Overtraining Will Kill Your Gains
By Chris Aceto
Here is a secret in my contest prep. I work with nut jobs
. I am serious. A lot of “my” success with bodybuilders is due to the type of company I keep. I seem to attract obsessive compulsive, super-crazy, hard-training individuals who make my job easy.
Although I tend to advise my clients on nutrition and get out of the way when it comes to training, I find myself interjecting very limited, but important, training advice during a contest prep period. Typically, the advice is the pretty mundane.
“Eduardo, you need a rest day!”
“Masoom, do a few less sets than normal over the next two to three training sessions.”
“Derik, train lighter for three days and just have fun in the gym.”
Overtraining can torpedo your contest prep by flattening the muscles and even interfering with fat loss. If you can build self-awareness to the point where you can figure out at what point you become overtrained and, in turn, adapt your training to make sure you sidestep an overtraining trap, then you will see truly great results.
In its most basic sense, overtraining means the body is being put under greater stress than it can handle. It’s that simple. Any additional stress, above and beyond what your own body can handle will result in a failure to recover and grow. So you could be fairly dedicated, training with a routine you believe to be a well thought out approach to getting big – yet fail to move ahead and grow if your body is over trained.
The intangible part of overtraining is that it varies greatly from perso
n to person. I’ll give you an example. When Mike Francois was on top of the bodybuilding world, he frequently performed 20 to 24 sets for back, taking each and every set to failure. Every training partner he partnered with ended up severely overtrained. Not big Mike. He grew like a weed with his back becoming his greatest asset.
Before you assume “Yeah, that’s because Mike was using vitamins x, y and z,” I can tell you he trained clean – drug free for the majority of the year and very often his training partners were not drug free. The result? Mike still grew and his partners always fell by the wayside, failing to grow.
While Mike made good progress, the partners always ended up overtraining. He would go through one partner after another, each unable to keep up with his volume and intensity. Not only does training intensity vary from person to person, but taking drugs usually helps – but is never a solution. It’s fully possible to overtrain while taking anabolic steroids.
Again, the bottom line is any stress induced through training that is greater than your body can handle will result in a complete lack of muscle growth and repair.
One of the myths that perpetuatesovertraining is the silly idea, “There’s no such thing as overtraining, just under eating.” That's not true. Recovery is dependent on total calories, protein, energy intake and essential fat intake as well as rest (time outside of the gym) and your own hormonal status.
It’s really a balancing act. The simple way to test that theory is to send a super well fed local bodybuilder out to live with Ronnie Coleman for two weeks and have Coleman slaughter him in the gym Coleman-style. Chances that he recover would likely be slim to none. The fact is, nutrition can only support the body so far. When exercise stress exceeds your body’s own tolerance for recovery, you go backwards. You don’t grow. Even if you are eating a lot.
When Dorian Yates burst onto the sce
ne, he followed up on the ideas formulated by Tom Platz and Mike Mentzer years earlier. Dorian’s take on things were in line with theirs which was most bodybuilders fail to grow because they train with too many sets (known as volume) and usually train too frequently – say training every day or not taking enough rest days.
Platz, Mentzer and Dorian were right but many – including Mentzer – just fell into the trap that ‘if more is not better than less – even far less may be radically better. So the pendulum shifted from all kinds of training to – because of the influence of these three – far fewer sets.
Suddenly, bodybuilders were doing 5-6 sets for chest or 8 to 10 sets for back which in my opinion just is not enough to optimally stimulate growth. Building muscle relies on the poundages you use also known as the weight. Pretty simple, if you can perform a set of barbell curls with 150 pounds, you’ll stimulate far more growth than using only 100 pounds.
No matter how you cut it, the weight you use is immensely important in recruiting muscle fibers to cause growth . After the weight comes volume or the total number of sets you perform. Volume influences muscle growth. If you do not perform enough sets, you’ll fail to trigger growth. If you get carried away and do too many, you’ll over train and also fail to grow, so you have to find a balance, a happy medium. Where’s the happy medium? It depends, but here are some guidelines.
1) The More Sets You Perform, the Better
Just as the greater the weight you handle, the better in terms of muscle recruitment, the more sets you do, the greater you’ll work a muscle. The thing you really have to distinguish is where to stop.
To illustrate the point, just ask yourself, is three sets of bicep curls better t
han one? Of course, the answer is yes. Is five better than three.Most likely. Is seven better than five? The point where you have to stop or the point where more sets are no longer helping is typically where you lose the ‘feel” or ‘pump’ in the muscle or where your poundages start to drop.
