Progressive Overload II

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

Hi Drs.,

First, I wanted to compliment you on your recent podcast episode, Progressive Overload II. While you’ve already shared a lot of useful information about your approach to progressive overloading in strength training, I felt this episode really brought it all together. It was particularly helpful in offering more practical applications of how to implement overload effectively.

However, one point that left me a bit confused is the analogy Austin has used a few times — and brought up again at the end of this episode — about not being able to swim faster than you can in order to swim faster. That one doesn’t quite sit right with me. It seems like the analogy doesn’t fit very well, because it would rather be like putting so much weight on the bar that you can’t lift it all — which obviously isn’t how anyone would approach training.

Wouldn’t a better analogy be something like swimming at too high of an intensity or in too high of a zone, leading to excessive fatigue and impaired recovery? That seems closer to the risks of targetting to high of an RPE in training than the idea of trying to swim faster than you currently can.

Thanks for your great content!

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Thank you for the response.

“It seems like the analogy doesn’t fit very well, because it would rather be like putting so much weight on the bar that you can’t lift it all — which obviously isn’t how anyone would approach training.”

This last part is where we’d disagree.

Many people do, in fact, approach training this way, by adding weight on a pre-planned schedule, even with rapidly increasing RPEs (indicating a lack of sufficient adaptation to justify load increases) or failing sets altogether.

The overall concept is simply that increasing the intensity of stimulus itself is not what drives adaptation. Intensity is a form of stimulus that we can manipulate in order to stay in the “sweet spot” of individualized training stress as we adapt over time.

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