The Overload Principle

Along with progression, adaptation, and specificity, overload is a major principle of exercise program design. During a bulking phase, your lifting program must include overload; without it, a significant portion of the extra calories you consume will be stored as fat instead of muscle. If you are skinny and you want to bulk up, you have to understand the principle of overload.

Definition of the overload principle

Simply put, overload is the act of subjecting your muscles (or other body parts) to unaccustomed stress. If, over the course of several workouts, you train harder each time, you are using the overload principle.

What does it mean when people say “Use it or lose it”? They are stating an exercise truism: your body is only as strong as it needs to be to handle the activities you engage in.

You won’t grow if you never push yourself in the gym. To get bigger and stronger, you must force your muscles to handle stresses that they have yet to experience. With a proper bulking diet, your muscles will adapt to the new workload and you will grow.

Overload results in additional strength

There are two main ways to get stronger: neural adaptation and hypertrophy. Overload results in both increased neural adaptation and hypertrophy, but neural adaptation will occur first, before you begin to grow.

Increased neural adaptation means you can activate a greater percentage of your total muscle fibers compared to the last time you called upon your muscles during a lift. When you first begin working out, your strength gains will come mostly as a result of neural adaptation. In the first weeks, you’ll get stronger, but your muscles won’t grow much larger. The body prefers to max out on neural adaptation as long as possible before resorting to hypertrophy.

Later, as your rate of neural adaptation levels off, the stress of overload stimulates hypertrophy. During a hypertrophy phase, muscle fibers get larger and stronger, and new muscle fibers may form.

Therefore, to get bigger, you have to work your way through the neural adaptation phase (what experienced lifters call “newbie gains”), all the while employing the overload principle, until you begin to experience hypertrophy.

Overload stimulates neuromuscular adaptation

When you begin a lifting program as an untrained novice, you are not capable of using every muscle fiber when you flex your muscle. Instead, a percentage of the fibers will contract, and the rest will be held in reserve. If you watch closely while you flex your muscle for an extended period of time, you may be able to see the muscle rippling under your skin as motor units switch off with each other to maintain the overall muscular contraction.

With overload training, you will quickly “learn” how to recruit a greater number of muscle fibers during each contraction. More motor units firing at any given point in time equates to greater strength. The overload training will increase your strength levels appreciably without any increase in the size of your muscles. These “newbie gains” are both dramatic and temporary. After a month or two of heavy training, your neural adaptation is complete. Strength gains will have to come some other way.

Overload stimulates hypertrophy

Hypertrophy – an increase in the size of your muscle tissue – is how your body adapts to overload training after you have exhausted the strength gains enjoyed as a result of neural adaptation.

As you continue your bulking program, hypertrophy will play a greater part in your strength gains. Since hypertrophy is what you want, it’s now easy to understand why your bulking program has to be longer than a few weeks. You won’t get very much bigger and more muscular until your neural adaptation to overload is starting to wane.

Progressive Overload

The overload principle is most useful when it is incorporated into a bulking workout – one that gets more and more difficult over time. But overload must be present in any workout scheme that aims to help you improve. The concept of progressive overload was first formalized by an army physician whose goals were to rehabilitate injured soldiers. Later, this concept found its way into all types of athletic training.

When you add additional weight to the bar every workout, you are using progressive overload to add new muscle mass. However, you can’t haphazardly add weight to your lifts; it has to be done according to an optimal schedule.

The rate at which you overload your body is progression, and it is another important principle of exercise program design.

Overload is essential to adding muscle mass

Overload is an essential component of a bulking program. If the bulking program is too short, your strength gains will come from neural adaptation. If you are untrained, you need a few weeks of lifting before you experience any significant degree of hypertrophy.

Those lifters who lift the same weight week in and week out may be keeping themselves in shape, but without overload, they will not add any muscle mass. To bulk up, use the overload principle.