Today, I want to talk to you about progressive overload but specifically how to use micro-progressions in the gym. This is one of the most neglected concepts in the gym. Everyone talks about progressive overload, and what they’re often talking about is adding 5, 10, or 15 kilos per week.
Firstly, there are more progressive overload methods available than just adding weight to the bar, and secondly, this rate of progress is just not realistic for most people, most of the time, especially for smaller individuals.
Let’s put this into perspective: if you weigh 50 kilograms and you add 5 kilos to your lift each week, you’re increasing the load by 10% of your body weight. Compare this to someone weighing 100 kilograms, who would only be adding 5%. This means you’re effectively doubling the increase in stress each week, relatively speaking, compared to a heavier individual. Are you truly capable of progressing at double the rate? Usually, the answer is no. Often, you might just be prematurely adding weight, risking injury and limiting your long-term results. Yes, you might even be able to get all your reps, but the reality is, you are now lifting with crappy form and you have given yourself no leeway for progression.
This is where micro-progressions become incredibly valuable.
Understanding Progressive Overload and the Role of Micro-Progressions
Progressive overload is one of the most fundamental principles in strength training. It is the process of gradually increasing the demands placed on the muscles over time to ensure continuous growth and strength development. Most people are familiar with it, and understand that you want to challenge the muscles to do more over time. If you never progress the demands on the muscles, you will plateau. Unfortunately, most people are just way too aggressive with their rates of progression and try to add too much weight to the bar, too quickly.
This is where micro-progression comes in. One of the most overlooked methods of progressive overload is micro-progressions, whereby you make very small, incremental increases that allow for sustainable and effective progression without overloading the body prematurely. This should really just be called progressive overload, but unfortunately, people tend to think of big jumps when you don’t say “micro” in front of that word.
Most people equate progressive overload with simply adding more weight to the bar every week, often in increments of 5, 10, or even 15 kilograms. While this method works for beginners and can work in short bursts, it quickly becomes unrealistic, especially for smaller individuals, those lifting closer to their max capacity, or those training in a fatigued state.
The human body simply adapts at a much slower rate than people assume, and expecting large jumps in strength every week is not only unrealistic but can also lead to injury, poor form, and stalled progress.
Why Micro-Progressions Matter
Micro-progressions allow for sustainable progress by making small but consistent improvements over time. Think of it this way: If you add a mere 0.5 kg per week to a lift, that equates to a 26 kg increase per year. Over two years, that’s 52 kg added to your lifts, which is far more realistic and sustainable than trying to add 5 kg per week (260kg increase per year) and quickly hitting a plateau.
When you rely on large jumps in weight, you may find yourself constantly failing lifts, which can be incredibly discouraging and lead to burnout. Micro-progressions ensure that you stay within a range that allows you to maintain good form, reduce injury risk, and progress at a steady rate.
So, learning how to use micro-progression in the gym is going to allow you to progress at a more realistic rate, and thus you will be able to get more out of your training, reduce your risk of injury and get better results over time. These are some of the very same methods we use with our coaching clients, and they are very effective.
How To Use Micro-Progressions In The Gym
Practical Methods for Using Micro-Progressions in the Gym
There are a number of ways to actually implement micro-progressions, and I know it can be helpful to see these in practice. So here are a few different ways you can implement micro-progression into your plan:
1. Microplates:
These are very small-weight plates, typically under 0.5 kilograms, that you can add to your exercises. While this might seem insignificant at first, let’s consider the cumulative effect. If you consistently add just 0.25kg or 0.5kg each week, over the course of a year, these modest increments can translate into significant gains, potentially adding between ~13 and ~25 kilograms to your lifts. Extend that consistent habit over two years, and you could find yourself adding as much as ~50 kilograms to your lift.
Despite their effectiveness, microplates remain underutilised in most gyms. Many trainees mistakenly see them as too insignificant, or even feel embarrassed using them, opting instead for larger increments that mean they just don’t add weight or they add too much and fail their lifts. This can lead to frustration and potential injury.
