Progressive Overload: 9 Ways to Progress Your Training

More Weight… Less Squat?

If you’ve spent enough time in a gym, you’ve probably watched someone’s sets of squats get heavier every set… and shallower at the same time. Every week, more weight added to the bar. And every week, their butt gets further away from the floor.

But hey, they’re getting stronger, right?… “Progressive overload “😉

Let’s say your client squats 185 lb for eight controlled, full range of motion reps. A few weeks later, they’re using 225 lb, but now their squat looks more like a 1/2 squat. Is that really something to celebrate? Not if you care about the quality of the work your clients are demonstrating.

Is it justified to believe your client is now stronger, simply because there’s more weight on the bar?

This is where I think many coaches get too caught up in the numbers. We want to see progress, and adding weight is easy to track and makes our clients motivated by their progress, sure. But if the movement quality changes every time the load increases, what exactly are we comparing?

On the other hand, a client might use the same weight for several weeks while improving their depth, control, or number of quality reps. Numerically, that may not look like progressive overload on paper, but those improvements absolutely deserve our attention.

To apply progressive overload properly, we need to understand what we’re asking the client to do more of, and why that would help them reach their goal. Otherwise, we can keep doing an exercise harder without making it more useful.

That distinction matters, especially when you’re coaching someone whose goal is muscle growth. Adding weight is useful. But more weight lifted does not automatically lead to greater hypertrophy outcomes. We need to pay attention to HOW that weight is being lifted.

Making an exercise harder doesn’t necessarily make it more effective.

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What Progressive Overload Actually Means

As your client adapts, their training should ideally continue giving them a reason to improve. That is what we’re trying to accomplish with progressive overload. The clearest example of progressive overload would be the following:

Assume ten reps initially leaves your client with about two good repetitions remaining (2 RIR, or reps in reserve). A few weeks later, they could do another five. This is an example of their work capacity and strength increasing, and this would be the point at which increasing the load by a few percentage points brings the difficulty of the set back toward the difficulty and effort you intended.

It’s not about doing the workout necessarily and comparatively more difficult over time, and that’s because, if programmed properly, your clients will be able to do more (whether that’s more reps or heavier weight), with more-or-less the same level of effort. The client is doing more because they’re capable of more.

So what can that progression actually look like? Depending on the exercise and the goal, we have several options:

More repetitions: Completing more reps with the same weight and consistent technique.
More weight: Increasing the load while maintaining the intended rep range and execution.
Greater range of motion: Loading more of the movement as the client develops the ability to control it.
Better control and execution: Reducing unwanted momentum or compensations so the intended muscles do more of the work.
Longer pauses: Extending a pause in a specific position without losing the position you’re trying to train.
Less assistance: Reducing help from a machine, band, or supporting limb so the client performs more of the work themselves.
Greater stability: Using a more stable setup or improving balance and bracing so the client can push the intended muscles harder.
Additional working sets: Adding sets when the client would benefit from more volume and can recover from it.
Higher training density: Completing comparable work in less time while maintaining the quality of the sets.

Some of these changes increase the work directly. Others, such as improving control or stability, help your client perform the exercise with better quality. As their capacity improves, they can also manage more reps or heavier weights at roughly the same RPE.

Social media has also created some ridiculous expectations around progressive overload. Many influencers make it sound like you HAVE to add weight or reps every single week. Follow that logic for a few years and apparently we should all be bench pressing a small car after a few years of training experience.

Progress doesn’t continue at the same rate forever. Strength and muscle gains slowly down as clients become more experienced, and performance will fluctuate with sleep, stress, and accumulated fatigue. Forcing a personal record every session can lead clients to sacrifice technique or push harder than they’re prepared to.

Moreover, it’s perfectly normal for your client to repeat the same weight and reps across several sessions. That alone doesn’t mean the program has stopped being effective. Look at the trend over time before deciding that something needs to change.

Before deciding how to progress an exercise, be clear on why it’s in the program. If your client wants a stronger squat, you’ll want to see them lift more while maintaining the depth and technique you’ve established. If they want bigger quads, you have more options. A supported split squat or hack squat might let them push their legs harder without balance or lower-back fatigue ending the set prematurely. We cover this in more detail in our article on training for strength and size .

More Reps or More Weight? You Have Options

Both are straightforward ways to progress, assuming you’re comparing reasonably similar sets.

Eight reps becoming ten means something when the load, depth, rest, and effort stay consistent. If those extra reps come from bouncing, shortening the movement, or taking long pauses in the advantageous positions between repetitions, the comparison becomes muddied. (such as taking seconds long pauses at the top of a squat, as rest).

Plotkin and colleagues compared progressive repetitions with progressive load over eight weeks in resistance-trained participants. Both approaches produced broadly similar muscular adaptations.[1] You have room to choose the approach that fits your client.

