Saturday, April 28, 2012

Am I Training to Much?

   Progressive overload and frequency are the two most important factors in building muscle.
The more frequently you can train a muscle, while stimulating strength gains and without exceeding your capacity to recover, the more muscle you’ll build.
This is no different than any other physical quality that you would like to improve in life.
   Want to become a better hitter? Go to the batting cage more frequently.
   Want to become a better shooter? Get on the hardwood and knock down 100+ jumpers every day.
   Want to shake the “2-Pump Chump” nickname you’ve earned with the ladies? Get more practice time in, preferably with a partner.
    Whenever you want to get better at something the answer is always to do it more often.
So if you want to get better at lifting weights, and thus build muscle faster, you should train more frequently.
    Like the ability to hit a fastball, strength development is a skill.
    You have to teach your muscles and your central nervous system to work in synchronicity so that you can contract harder during a set.
By contracting harder and producing more tension you’ll get stronger and be able to lift heavier weights When you can lift heavier weights you’ll get bigger. It’s a simple formula that is often overlooked.
Training more frequently also helps to alleviate soreness and little nagging injuries. That’s because when you do something only once per week you never really adapt to it. Like shooting jumpers or digging ditches. You get sore the first time but after doing it daily for a few weeks the soreness is gone.
Strength training is no different. I’ve taken a lot of “once-a-weekers” and increased their frequency with outstanding results. They inevitably tell me that they feel a thousand times better and have fewer aches and pains.
It’s simply a matter of the body building itself up and getting used to the demands frequently imposed upon it. Basic adaptation.
If you turn your workouts into a contest, train to failure and beat the shit out of yourself all that goes out the window. In that case you should probably just train twice a week for 13 minutes per session and hope for the best.
Those who train a little bit more intelligently can train more frequently.
Beginners should always train each muscle group a bare minimum of three times per week, if not four or five. When you are weak and trying to learn the lifts you need very frequent exposures.
So if you can swing it, five 30-minute sessions can work very well. If you can only do three, that’s fine too.
Everyone else beyond the beginner level should train each body part or movement pattern at least twice per week, if not 3-4 times.
That keeps you healthier and provides far more opportunities to stimulate growth than the standard bodybuilder prescription of training a muscle group only once per week.

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