The reluctance to use microplates is really sad to see, as they can really make progression much easier and more enjoyable. Small increments are exactly what’s needed to promote continuous, realistic progress. Using microplates ensures that you’re consistently challenging yourself slightly more each session without overwhelming your body. It allows your muscles, joints, tendons, and connective tissues ample time to adapt, significantly lowering your risk of injury and burnout.
Psychologically speaking, using microplates to continually progress offers a huge boost to your motivation, especially when compared to failing to progress or missing reps because of being too aggressive with adding weight. Every successful incremental increase provides a small victory, boosting your confidence and motivation. This positive reinforcement can keep you mentally engaged, increasing adherence and enjoyment in your training routine.
Ultimately, using microplates leads to incremental progress that is both achievable and enjoyable. You will make much better progress by being slow and steady with this stuff, rather than trying to force huge jumps in weight.
2. Weighted Collars:
Even weighted collars, which can weigh less than 0.125kg, can be valuable tools in your training toolbox. I know you may be thinking that adding some collars to the bar is going to significantly increase your results, but these small increases do add up. Powerlifters and other strength athletes frequently utilise these because, at advanced stages, progress becomes exponentially more challenging, and every small increase counts significantly.
Microplates and weighted collars plates are particularly valuable in strength sports such as powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, and competitive bodybuilding, where slight improvements can make the difference between success and failure. These precise increments can be the key to breaking through plateaus when more traditional jumps in weight become too demanding or just plain unrealistic.
In advanced trainees, gains can slow dramatically. The body becomes highly efficient and requires increasingly precise stimulus to adapt and progress. Utilising micro plates and weighted collars enables you to incrementally increase the intensity, offering just enough additional training stimulus to coerce adaptation without overwhelming your recovery abilities or leading to failed lifts. This approach also ensures you’re not overloading your nervous system, joints, or connective tissues unnecessarily, which can help prevent injuries.
Also, these tools are ideal for athletes involved in strength competitions such as powerlifting or Olympic lifting, where progress is measured in exact increments. Calibrated equipment ensures precise load measurements, essential for meeting competition standards and achieving incremental PRs. So being precise with your loading in training can give competitive athletes an edge, ensuring they peak optimally on competition day.
Never underestimate these seemingly minor additions, they can become your secret weapon in long-term strength development and athletic performance.
3. Cable Machines and Weight Stacks:
Many machines have large jumps between weights, typically 5kg increments. This can be particularly frustrating and limiting to your progression, as these jumps are often too big. Imagine comfortably lifting 5kg, but the next option available on the machine is 10kg, a 100% increase. Such a huge jump is unrealistic and can quickly lead to stalled progress or even injury from attempting overly ambitious increases.
Here’s where micro-progressions shine. Some machines and gyms have smaller weights you can add on top of the weight stack, but if your gym doesn’t have this, you can creatively overcome this obstacle by placing a small weight plate directly onto the pin of the weight stack itself. This small addition can help to bridge the gap, allowing for incremental progress. For example, perhaps progressing from 5kg to 6kg or 7kg instead of leaping directly to 10kg. Additionally, some gyms offer specialised magnetic weights that securely attach to the metal plates on a weight stack, enabling even smaller increments and very precise adjustments.
This method is incredibly versatile, easily applicable to virtually all types of machines, including cable machines, selectorised machines, and many plate-loaded machines. It gives you tremendous flexibility, helping you progress more consistently and safely. Utilising this technique will also more than likely improve your confidence and motivation, as you’ll experience regular, achievable success rather than frequent setbacks due to unrealistic jumps in weight.