Double progression is an easy starting point: prescribe three sets of 8–12 reps, build toward the top of that range with the intended technique and effort, then increase the load so that 8 reps becomes challenging again. Easy to coach, easy to teach, works tremendously well.

But don’t get so attached to adding reps first that you overlook a smaller weight increase.

A Little Math Worth Knowing

Let’s say your client squats 225 lb for eight reps . Multiplying load by repetitions gives us the set’s volume load :

225 × 8 = 1,800 lb.

Now let’s compare the difference in volume load from adding one rep versus adding adding 10 lb to the bar:

Set	Volume load	Increase
225 lbs × 8 reps	1,800 lb	Baseline
225 lbs × 9 reps	2.025 lb	+225 lb, or 12.5%
235 lbs × 8 reps	1.880 lb	+80 lb, or 4.4%

The extra repetition adds 225 lb of volume load. The extra 10 lb across eight repetitions adds only 80 lb. That’s less than half the increase!

So “just one more rep” isn’t necessarily the smallest progression available.

Of course, this doesn’t guarantee that 235 lb for eight reps will be easier than 225 lb for nine. You’re still lifting more weight on every repetition. But it does show why a small weight increase is worth considering.

The main idea is to give yourself another option. Try a small increase, perhaps only 2.5–5 lb total if you have the plates, and watch the result. If repetitions fall below the prescribed range or technique deteriorates, the jump was too large for that day’s target.

Sometimes, adding a little weight is more manageable than adding another rep.

Progress Within the Rep

Next, I want you to imagine a relatively new lifter practicing a lift such as a split squat. At first, they might only be able to control the upper portion. Over time, they can descend farther, stay balanced, and push back up without unnecessary body movement or compensation.

I’d absolutely want that improvement recorded, even if they’re holding the same dumbbell.

They’re now loading positions they previously avoided or weren’t able to reach. For that client, developing that new range deserves more attention than adding another 5 lb.

That being said, partial reps have their place at every experience level. What matters is WHY you’re using them.

For a beginner, a shorter range might be all they can currently control. You can train within that range while gradually working toward a more complete movement as their ability improves.

An advanced lifter might deliberately limit the range to strengthen a specific portion of a lift. In that case, the partial rep is doing exactly what it was prescribed to do. There’s no requirement to make it deeper each week when depth wasn’t the goal in the first place.

The distinction is whether you’ve chosen that range for a reason, or whether adding weight has come at the expense of the range you intended.

We explore how setup affects the specific challenge in our article on quad hypertrophy programming .

Once your client can consistently perform the intended range with good control, you have a clear baseline for progressing reps and load.

Using Pauses to Progress an Exercise

I had a client who kept shifting forward as he descended into his squat. The deeper he went, the more his weight moved toward his toes, until his heels were lifting, or barely staying on the ground.

After two weeks of trying different cues without much improvement, I decided we needed to change the variation: paused squats.

But to perform those breaks properly, we first had to REDUCE the weight.

Within a couple of weeks of having him pause for three seconds at the bottom of each rep, his positioning improved tremendously. The setup was simple:

3 × 6 paused squats , using a manageable load and holding the bottom position for three seconds.
Followed by 2 × 6 regular squats , practicing the same positioning without the pause.

That was enough to help him develop a better awareness of his position throughout the descent and at the bottom of the squat. The regular sets then gave him a chance to apply what he’d just practiced.

If we had judged his progress purely by the weight on the bar, it would have looked like we were going backward. But reducing the load allowed him to correct the very issue that was limiting his squat. Eventually, we could build the weight back up while maintaining the positioning we’d been working toward.

Sometimes, you need to reduce the weight before you can make worthwhile progress with it.

This is why I wouldn’t force a load increase simply because the program calls for progressive overload. In his case, temporarily regressing the weight helped him develop the control he needed to handle heavier loads more confidently and safely.

You can also progress the paused variation itself. Holding the same position for three seconds instead of one, with the same load and reps, increases the demand of the hold. Once you’ve established the pause you want, keep its duration consistent and progress reps or weight from there.

We cover pauses, slower eccentrics, and other ways to adjust repetition speed in our article on how to use tempo in your clients’ training .

When Should You Reduce Assistance?

On an assisted pull-up machine, reducing the counterweight means your client must lift more of their own weight, assuming body weight and execution stay similar. That’s a straightforward progression.

Now consider taking hand support away from a supported split-squat.

If their performance drops and they start wobbling all over the place, maybe removing that support wasn’t the greatest idea. First, though, we need to establish what the hand was doing. Were they pulling themselves upward, or mostly using it for balance? Those are very different types of assistance!

