Progressive overload for Humans
How to build any practice that actually lasts
The fitness world understands something the wellness world often misses — Sustainable growth happens through progressive overload.
In strength training, this means gradually increasing weight, reps, or intensity. Muscles adapt to manageable challenges & break down under sudden overhwelming increases.
The same principle applies to meditation, creative acts, yoga practice, morning routines, reading more often — literally any habit you want to build.
Yet wellness culture still says things like “21 day challenge! Meditate for 30 minutes daily starting tomorrow!” or “Transform your body, commit to 90-minute yoga practices!”
It’s a bit like telling someone to deadlift their bodyweight on day one —
Maybe doable but definitely not sustainable.
Things launched at with this level of enthusiasm & lack of preparation go the way of almost every new years resolution —
You’re rocking it for maybe a week or two. You feel superhuman, you are a new you. You miss a day, scold yourself for sucking, the practice becomes harder to return to. But you get back on the horse, miss another day or three & begin to begrudge this pressure point you’ve created for yourself. Saddle up again, miss again.
You decide whatever habit you’re trying to build isn’t viable for the life you live & it get’s tossed out with most everyone elses’ before march 3rd.
Ruined shoulders & other physiological wonders
The nervous system and muscle tissue follow similar learning curves. The curves of gradual adaptation. Both strengthen when challenged slightly beyond current capacity & both break down when overloaded.
Consistent micro stresses trigger protein synthesis, improved neural connectivity & enhanced stress tolerance. But for the stress to bring about positive gains it’s got to be relative to your current baseline.
This all started to make sense for me after, right at the start of 2020 I was diagnosed as hypermobile & told my shoulders were ‘ruined & likely not reparable.’
All respect to medical professionals due, this was a fairly shoddy consult & diagnosis. I showed up in serious pain, having had to take a few weeks off my physically intensive job, being plagued again by chronic immobility & debilitating soreness that had appeared on & off for over a decade. I explained the history, the immobility & agony that had me switch to a paleo diet (anti-inflammatory) for a while when I was twenty (which at least for a season or so fixed it) & that generally when it flared up I tried to manage it with diet & rest but had for quite some years been in a season where rest simply wasn’t an option. I added as an afterthought ‘I’m pretty bendy.’
She moved my limbs about a bit & essentially gave me a diagnosis of being really bendy.
I stood there under the crap white lights with an eyebrow raised at this friendly faced brunette kind of just waiting for the other mic to drop. I couldn’t help thinking
hang on, isn’t that what I just told you?
She told me I’d have to quit Yoga, I probably wouldn’t be able to fix the issue with standard physio. All in all it was a ‘heres your problem, now you have just enough information to intellectualise what you’re already living with & no solution.’
Fab.
Needless to say this was just another opportunity for me to delve into my own beloved research. I set about hunting for what hypermobility actually means — which is infinitely reduced when a doctor tells you it’s about being bendy. Funnily enough loads of hypermobile people aren’t actually particularly bendy or often are very bendy in one area & totally stiff in all the others.
Hypermobility signifies a difference in the makeup of your connective tissues.
Which means hypermobile muscles are structurally different, they start with a lower baseline of strength, the stabilising muscles fatigue much faster due to their constant attempts to stabilise the joints. Any strength they do build can be lost much more rapidly than the average muscle. The brain gets fuzzier signals regarding proprioception — where the joints actually are in space — so it compensates by allocating more resources to tracking the body. The amygdala (threat detection center) of hypermobile people is generally much larger because their nervous systems are constantly receiving extra signals of stressors — which goes some way to explaining the heightened emotional sensitivity that tends to come with the territory. Anxiety amongst hypermobile humans is incredibly common due to the bodies life-long background hum of extra effort, even when nothing particularly stressful is going on.
The good news?
Targeted, consistent strength & stability training improves all of it.
The joints & the nervous system are in constant conversation — strengthen one, you strengthen the other.
Once covid hit, having learned most if not all of this, my location & lifestyle drastically changed, I thought…
So the last thing my body is naturally built to do, is stand on my hands..
That’s what we’ll get working towards then.
I absolutely did not quit Yoga, in fact I massively upped the amount of time I spent practicing asana but I slowed my practice of it wayyyy down. Made every movement of it strengthening, placed attention in my micro muscles. I started working towards forearm balance, a little or a lot every damn day. Reasoning that while it was wholly demanding of my weakest point (shoulders) it had a shorter base — didn’t involve so many weak & wobbly joints — than handstand which made it a solid entry point. I continued to practice consistent, conditioning movements. In less than a month I was catching moments where I felt surprisingly stable standing on my elbows, stable enough that I started little by little turning my hungry gaze & my adamant practice to standing on my hands. Specifically pressing into it as I figured that kicking up created more impact than my then teetering joints had any chance at finding balance in.
Half bodyweight exercises then bodyweight. Perfecting form before adding load, gradually building tolerance.
Within four months, my shoulders were stronger than they’d ever been. I’d gone from being a person who could barely hold a plank let alone a handstand to being able to straddle press into one — A skill that often takes years to accomplish.
The chronic on-off pain & immobility I’d dealt with for more than a decade? Well it left six years ago & to date, has never returned.
