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Explain progressive overload as you would to a capable student, in 3-4 sentences.

Progressive overload is the principle of gradually increasing the demands you place on your body during exercise to continue making gains in strength, endurance, or muscle size. Once your body adapts to a certain level of stress, you need to increase that stress—whether by adding more weight, doing more reps, increasing training volume, or reducing rest time—to keep progressing. Without progressive overload, your body has no reason to continue adapting, and your fitness improvements will plateau. Think of it like leveling up in a video game: you need increasingly difficult challenges to keep advancing.