4. Dumbbells and Kettlebells
Progressing exercises with fixed weights, like dumbbells or kettlebells, can be a bit more challenging. Most of these fixed weights, at least in most commercial gyms, will have relatively big jumps between the weights. For example, jumping from 3kg to 5kg may not seem like a lot, but it represents a significant 66% increase, which might be too demanding and lead to injury or compromised form. Fortunately, there are several practical solutions for implementing micro-progressions with these fixed-weight tools.
One effective method is to attach small weight plates to dumbbells or kettlebells securely using straps or resistance bands. For example, if you’re performing lateral raises with 3kg dumbbells and find moving directly to 5kg too challenging, you can incrementally add 0.25kg or 0.5kg plates. These tiny increments allow your body to actually adapt appropriately, reducing injury risks and ensuring you’re still performing the exercises with proper form and technique.
Another useful approach is utilising wrist weights to add weight to the bar. These weights, typically available in increments from 0.25kg to 1kg, can be comfortably wrapped around your wrists. They provide an easily adjustable increase in resistance, ideal for exercises involving dumbbells or kettlebells, especially when working smaller muscle groups or isolation exercises.
You can also combine dumbbells or kettlebells with resistance bands for incremental loading. By placing a resistance band around your dumbbells or kettlebells, you increase the tension your muscles are experiencing. So this can be an effective way to add resistance, but banding an exercise isn’t always appropriate, especially if it means the resistance profile of the exercise is altered to be further away from the strength profile of the muscle being trained.
By employing these micro-progression strategies, you ensure steady, consistent progress in your training, protect yourself against unnecessary injury, and maintain ongoing motivation, helping you achieve sustainable and significant long-term fitness results.
Realistic Expectations and Long-Term Success
Understanding realistic expectations is essential to successful and sustainable progress in the gym. For example, if you’re currently bench pressing 20 kilograms and considering adding an additional 5 kilograms, this represents a substantial 25% increase in the total weight lifted. On the other hand, if you’re bench pressing 100 kilograms, that same 5-kilogram addition is merely a 5% increase. Clearly, the lighter the weight you’re lifting, the more significant even small absolute increments become in relative terms. So it can be hard to know just how much you should be progressing.
So, what exactly constitutes a realistic rate of progress? Typically, a safe and effective rate of increase is about 1-2% per week, depending on several factors such as the exercise you’re performing, your experience level, your overall strength, and the amount of muscle mass you’re actively using. Larger muscle groups and compound movements, such as squats or deadlifts, may allow slightly quicker incremental increases compared to isolation exercises like bicep curls or lateral raises.
Your training history also plays a significant role in determining your rate of progress, as beginners will experience rapid initial gains, while intermediate or advanced lifters will generally see slower, steadier progress over time.
It’s essential to set realistic expectations right from the start to avoid frustration, disappointment, and burnout. Unrealistic expectations often lead to attempting to progress too quickly, risking injury, poor form, or plateauing prematurely. Instead, shifting your mindset towards accepting smaller, more manageable increments through micro-progressions promotes steady and consistent improvement. Utilising microprogressions encourages gradual adaptations and steady strength development, significantly decreasing your risk of injury and enhancing your longevity in training.
Adopting micro-progressions has both physical and psychological benefits. Physically, your body adapts to increased loads more comfortably, reducing strain on joints, tendons, ligaments, and connective tissues. Psychologically, regular small successes build confidence, provide frequent motivational boosts, and reinforce positive habits, which are crucial for maintaining enthusiasm and consistency in your training.
Remember, fitness success is a long-term journey. Being realistic about your capabilities and embracing micro-progressions ensures you avoid burnout, manage expectations effectively, and set yourself up for meaningful, sustainable results. Consistency is far more important, and far more impactful, than rapid but unsustainable progress. Embrace this slower, steady pace, and you’ll find yourself achieving greater strength, improved performance, and enhanced enjoyment in your workouts over months and years.