Even more wild — that natural bendyness increased in ways I never could’ve imagined because I worked active flexibility through my vast range of motion. Creating strength in what was once painfully lax. By request, I started teaching handstands, before I was even certified to teach Yoga. Basing my offerings in what I knew to be true — what is strong is not usually mobile & what is very mobile is not usually strong. People are always more one than the other & balancing these two states builds the sweet spot where incredible skills become possible & indeed, just feeling more equilibrium & less painful restriction in your own body.
& balancing them at a rate the nervous system as well as the physical body can adapt to, in actions sustainable enough to be truly consistent with… well, suffice to say I’ve become a little more than convinced that with the right measures of understanding, self awareness & persistently applied methods — we are all capable of some pretty superhuman things.
Sure, proving doctors wrong was part of the fun but it wasn’t really the point. It was about learning & respecting the body’s adaptation timeline.
It was about proving to myself more than anyone else, that nothing was ruined.
Sthira Sukha
In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali offers exactly one instruction on the physical practice of yoga.
Sthira sukham asanam —
The posture should be steady & comfortable.
Three words. That’s it. Two thousand years of asana philosophy condensed into a single instruction & it has nothing to do with how deep you go, how long you hold it or whether your forehead reaches the floor.
Sthira — steady, strong, stable.
Sukha — ease, spaciousness, comfort.
Both cultivated simultaneously.
This sutra is usually taught as a meditation instruction — find the balance between effort & ease in your practice, don’t grip & don’t collapse. & it is that, but it’s also, best as I can see, the most clear description of progressive overload that exists in the yogic tradition.
Too much Sthira — too much force, too much load, too fast — & the body overcompensates, develops chronic patterns of overuse that become pain & limitation.
The practice that was supposed to build you starts to erode you instead.
Too much Sukha — too much ease, too little challenge, no meaningful load — & nothing adapts. The body stays exactly where it is.
The practice becomes static & stops showing signs of making any progress at all.
The only magic ingredient to a practice is the mix of both. Enough challenge that the system is asked to adapt. Enough ease that the adaptation is actually possible. Enough steadiness that you keep coming back. Enough comfort that coming back doesn’t feel like a set of hurdles.
Eg… a version of it that’s actually sustainable.
The same thing Patanjali prescribed to a posture is what the fitness world calls progressive overload. In the yogic tradition a posture is not just a shape the body makes — it’s the relationship you bring to any position you find yourself in. On & off the mat.
Your meditation practice. Your creative acts. Your eating habits. Your relationship with your own nervous system.
Steady advancement + comfortable starting point = Sustainable progress.
The math may be ancient but it’s mathing just fine.
Your nervous system doesn’t give two figs
— About your motivation that is. The nervous system in general gives all the figs. This a drum I’ve banged in previous articles & one I’ll surely bang again in those to come.
She’s always listening & she always wins.
It learns through repetition of manageable challenges, not through drastic efforts that exhaust it & require days of recovery before the next attempt. Every time you show up to a practice that asks just enough of you — not too much, not too little — you are literally building new landscape of the body & the brain.
The 5 minute meditation that you can do every day is building more than the 20 minute one you attempt twice a week & abandon in frustration. The gentle, most-days-a-week 15 minute yoga practice is building more than the intensive one you do when motivation strikes & berate yourself for when it doesn’t. The short daily creative session is building more than the marathon weekend ft. the muse followed by two weeks of nothing.
Consistency at the right load is always more effective than intensity at the wrong one.
This isn’t a permission slip to stay comfortable forever. Progressive overload requires progression — the load increases as the capacity increases, gradually & deliberately. But it starts where you actually are, not where you think you should be. & it builds at a rate the nervous system can follow rather than a rate the ego demands.
Since somehow I’ve made it through this & every article without saying it & it’s one of my favourite things to gently drill into students IRL…
Meet yourself where you’re at.
Your practice of progressive load
This is an invitation more than a demand. It’s for those who are reading this thinking ‘hey wait, maybe I can do…’
Pick one practice you’ve been trying to build — or rebuild, or return to after the inevitable interruptions of our messy magical lil lives. Something that matters to you. Something you have over the moons, started & stopped & started again.
Now ask — what is the smallest version of this practice that I could show up to consistently? Not the version I aspire to. The version that is genuinely, on my worst day, my roughest week, my most impractical season of life, doable.
Now start. Not as a stepping stone to something more impressive as quickly as possible. As the practice. As the full expression of Sthira Sukha applied to your own life — the steady, comfortable, sustainable commitment that the nervous system can learn to trust.
When that version becomes genuinely easy — & it will, that’s the whole point — add a little. A minute more. a paragraph in place of a line. One more round. One more breath. Slightly more load.
You’ll get to notice that the capacity is there because the foundation is, the progression is natural because your minimal version of it is making way for something more.
The body & the mind are not obstacles to your practice. They are the practice & they respond to being met at their baseline rather than whatever level you’d like them to be at.
May you find / create / tend to some sukha out here friends.
Beautiful post <3 I needed that reminder
This is such a thoughtful bridge between physical training and human formation. What stands out is how clearly you connected progressive overload to sustainability, because growth in almost any practice often depends less on intensity and more on whether the nervous system, body, and mind can actually adapt to what is being asked. The framing of steady advancement over dramatic effort carries real wisdom.
I especially appreciated Sthira Sukha as both metaphor and discipline. The tension between strength and ease applies far beyond movement, because many people either overload themselves into frustration or remain so comfortable that nothing meaningfully changes. Thank you for grounding consistency, resilience, and self-awareness in something both practical and deeply human.