Strength training is one of the most beneficial forms of exercise. Using resistance to load your muscles and bones helps you get stronger, increase bone density, decrease your likelihood of falling and getting injured, and makes performing activities of daily living much easier. One of the main principles of strength training that allows all of these benefits to happen is progressive overload, which is where you’re working your muscles harder and making your workouts more challenging over time. 

The most common way to achieve progressive overload is by increasing the amount of weight you lift. This is easy to do when you have access to a large variety of equipment when working out at the gym, but not so easy to do if you are limited in your selection, like if you workout at home. Thankfully, there are other ways we can achieve progressive overload and make your workouts more challenging from week to week aside from just increasing the amount of weight you lift. 

One way you can make an exercise more challenging without adding weight is increasing the amount of reps you perform. Let’s say your workout program has you do three sets of eight reps of squats. At the gym, one week you could use a 20-pound dumbbell, the next week you use a 25-pound dumbbell, and so on to make it more challenging. If you only have access to one weight, you can increase the number of sets and reps you do from week to week instead of increasing the amount of weight. This could look like jumping from three sets of eight reps to four, or from three sets of eight reps to three sets of 10-12 reps.

Eventually we’re going to get to a point where we can’t just keep increasing the amount of reps. This is where we can make the exercise itself more challenging by increasing time under tension, or the amount of time you spend completing one rep. Lengthening the eccentric portion of a movement, or when the muscle is lengthening, can make the muscle work harder even with the same load. In a squat, this would look like slowing down the lowering portion, which is when you are going from standing to the lowest part of your squat. Increasing the time it takes to lower down from one second to three seconds will greatly increase the challenge of the exercise, even with the same external resistance.

Another way we can make an exercise more challenging is by adding a half or quarter rep at the bottom of the movement. For example, at the bottom of your squat, you could try coming half way up, and then lower back down into the full depth of your squat again before standing all the way up. This is another way to increase time under tension, since it’s taking longer to get through the full range of motion and the muscles are working for more time. 

Prioritizing progressive overload in our workouts in one form or another is going to help us see the results we desire more quickly than if we do the same exact thing every single time we exercise. 

The options to make your workouts more challenging are endless and can be done just as effectively at home as it can be done at the gym. If you’re looking for a new twist to one of your workouts, give some of these options a try!

Xoxo

Coach Maggi