Track Your Progress
Unfortunately, most of you reading this won’t actually take what you have read into account. Not because you don’t think microprogressions aren’t important, but rather, it is because most people simply don’t actually track their workouts. Tracking your progress in the gym is perhaps one of the simplest yet most powerful strategies for ensuring consistent improvement and success in your fitness journey. Despite its simplicity, the reality is that most people do not accurately or consistently track their workouts. Often, people rely on memory, guessing what weight or number of reps they performed in previous sessions. This guesswork inevitably leads to inconsistent training sessions, either underloading or overloading exercises, which hampers your overall progress and increases your risk of injury.
Accurately and meticulously tracking your workouts provides multiple benefits. It allows you to precisely measure your progress over time, clearly indicating when you should incrementally increase the difficulty of your workouts, and helping you avoid unnecessary plateaus. By recording detailed information such as the specific weights lifted, the number of repetitions performed, and even subjective notes on how challenging each exercise felt, you create a reference guide that informs your training decisions each week.
Tracking also fosters a sense of accountability and discipline. When you know exactly what you accomplished during your previous session, it removes the guesswork from your training, ensuring you neither underestimate nor overestimate your capabilities. This clarity significantly reduces the risk of overloading your muscles, joints, or nervous system, helping you train safely and sustainably for years to come. This obviously leads to much better progress compared to someone who doesn’t track, and is inconsistent with their loading in the gym.
Also, consistent tracking provides significant psychological benefits. Seeing your progress visually documented week by week and month by month reinforces your motivation, boosting your confidence as you witness the incremental improvements clearly laid out before you. This concrete evidence of progress can be particularly powerful during periods when visible changes in your physique or performance might be slower or harder to notice. Being able to very clearly see the trend of progress is very, very powerful for keeping you on track.
In addition, meticulous tracking helps you quickly identify what training methods are working best for you, allowing you to refine your workouts more effectively. You can observe patterns, recognise exercises that produce the greatest improvements, and pinpoint those areas that may require extra attention or variation. This level of insight can be a game-changer in optimising your fitness plan.
Remember, tracking isn’t just about numbers; it’s about cultivating a mindset focused on incremental, consistent progress. Make it a habit to jot down details after every workout session, including not only weights and reps but also your perceived effort, mood, energy levels, and overall workout quality. Over time, this approach will reveal invaluable insights about your body’s unique response to training.
Ultimately, progressive overload is about long-term, steady growth rather than rapid, short-lived gains. Embrace the power of careful tracking, value each small step forward, and you’ll set yourself up for sustained, injury-free improvement and long-term success in your fitness journey.
Using Micro-Progressions In The Gym
Progression is really important if you are trying to actually get the results you want in the gym. You need to be adding weight to the bar over time. But that doesn’t mean you need to increase the weight on the bar every single week. What we’ll often expect is that we’re seeing maybe one to two per cent extra weight over the span of one to four weeks, depending on how consistent you’ve been training, if it’s a new program, your training history and experience, and so on.
For example, if we were coaching a client and they were squatting 100 kilos, we wouldn’t tell them to add 10 kilos next week. I’d say, try 102.5kg, for example, next week. That would be an increase of 2.5 per cent. And then, if they’re able to do that, then we keep it steady for a week and see how they get on.
If they’re not ready for another weight increment, we might increase the number of reps that they’re doing. For example, could give a rep range of six to eight reps. Do your 100 kg squat for six, then for seven, then for eight. Three weeks have passed by, now you’re ready for an increase in weight. We go up by 2.5 to 5 kilos, and we continue that sequence over time. We call that double progression, and that can be incredibly helpful for your progress in the gym.
Remember, if you’re bench pressing 20 kilos and you’re thinking of adding five kilos, that’s a 25 percent increase. If you’re benching a hundred kilos, a 25 percent increase would be an extra 25 kilos in the bar. Totally different and not to be expected. The weaker you are, the smaller you are, the less you’re lifting, the smaller increment of progression you will require. But remember, it’s all about that long-term progress. Track your numbers, and you’ll get better results long term.
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