Overtraining stops your progress

Do you train very often? Or too intensively? And have you ever experienced overtraining? Then watch out for it!

My pre-contest preparation is a secret. I work with crazy people. I'm serious. Many of "my" successes with bodybuilders are due to the fact that the company I seek out consists of obsessive compulsive individuals with insane training commitments who make my job much easier.

Although I usually advise clients on diet and tend to go out of my way in training, I do occasionally give them some small, but necessary, training advice during the pre-contest phase of their training.

There's usually nothing interesting about my advice.
"Eduardo, you need a day off."
"Meat, do a few less sets than usual for the next few days."
"Derik, take it easy for a few days now and just have fun in the gym."

Overtraining can ruin your pre-contest preparation by making your muscles flat, and can even interfere with weight loss. If you learn to know your body by recognizing when you're overtraining and adjust your training to avoid that trap, you'll see great results.
The simplest way to say it is that when you overtrain, your body is put under more stress than it can handle. It's as simple as this. Any stress beyond that will result in your body not recovering and growing. You can be passionate, have a workout you trust - but you won't move forward if you are overtrained.

Part and parcel of overtraining is that it manifests differently for everyone. I'll give you an example. When Mike Francois was at the top of the bodybuilding world, he would often perform 20 to 24 sets in his back workouts, and go to failure in all of them. Every one of his training partners overtrained badly. Big Mike didn't. He grew like a weed and his back became his best part.

Before you conclude that it's because he helped himself all he could, I can assure you that Mike was clean most of the year while his teammates were mostly not. The result? Mike grew, and they didn't.

While Mike made progress, his partners always ended up overtrained. He rotated one after another, and none could keep up with his volume and intensity. Training intensity varies for everyone, and drugs usually help - but they are never the solution. It is quite commonly possible to overtrain when taking anabolic steroids.

Once again, any training-induced stress that is greater than what your body can tolerate will result in a complete halt to muscle growth and recovery.

One of the perpetual, silly myths is the idea that, " There is no overtraining, only undertraining." Not true. Recovery depends on total caloric intake, protein, energy, essential fats, as well as rest (time away from the gym) and your own hormonal status.
It's all about balance. A simple test would be to take a well-fed local bodybuilder and send him to Ronnie Coleman for a fortnight to torture him in the gym with his style of training. The chances of him recovering would probably be slim. The fact is, diet only helps the body. When the stress of training exceeds your body's recovery capabilities, you back off. You don't grow, even if you eat a lot.

When Dorian Yates appeared on the scene, he followed the thoughts of Tom Platz and Mike Mentzer. He argued that most bodybuilders don't grow because they train too many sets (known as volume training) and usually too often - say every day or not enough days off.

Platz, Mentzer and Dorian were right, but many - including Mentzer - just fell into the trap of thinking that if more isn't better than less - much less will be radically better. The pendulum then shifted from all sorts of training to - because of these three - significantly fewer series.
Bodybuilders were training 5-6 sets for chest and 8-10 sets for back at a time, which in my opinion is not enough to optimally stimulate growth. Building muscle depends on the weight you use. Simply, if you can do biceps raises with 70 pounds, you will stimulate much more growth than with 45 pounds.

You can say what you want, the weight on the barbell is hugely essential for engaging muscle fibers and sparking growth. After the weight, it's the volume or total number of sets you perform. The volume of your workout affects muscle growth.

If you don't perform enough sets, you won't grow. If you do too many, you overtrain, and you won't grow either. You have to find a balance, a happy medium. Where is it? That depends on a lot of things, but I'll give you some advice.

1) The more sets you do, the better

Just like more weight, more muscle engagement comes with more sets. You just have to figure out when to stop.
To give an example, ask yourself if three sets are better than one for the biceps. Of course it is. Is five better than three? Probably. Is seven better than five? The point where you have to stop, or the point where the next sets are no longer helping, is usually when you lose the feeling of being pumped and the weight on the barbell starts to drop.

