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# Progressive Overload
The principle that training stimulus must increase over time to keep driving adaptation. Commonly reduced to "add weight every week," but per Andy Galpin that's only one of several valid levers.
Any one (not all at once) of:
Treating load as the only progression axis stalls a program once load increases get hard to sustain (joints, recovery capacity, life). Volume and density are just as valid and let you keep progressing without constantly adding weight.
(Source: Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimize Your Training Program for Fitness & Longevity — Huberman Lab)
Six independent levers can be manipulated to progress a program: exercise complexity, intensity/load, volume, time-under-tension/tempo, training frequency, and rest intervals — Galpin recommends moving one lever at a time rather than several at once.
Rate caps: roughly +3%/week intensity, +5–7%/week volume, never exceeding +10%/week (e.g. 10 → 11 miles/week, not 10 → 13). Volume can be tracked as reps-per-set × total sets × total exercises, summed across the week, to confirm week-over-week increases stay in range.
Deload: reduce to ~70% of recent working load every 4–8 weeks (optimal ~6), then resume and push past the prior peak. Strength itself is cheap to hold through a deload or a lower-priority quarter — as little as 5 sets/week sustains it for 8+ weeks, versus 12–16 weeks of total disuse before noticeable loss.
Source: Huberman Lab Guest Series w/ Andy Galpin, "Optimize Your Training Program for Fitness & Longevity."