Progressive Overload
What is Progressive Overloading?
People who go to the gym might be familiar with the idea of Progressive Overloading. One month, you are benching 100, then 105 next month, then 110 the following month, etc. You can’t continue to bench the same 100 pounds and expect to continue to get results. Your body reacts to that 100 pounds by supplying more muscle to that area so that the next time you are benching, you are better equipped to handle that stress. If you want to continue to build muscle, you need to increase the weight. You have to progressively overload your muscles, so that during recovery your body continues to build more muscle.
Where Else Can you Use Progressive Overloading?
Now I’m not here trying to convince you to go to the gym, because the good thing about this idea is that it can be applied to not just your muscular system, but also your nervous system! You can use progressive overloading to incrementally improve yourself in whatever area your interested in. When you experience new challenges in real life, your mind is literally reconstructing itself and forging new neuron connections so that when that challenge comes up again, we already have a response pre-built and ready to be used. But these challenges need to be incrementally more difficult; you do not want to overload yourself with something that is too much for you to handle. If you want to become a body builder, you can’t go to the gym on your first day and bench 400 pounds. You need to start small and progressively overload yourself to the goal of 400 pounds.
For example, let’s say you want to become a more social person, but you have debilitating social anxiety. It wouldn’t be beneficial to start by public speaking in front of 1,000 people, that would be completely overwhelming for you and not helpful. Maybe you start by just reading a book on becoming more social (How to Win Friends and Influence People is a great start). Then, maybe you start to use what you have learned on people you are comfortable speaking with like friends and family. Then you can start to talk to the people you’re less comfortable talking to like coworkers. Try starting and maintaining conversations with coworkers as much as you can. Then you can start approaching people you’ve never meet and having conversations with them. If you want to go even further, you can start taking public speaking courses and build yourself up to be able to speak in front of thousands of people. You can take it as far as you’d like.
Jordan Peterson also talks about how he would use progressive overloading with people with extreme phobias. In this example (Great 5 minute clip), one of his clinical clients was terrified of elevators. The best way to improve this person’s ability to face this fear is to incrementally expose them to levels of that fear. On their first session, they would look at an elevator. This may seem like a ridiculous place to start, but you need to start small so that you can handle what comes next, instead of overwhelming yourself. Then they incrementally get closer to the elevator as the sessions continue until she’s able to actually look inside the elevator. This is progressive overloading. Slowly incrementing the fear you are experiencing. It makes you more capable to handle whatever it is you are trying to handle, and like Jordan says, it makes you stronger overall.
The great thing about this idea is that progressive overloading can be used to build yourself up to wherever you want! It is an excellent tool for tackling fears and building up parts of yourself you would like to improve over time.
Personal Example
For me, I had a recent example this weekend where I could have used progressive overloading. I am really excited about this website. I’m starting to get some great ideas for how I am going to build this and I’m trying to do everything at once, right away. I’m already trying to write more than once a week, which is more than the initial amount I set myself. I was trying to do more than I could handle, and I was starting to resent my work because of it. I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I would, and I wasn’t enjoying life as much either.
I started this because I thought it would be a fun side project, and I’m getting so excited about it that I’m trying to do more than I can handle. I need to use progressive overloading, start slow and write once a week and start to get a consistent schedule going. Get used to writing every week. THEN, I can start to build this up to different heights. I needed to learn to pace myself and grow this at a healthy rate, and try not to do so much that I end up not sustaining it.
I am far from perfect, and even I struggle to use the qualities that I’ve learned and talk about. It’s all a part of life, learning, and growth. Which I am starting to realize as I write more that growth and becoming the best version of yourself is going to be a central point of these blogs. It’s been a key part of my life for a bit now, and I never plan on changing that. I hope you’ve found something useful here, thanks for reading.
References
This is not an original idea of mine. If you would like to see where I got this information from and the inspiration for writing this, you can check out Hamza’s work as well and Jordan Peterson. Hamza is where I first originally heard of the idea of progressive overloading , but Jordan Peterson touches on clinical therapy sessions and dealing with people who have extreme phobias and incrementally exposing these people to levels of their phobia.
