Do I Always Need To Make Progress or Is It Okay to Plateau?

When it comes to building size and strength in the gym, we're beholden to the laws of progressive overload.

- BY ANDREW TRACEY

In lay terms, if you want to change your body, you have to give it a reason to change. In the case of brawn, this means applying a stimulus (training), and your body, clever thing that it is, adapts to that stimulus by growing bigger muscles or making you more efficient at using the ones you already have. That's the overload part.

The bad news is that once we've adapted to that particular stimulus, it probably isn't going to cut the mustard next time around, so we have to up the ante if we want to keep seeing changes. This is where “progressive” comes in. There are a few ways to approach this, but the most obvious are: more reps, bigger weights and longer distances.