4 Ways To Overload Your Muscles: More Than Just Adding More Weight

In a sport which is all about lifting more weight, you might think the solution to lifting more weight should be fairly simple: lift more weight! However, those who’ve any kind of experience know that the ability to continually add more poundage whilst keeping good form soon fails us. In a sport which is all about muscular overload, some may take that as the deathblow to progress as they continue struggling to add more weight thinking that is the only way. It’s not: There are more ways of overloading the muscles than simply adding more weight, which will ultimately enable you to lift more weight. Interested?

More Repetitions

If you are struggling to move onto the next weight increment, stick with the same weight you can lift with good form and continue trying to do more repetitions with it. You will often find just by developing the ability to do a few more comfortable repetitions with a weight that the lifting of a heavier weight will become possible.

More Sets

What more reps and/or more sets basically equate to is more volume. By lifting greater overall volume (within proven strength/muscle repetition protocols) than previously you reach more muscle fibers and engage more nerves, gaining more strength and size.

Less Rest

Depending on what you are aiming to achieve within your training, how long you rest will be a factor. Bare in mind that your body is constantly trying to adapt to stop you from making gains, and you must undermine this effort of the body by changing your training protocols. Rest is one such variable.

The most obvious temporary change you can have to change things up a bit is to reduce your rest periods between sets. You may need to drop weight in order to achieve this as you won’t be fully recovered or as strong for each set, but that’s the point – because you’re not recovered, you engage new muscle fibers that previously haven’t had a chance to be worked because you usually only used the same ones.

Also, you can play with this reduced rest variable between sessions, meaning you have less days rest in between training the same muscles.

More Time Under Tension:

Time under tensions is simply a way of describing how much time your muscles spend acting against the weight. A set of equal repetitions done at different tempos will obviously mean the set which had the slowest repetition tempo had the greatest time under tension. Tempo is a very overlooked method of overloading your muscles, so play around with it – going faster to get in more repetitions and develop more power, and going slower to increase the time under tension and generate more fiber breakdown and more strength through hypertrophy.

Final word: In playing around with the various ways of overloading, be sure you’re not chronically overtraining. You’ll soon know if you are because your progress will cease, then less becomes more.