For example, a bodybuilder can't do 20 sets of biceps lifts with 55 pounds. After the sixth set, he wouldn't be able to do it with those 55. If he were trying for 8 to 10 reps in a set, he would have to drop the weight dramatically after set number five, six or seven. That means it's time to move on to the next exercise.
When you get to the point where you need to drop the weight, stop. For a beginner or intermediate it might be 2 to 3 sets, while a competitive bodybuilder will take 5 to 6 sets. The bottom line is to listen to your body and keep going when you need to. If you lose your pump, push yourself. If you can't handle the same weight for every other set, move up.

2) Repetition rate counts

The speed or perceived speed at which you move the weights affects how many sets you can do. In addition to weight and total number of sets, the speed at which you move the weight affects growth, and can determine your threshold for overtraining in each workout.

Moving weights quickly and aggressively is probably better for growth than moving them slowly and evenly. This is because fast movement engages many more muscle fibers than slow movement.

In my opinion, slow training has its place in an overall volume plan, but it should never be used as a primary tool to build muscle. If you want to grow, you should grab a heavy weight and push it hard, while maintaining decent technique of course. Of course, the speed with heavy weights won't be as much because the weight used won't allow you to build it as much.

By overloading the muscle with heavy weight and performing it quickly, you are physiologically creating the greatest amount of stress possible for the muscle. One way to tell if you are doing too much is to learn to know your ability to push the weight fast.

If you come to the gym and there's no juice in your muscles - you're not able to push the weight explosively for the first few sets of an exercise (after warming up, of course), you're already overtrained. Get out of the gym. But if the swing is there in your muscles - move the weights quickly, you'll feel strong, you're certainly not overtraining, and you can continue training.

3) Frequency counts

Another factor affecting recovery is frequency. I firmly believe that you should train a muscle every 5 to 8 days. Generally, if you train a batch more frequently - say, training chest every fourth day, you won't grow due to overtraining.
On the other hand, if you wait more than 8 days, you won't grow either. It won't be overtraining, it will be lack of training frequency. Understand, muscles grow by stimulation followed by rest. If you rest too long - waiting too many days before training the same muscle group - the stress on the body will be too great, overloading the recovery process, and making growth impossible.
Let's put it this way. Imagine you train your legs on Monday and again on Wednesday. The time between workouts is too short, and you overtrain. Now try to train them again 10 to 12 days after the first workout. What will happen? There is so much time between workouts that your legs will be incredibly sore after the second workout, which can also cause you to overtrain.
You need balance, not too often or vice versa. To avoid overtraining, you need a training strategy that allows you to exercise each body part every 5 to 8 days.

4) Too many days in a row

If your goal is mass, you need to rest. Many bodybuilders aren't able to train more than two days in a row - or at least they shouldn't - because such training usually causes hormonal changes that lead to overtraining. In a state of overtraining, normally testosterone levels drop slightly and cortisol levels rise a bit.

Cortisol is a stress hormone secreted by the adrenal cortex and its secretion is a response to stress. In small doses, it even promotes anabolism - building muscle mass. However, when secreted in larger amounts, especially when testosterone levels drop even slightly, it breaks down muscle by inducing a catabolic environment.

Conclusion

When it comes to pre-contest preparation, I often tell bodybuilders, "We're not going to push anything to extremes.
I'm not going to keep you on zero carbs, but you're not going to eat too many. We're not going to do cardio to prepare for the Boston Marathon, but we're going to do it to burn fat."

I realize I'm trying to do competition prep here, which won't be overwhelming for the body. When you go to extremes, the body sometimes refuses to change. The same principle works for training. When you push too hard, the body will often refuse to gain muscle in the non-competition period, and in turn refuse to hold it during the pre-competition preparation.

The art is to find that threshold where your body is no longer changing, and to be able to adapt and ease off the gas in your training so you can continue to improve.