Rant - Progressive Overload

I need to rant for a moment. If you don’t want to hear it turn back now. Opinion ahead. 

It seems we have forgotten about or do not understand progressive overload. I will assume that the phrase may not ring a bell to people and that is ok, as long as we can understand the concept. When someone runs they understand the concept of increasing distance slowly over many weeks to progress up to let’s say a marathon. Yes there are some, David Goggins included, I absolutely love his book, who speak to the fact that you mentally can handle a lot more than you think, but any normal running plan, for a marathon, would have you gradually ramp up mileage according to where your personal baseline is. Most would not go run 26.2 miles without practice. If you did you may suffer from stress fractures, actual fractures, kidney damage and possible failure, and a slew of other things that are livable, but certainly not pleasant.  

Now let us take a moment to talk about lifting weights and similar things associated with that realm. If you worked out in high school, let’s say you benched, squatted, and did bicep curls, then took off 20 years, sat at a desk job, and were mostly inactive. If you were to go back to the gym today to get “back on track”, I would cheer you on, hope to even see you there, and make sure to hold you accountable. I would talk up the benefits of lifting and that it is never too late to start back on that path towards your goals. But if you used to bench 300lbs, squat 400lbs, and bicep curl 50lbs, I would hope you would assume you wouldn’t be able to do that still today. Yes, I know, there are exceptions, but generally muscles need to be worked progressively or consistently to attain or maintain strength. So far so good?

The preceding example may have been very obvious, I didn’t mean to insult anyone if it did. I now will jump to another version that may be less clear. Let’s say you injure your shoulder benching 6 months ago. You had always worked out or had gotten back into it and worked up to a pretty comfortable working set off 225lbs. You injure your shoulder and need to back off for a bit. You go to your trusted shoulder person, maybe even our clinic, and you go through your injury journey and are now on the other side of it, ready to go.  After 6 months, heck even after 3 months of “backing off” the weights on a specific muscle group, you shouldn’t jump right back into working sets at 225lbs, and I would argue not to even attempt 225lbs quite yet.

If you were at our clinic, I would have hoped that we would have given you this guidance, even if it was my normal “ease back into it” motivational speech. Again, I understand some people can hop right back into it, lots of factors: nutrition, training age, genetics, etc. There are also training routines in the meantime designed to keep you very strong as you are dealing with an injury, such as working one side of the body still to maintain strength on both sides, tons of research there.  But generally we need a plan of how to get back to where we were and continue improving.  We need to overload the tissues progressively so that they can build up to support the weight and movement that we want them to do.  Start at 135lbs and use the “10% rule”, where you would add no more than 10% of the current weight per week as you progress up. Sometimes that is even too fast. But know that if you go after that original 225lbs, you may irritate that shoulder and be right back where you were 6 months ago.

I am not trying to scare you. The last thing I want is to scare anyone. I want you to respect the steel, respect the sport or hobby of lifting, respect the body and tissue tolerance, and get back to being the best version of yourself as fast as possible. 

Next example, no injury, just haven’t benched in 3-6 months because it wasn’t programmed. Now you go to bench and try to find a one rep max. BE SMART ABOUT IT. Make sure your form is solid and you warm up correctly. Now here is where we could talk for hours. Yes, I realize you could theoretically increase your max on bench, without benching. I am speaking in generalities. I realize there is powerlifting, Strongman, CrossFit, bodybuilding, other sports that this is also theoretically possible to do. 

But let’s say you don’t get paid to lift weights and you are lifting for health and/or hobby. Sure, find your one rep max. But again, be smart about it, no caps locks needed this time. I don’t want you jumping all over the bench, squirming, lifting your feet and your head, let’s keep it looking good and feeling efficient. Let’s not start compensating because I know you can mentally do more, and even physically do more if you had to lift a car off yourself.

But here we are on the bench, in a gym, or maybe outside, enjoying life. Let’s find a comfortable max with good effort and adapt to more weight in a controlled and progressive manner.

Lift smart.

Brian Watters, DC