For example, Bodybuilder A can’t do 20 straight sets of standing barbell curls with 120 pounds. After the sixth set, he will no longer be able to use the 120. If he was aiming to do 8 to 10 reps per set, after set number five, six or seven, the weight he can handle will drop off a lot, meaning it’s time to move onto another exercise.
When you reach a point where the poundage starts to fade, that’s it. For some people, like a beginner or intermediate, that might be 2 to 3 sets while for someone like a Seasoned National level Competitior it might be 5 to 6 sets. It’s important to listen to your body and move on when you need to. If you lose a pump, move on. When your poundages drop – you can’t handle the same heavy weight for each continuous set, move on!
2) Speed Of Reps Count
The speed or perceived speed at which you move a weight influences how many sets you can do. Outside of the weight and total number of sets you perform, the speed at which you drive a weight has an influence on growth and can determine your own personal threshold for overtraining within each training session.
Moving a weight fast, with speed
and aggression, is arguably better for growth than moving a weight with a slow and even speed. That’s because trying to ‘drive a weight’ with the intensity of a bullet coming out of a gun – causes a far greater number of muscle fibers to come into play than simply moving the weight with a slow cadence.
Slow training, in my opinion, is a tool to use in some part of an overall muscle building plan but should never be used as a primary way to build muscle. If you want to grow, you should pick a heavy weight and drive the weight while maintaining good form. Of course when you drive a weight, there's not going to be a lot of momentum created because when you overload the muscle with a heavy weight, the poundage radically cuts down on the creation of momentum.
In overloading a muscle with a heavy weight and driving the weight by pushing it fast rather than super slow, you physiologically create the greatest amount of stress on the muscle as possible. One way to discover whether you are about to do too much is by getting in touch with your ability to drive a weight.
If you go into the gym and there’s no oomph to the muscle – you can’t explode and drive the first few sets of an exercise (after warming up, of course) you are already over trained. Get out of the gym! On the other hand, if there is a lot of snap in the muscle – you can drive those heavy weights and you feel powerful, for sure you are not overtraining and should proceed with the workout.
3) Frequency Counts
Another factor influencing recovery is training frequency. For the most part, I believe you have to train a muscle once every 5 to 8 days. In general, if you train a body part 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’ll also fail to grow. In this case not by overtraining but by failing to trainfrequently enough. You see, the muscles grow by stimulating them, then resting. If you rest too long – waiting too many days before hitting the same muscle group for another workout, the stress on the body appearsto be too great which overwhelms the recovery process leading to a lack of growth.
Let’s put it this way, imagine training legs on Monday and then again on Wednesday. The time in between is too short, so you overtrain. Now try training them for a second time, 10 to12 days after the first workout. What happens? The time between training is so long your legs become immensely sore the second time you train which can also trigger overtraining.
You need balance, not too often and not too infrequently. To avoid overtraining, you’ll need a training st
rategy that allows you to hit each body part once every 5 to 8 days.
4) Too Many Days In a Row
If mass is the goal, you have to rest. Many bodybuilders won’t be able to train more than two consecutive days – or at least should not train for more than two consecutive days in a row – because training for more than two days usually causes hormonal changes that lead to overtraining. Typically, in an overtraining state, testosterone levels start to drop a little. In addition, you’ll experience a small surge in cortisol levels.
Cortisol is the stress hormone released from the adrenal cortex that sits just atop the kidneys and it increases in secretion is response to stress. In small amounts it actually contributes to anabolism – the building up in muscle tissue. However, when released in larger amounts, especially when testosterone levels drop even mildly, it tends to tear muscle down creating a catabolic scenario.
Conclusion
When it comes to contest prep, I often tell bodybuilders, “We are using the Goldilocks approach. I'm not going to have you on no carbs, but you won’t be eating tons of carbs. With cardio we won’t be prepping for the Boston Marathon but we have to do cardio to burn the fat.”
I realize what I am really trying to nail down is an approach to contest prep that is not overwhelming to the body. When you go to extremes the body sometimes fails to change. The same idea holds true with training. When you push the body too hard, often it fails to respond by not adding muscle in the off season or failing to hold muscle during a contest prep phase.
The art is in figuring out when your body is no longer changing and having the inner fortitude to adapt and cut back on your training to make sure your body continues to improve.
Chris Aceto attended Bob Gruskin's Guru University as a teenager in the Bronx, New York.
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