Progressive Overload & Pain: How to Make Gains & Heal Pains

Alright, buckle up, buttercup.

Let’s talk about progressive overload and how it relates to pain. 

The term progressive overload sounds fancy, but it’s really just a simple concept to make you stronger, faster, and generally, a gym superhero.

Imagine this.

You want to get stronger, right? But if you do the same thing every day—lifting the same weight, running the same distance, or doing the same 5-minute plank—you’re going to plateau.

Basically, you’re cruising at the same speed on a treadmill, expecting to magically go faster.

Spoiler – it’s not going to happen.

Now, progressive overload is the secret sauce. It’s the idea of gradually making your workouts a little more challenging, so your body is constantly forced to adapt and grow.

We can do this by adjusting:

1. Load – the amount of weight you lift. If you're bench pressing 115 lbs for 8 reps and its easy now, try 120 lbs for 8 next time. Your muscles will get the hint & be like ‘oh, okay, we need to work harder now.’

 2. Intensity – how close to failure you lift using RPE or RIR (read my blog post here). In order for you to get stronger and grow dem muscles, you need to be lifting until your 2-4 reps shy of failure for main compound movements, and within 1-2 reps for isolation exercises. You can increase intensity aka lift closer to failure, to force your muscles to adapt.

3. Range of motion – deeper ranges of motion put more of a stretch on muscles. More stretch under load means more muscle fibers recruited. This 

4. Tempo – the speed at which you do a rep or run (graphic here). Sometimes it’s not about adding more weight or reps but about adding more time. Slow down your movements. Instead of blasting through your sets like you're late for a meeting, try slowing down the tempo—lower the weight slowly, or pause at the bottom of a squat for a second. Time under tension is a key player in muscle growth.

5. Volume – the number of rep & sets you do. If you’ve mastered 3 sets of 6 squats, try 8 or go up to 4 sets. Your muscles will think, ‘okay, more work? We got this!’ In terms of running, you can increase your time or mileage. 

6. Technique – getting better at a lift to make it more buttery, or improving your running form helps your body to move more efficiently so you have to work less. What a great way to progress. 

7. Rest Periods – the time you rest between sets. You generally need more rest for heavy compound movements like deadlifts, and less rest for isolation exercises like bicep curls. You can either increase or decrease rest depending on your goals. 

8. Frequency – how often you go to the gym or do a certain movement pattern. Example: let's say you've been back squatting once per week for the past 4 weeks, and now start back squatting twice per week to get more stimulus.

Phew! Look at all those fun programming variables to play with, babyyyy.

Now, you're probably wondering – 'okay, susie, but how does this relate to pain?'

Well, just like we can use the eight things above to make things harder in the gym to force adaptations to get stronger, bigger, faster, we can use the exact same principles to make a movement more comfortable for someone dealing with some lil pain demons. 

We can take some weight off the bar, decrease the intensity to leave more reps in the tank, offload painful ranges of motion, do a movement slower or add in a pause, decrease the overall reps and sets, mess around with exercise setup and technique, increase rest periods for more recovery, or play around with frequency by either decreasing it or increasing it with lower reps so you can get bite sized exposures to the movement that is a lil spicy for you right now.

WOWZERS!

These are the exact principles Dr. Bell, Dr. Pepper, Dr. Emily, and I manipulate with our online rehab clients in order to keep them training in the gym or running on the trails while also dosing in specific exercises chosen after their Movement Assessment and New Client Intake in order to help their painful tissues adapt. 

We mush it all into a beautiful, comprehensive program. This is why rehab MUST occur WITH training, not in isolation. Being told to ‘just stop lifting or running’ is lazy AF advice, and you deserve better. 

Now, just like you wouldn't change all eight variables at once for progressive overload (because that would be silly and put too much stress on your body and tissues & you'd turn into a puddle of goo), we aren't changing every single variable when someone is experiencing pain, either.

Our goal is to change the least amount of factors possible in order to decrease pain levels and improve tolerance to loading. It's like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich where all the ingredients work together to make something that's absolutely, delish.

Then, as pain simmers down and your tolerance improves, we use progressive overload to continue pushing your tissues to adapt til you are pain-free and can conquer the world. 

Progressive overload 🫱🏽‍🫲🏼 training with pain.

Boom, betch. 

Need help with your pain or fitness? We'd love to work with ya!