The 30-minute exercise trick that works for weight loss and fitness levels

Personal trainers champion ‘progressive overload’ as being the key to successful strength training. Here an expert tells Harry Bullmore how you can apply it to your home workouts with minimum effort in terms of time and equipment

Progressive overload is the key to successful strength training - a personal trainer explains how you can apply it to your home workouts (Getty Images)

In my old commercial gym, there was a man who would spend an hour exercising most mornings. Each day he would pick up the same 10kg dumbbells and work through the same sequence of exercises at the same speed, then leave again.

The movement will have raised his heart rate, elevated calorie burn and, initially at least, helped strengthen the working muscles. It’s also undeniable that he developed discipline, and a strong exercise habit that will see him well in the long run. The problem was that there was no progression, so his significant input of time outweighed the benefits he was seeing.

A gym membership isn’t a prerequisite for losing weight and keeping fit. You can train at home with little-to-no equipment and see significant improvements in your strength, body composition and fitness. But doing the same workout, day in, day out, is unlikely to yield the results you want, and it certainly won’t deliver the results you deserve from the time you’re putting in.

The good news is, this mistake is incredibly easy to remedy. You don’t need any pricey kit to do so either, according to certified personal trainer and minimal equipment strength training specialist Amanda Capritto. And she practises what she preaches.

“I’ve been living in a converted van full-time for the past year while travelling around America,” Capritto says. “I can count on my two hands how many times I’ve been in a full gym in that time. Other than that, I’ve trained with only resistance bands, a single 15kg dumbbell, and a 16kg kettlebell.”

Yet, in this time, she’s recorded several measurable improvements in her strength and fitness, including a new squat PB during one of her rare trips forays to the gym.

“With a bit of creativity and commitment, getting and staying strong is 100 per cent doable with minimal equipment and time,” she adds.

I can’t prove that a lack of challenge and progression is the world’s most common workout mistake. But as a fitness writer who’s been training consistently for more than a decade, it’s the one I see most often.

The solution to this problem is something called “progressive overload”: systematically increasing the intensity of your workouts over time, in line with your increasing strength and fitness levels. This way, your workouts should always be appropriately challenging, which is the key to sparking positive adaptations in the body.

Progressive overload can be achieved by playing with the many variables in your workouts. If you have limited equipment at home, tweaking these variables can also make it go a lot further.

“Being efficient with weight training means progressively overloading on a regular basis,” says Capritto. “This involves being smart with exercise selection and other variables like rep counts and rest intervals. Then my workouts are really quite simple and mostly contain very straightforward exercises – rows, press-ups, deadlifts, lunges, squats and kettlebell swings.”

By doing this, she’s usually able to wrap up her workouts within 30 minutes, freeing up more time for the things she loves to do.

“At one point in my life, I did strength training for the strength training itself,” Capritto explains. Fitness was the activity and the outcome. Now, I see strength training as a driver of health and physical capability – more of a means to an end – and I think most of the general public sees it that way too.

“I want to spend less time slinging weights and more time romping about in the mountains. That’s why I approach every workout with efficiency in mind, and do two to four sessions per week.”

Below, you can find out how she applies progressive overload to achieve this.

You can increase the potency of a bodyweight squat by adding weight, slowing down your reps or swapping it for a unilateral exercise like the split squat (Getty)

Change the weight

This is the simplest way to apply progressive overload. In strength training, a good litmus test for checking if an exercise is challenging enough is noting how quickly and easily you can move the weight you’re lifting – even if it’s just your body weight.

Whatever your target number of repetitions, the exercise should be challenging enough that, by the last one or two reps, you involuntarily slow down during the lifting portion. For the squat, this would apply when moving from a squat position to standing.

As a practical example: If your workout involved performing four sets of 10 goblet squats with a 10kg dumbbell, and after a week or two this began to feel easy, you could swap your weight for a 12kg one.

This is easy to do in a gym, but harder for Capritto, who has just one dumbbell and one kettlebell in the back of her campervan. The same problem might apply to you if you train at home with only a few weights to hand.

If that’s the case, the options below can help.

Raise the target number of sets and reps

Your next port of call for increasing the difficulty of a workout is increasing your target number of sets and reps. If you can comfortably do four sets of 10 reps on an exercise one week, try five sets of 10 the next week, or four sets of 12. As long as you’re progressing in a way that makes the workout appropriately challenging, you’re golden.

However, research suggests that muscle growth results from sets of between five and 30 repetitions, and lower rep ranges are preferable for building strength. There also comes a point where you’re doing too many reps for this to be a time-efficient approach, so you might not want to continually increase your target number of reps indefinitely.

When that happens, it’s time to look at other options for progressive overload, like those further down the page.

Exercise selection

“I can’t simply go to the store and buy more weights,” Capritto says. “I have to think of ways to increase the load on a given muscle with the same tools. Often, increasing load in this case means doing unilateral work.”

Unilateral work simply means exercises that target one side of the body at a time: think of swapping a squat for a split squat, or a bent-over row for a single-arm row. By doing this with the same weighted dumbbell or kettlebell, the working muscles are challenged to support more load, leading to a greater challenge.