If they were helping lift themselves, reducing that assistance asks the legs to do more. If they were simply maintaining balance, removing the support creates a different challenge altogether.

For a client working on balance and control during single-leg movements, that might be exactly what you want. An athlete, for example, may benefit from practicing an unsupported variation when those abilities are a priority. But being an athlete doesn’t mean every exercise needs to test their balance. They can also use support when the purpose is to train their legs harder.

For a hypertrophy-focused client, I’d question removing support if it makes balance end the set before the legs are sufficiently challenged. We could keep the hand in place and progress the reps or weight instead.

There’s no blanket rule about using assistance. Decide what you want the exercise to accomplish, then choose the setup that helps your client accomplish it.

If the support helps your client train the intended muscles harder, what exactly are we gaining by removing it?

More Work at the Same RPE

Let’s say your client performs eight reps and finishes with about two more left in them, or an RPE of 8. A few weeks later, they’re doing ten reps with the same weight, same execution, and still have two reps left.

The set takes about the same effort, but they’re doing more. That’s exactly what we want to see. We can then increase the weight and work back up through the rep range.

But there’s another form of progress that’s easy to overlook if you’re only paying attention to the first set.

Imagine their performance looks like this:

Week 1: 10, 8, and 7 reps.
Week 3: 10, 10, and 9 reps.

Assuming the weight, rest periods, execution, and approximate RPE remain consistent, they’ve gone from 25 to 29 total reps. Their first set hasn’t changed, but they’re maintaining their performance much better across the remaining sets. I’d absolutely count that as progress.

This is also why I wouldn’t immediately add a fourth set just because the first set hasn’t improved. There may still be plenty of room to progress the three sets already in the program.

Additional sets can be useful when the client needs more training volume and can recover from it. But first, look at what’s happening across the work they’re already doing. We discuss this in more detail in Why More Volume Isn’t Building More Muscle.

Doing the Same Work in Less Time

Another way to progress is to complete the same amount of work in less time. This is what we mean by increasing training density.

Let’s say your client performs three sets of ten reps with two minutes of rest between sets. Over time, they can perform those same sets, with the same weight and execution, while resting only 90 seconds. They’ve improved their ability to repeat that performance with less recovery.

For a client looking to improve muscular endurance or working within a tight schedule, that can be useful. But we still need to look at what happens when the rest gets shorter, because this may not always translate to better results.

If their sets go from 10, 10, and 10 reps to 10, 7, and 5, we’ve saved some time, but we’ve also lost eight repetitions. They’ll probably feel more exhausted, too. If the goal is hypertrophy, I’d want a good reason for making that trade.

An eight-week study comparing one-minute and three-minute rest periods found greater strength gains and anterior-thigh growth in the group resting longer.[2] This doesn’t mean everyone needs exactly three minutes. It does mean we shouldn’t assume shorter rests make a muscle-building workout better simply because it feels harder.

We cover how to judge recovery between sets in our article on rest periods between sets.

And if time is the main concern, consider how the exercises are organized. Pairing exercises that don’t interfere much with each other can let your client train one muscle group while another recovers. Our guide to programming supersets gives practical examples of how to do this.

Before shortening rest, establish how much recovery your client needs to perform the next set well. Then see where you can save time without losing the work you wanted them to do.

How to Apply Progressive Overload With Your Clients

Adding weight to an exercise and hoping for the best isn’t a strategy. Knowing when your client for that load increase is the distinction that matters.

Before changing anything, look at how they’re performing the exercise. Are they completing the range you prescribed? Can they maintain their position as the set gets harder? Are they finishing with the amount of effort you intended? Those observations should help you decide next steps.

For one client, that might mean adding 5 lb, 2.5 lb, or even fractional plates of 1lb or less. For another, it might mean staying at the same weight while they develop better control. And as we saw with my client’s paused squats, sometimes reducing the load temporarily is what allows them to make better progress afterward.

Keep track of these improvements, and explain them to your clients. If the only thing you ever celebrate is more weight, don’t be surprised when they start cutting reps short to give you exactly that.

Progressive overload should reflect your client’s improving capacity and strength. More reps, more load, a greater usable range, or less assistance can all have a place. Your job is to recognize which progression they’re ready for and whether it serves their goal.

And if their squat gets heavier while their butt keeps getting farther from the floor? Maybe hold off on the ‘LET’S GOOO’ until we see an actual squat!

References

1. Plotkin DL, et al. (2022). Progressive overload without progressive load? The effects of load or repetition progression on muscular adaptations. PeerJ , 10:e14142. Study

Schoenfeld BJ, et al. (2016). Longer Interset Rest Periods Enhance Muscle Strength and Hypertrophy in Resistance-Trained Men. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research , 30(7):1805–1812. Study