During your small group personal training session, or 1-1 personal training session you may have heard the training team ask you to describe the difficulty of an exercise on a scale of 1 to 10. If you've ever wondered why, let us explain. It's all linked to the notion of 'Progressive Overload'.



When we exercise, we always want to ensure that we are continually challenging ourselves. This ensures that the muscles of the body do not become accustomed to the force being placed on them. For instance, if we consistently stayed at the same squat weight for several months, the quads and glutes would get used to lifting the same weight. What felt like an 8 or 9 at first, would now feel like a 6 or 7 on that scale. It's at that point that we want to challenge the body again and change a training variable. This could be anything from increasing the weight, increasing the number of reps/sets or decreasing the recovery time. The human body will not change unless it is forced to do so. 



So why is progressive overload important? Because it forces the body to change and ensures that we don't plateau. That's how we continue to see results.