You could also swap exercises for more challenging ones that target the same muscles. For example, trading press-ups for feet-elevated press-ups, or squats for sissy squats.

Read more: A fat loss expert recommends swapping strict diets for these five simple habits to see long-term results

A man performing a Bulgarian split squat during a home workout (Getty)

Think time under tension

Time under tension is a fancy phrase for the amount of time your muscles are working during an exercise. Logic dictates that, the longer your muscles are working, the harder an exercise will be. So, we can increase the difficulty of a strength training workout by slowing down the tempo of your lifts.

Capritto recommends applying this to the eccentric, or lowering, portion of an exercise. For example, in a squat, this applies to the time it takes you to control your body down from a standing position to the bottom of your squat.

“Take three full seconds to descend, then pause for another three seconds in the squat position before standing up as explosively as you can,” she recommends.

Decrease rest times

Another way you can increase the intensity of your workouts is by decreasing the amount of rest between sets. This can be effective for developing muscular endurance, and even muscle growth on occasion. However, if your primary goal is building strength, it’s probably one to avoid.

This is because longer rest times allow your muscles to recover and restore energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate or ATP. By doing this, you can hit the next set with renewed intensity, providing a better stimulus for strength gains. Whereas with a shorter rest time, you’ll approach the lift fatigued, which usually leads to a decline in performance.

Incorporate power training

This isn’t strictly an example of progressive overload, but it is a way of varying your training for far-reaching results.

First, it’s important to understand that strength and power are two different yet interrelated things; strength refers to your ability to generate force, while power equals work divided by time, so it describes how quickly you can exert force.

“With limited equipment, really focusing on the concentric contraction, or the ‘up’ portion of an exercise, can be a big help for driving continued progress,” says Capritto.

“I implement power training into my routine in two main ways. One is adding plyometrics, which is essentially jumping, hopping, bounding and bouncing. An example would be replacing squats with squat jumps, or standard press-ups with clapping ones.

“The other way I add a power element is simply speeding up the concentric portion of a movement. For example, driving the hips forward with intentional rapidness during Romanian deadlifts.”

Read more: A flexibility expert says these are the three best stretches for fighting tight hips

There are ways to make bodyweight exercises like press-ups more challenging without any extra equipment (Getty)

Why is progressive overload important? The nitty gritty

The reason this is a problem is, according to the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM), it falls foul of the two main principles that underpin successful strength training: general adaptation syndrome (GAS) and specific adaptations to imposed demands (SAID).

General adaptation syndrome (GAS)

GAS, coined by Hungarian-Canadian researcher Hans Selye, explains how the body reacts to stress.

Lifting weights, using a dumbbell that is too heavy for you can lead to a breakdown in form and injury, but appropriate stress can trigger the body to positively adapt in response. In other words, lifting a weight that’s challenging but manageable might, when paired with a suitable diet and recovery, deliver increases in muscle size and strength of the body’s tissues.

The key takeaway here is that your workout needs to be appropriately challenging to trigger optimal improvements in your fitness. Once you’ve experienced the desired increases in strength, muscle, fitness or performance, the workout will become easier and no longer deliver the stimulus needed for continued improvements. At this point, play with the variables above to make it more challenging again – aka, progressive overload.

Specific adaptations to imposed demand (SAID)

This leads us nicely to the SAID principle. As the acronym suggests, this dictates that any bodily adaptations will depend on the stimulus you’re giving it.

It is possible to build strength and muscle at home with some simple tweaks to your workouts (Getty)

Where lifting weights is concerned, this means that if you want to develop a certain body part, you should prioritise exercises that recruit muscles in this area.

Likewise, if you want to build strength, you should prioritise lifting heavy weights for a low number of repetitions. Lifting lighter weights for a high number of repetitions is more likely to build muscular endurance, and lifting weights explosively can result in improved power.

Or in layman’s terms: if you want to lift heavier weights, you need to lift heavier weights, and continue to do so consistently and progressively over time. The same applies to pretty much any fitness goal.

Read more: I tried ‘the best kettlebell workout’, and it was surprisingly simple yet effective in just 10 minutes

In summary

• Fitness progress is your body’s response to appropriate amounts of physical stress – provided you’re fuelling and recovering adequately.
• Workouts should be challenging and suited to your individual fitness level.
• If a workout is too challenging, leaving you unable to finish or forcing you to compromise on form, it will likely lead to negative outcomes such as injury.
• If a workout is too easy, it will not provide the necessary stimulus to trigger positive adaptations in your body such as an increase in strength, muscle, performance and other factors of fitness.
• For this reason, it’s important to find a Goldilocks premium difficulty for your workouts, where they are challenging but achievable.
• As your fitness level (and strength in particular) increases, the same workouts you used before will begin to feel easier, and eventually, they will cease to provide the stimulus needed for positive adaptations.
• To prevent your progress from plateauing, “progressive overload” needs to be consistently applied over time – adapting your strength training workouts by changing the weights, sets, reps, and exercises to make them more challenging.

Read more: As a fitness expert, here are the seven habits that have made the biggest difference in the gym