One of my main concerns in bodybuilding is overtraining. Overtraining is when you train too hard or too frequently for your body to recover from your workouts. There are a lot of symptoms that I use to tell if I am overtraining and they are:

1. Chronic fatigue

2. Overly sore joints and muscles

3. Willingness to go to the gym

4. Lack of appetite

5. Insomnia (lack of sleep)

6. Reoccuring cold or sickness

What is Overtraining?

When you are lifting heavy weights your muscle fibers tear and then while you are resting, through proper nutrition and sleep, they get bigger and stronger (hypertrophy). If you overtrain, your muscle fibers tear and your body does not have enough time to heal the muscles before you go back into the gym and tear the fibers again. This is overtraining!

If you overtrain your muscles, it will not grow in size or strength and can actually get weaker or smaller. Usually the most overtrained muscles are the biceps AKA ‘guns’. Everyone wants a big bicep. They want to intimidate other guys and attract the ladies when they flex. So what do they do? They go in their garage and train the biceps for an hour with 30 sets! Then their biceps don’t grow so they train longer and with more sets and eventually they overtrain and give up lifting weights.

How to fix overtraining?

By deloading, what is deloading? Well pretty simple, either you lower the weights you are doing by 10-30% (thats about 5-15lbs.), lower the number of reps/sets and focus on your form of the exercise or completely stop working out the bodypart[s] that is overtrained for a week or even up to a month(depending on genetics) . Also remember to eat more and take your multivitamins.

Creatine is an amino acid. It is normally produced in the body from arginine, glycine and methionine. Creatine plays a vital role in cellular energy production as creatinephosphate (phosphocreatine) in regenerating adenosine triphosphate (ATP) in skeletal muscle. Without ATP, muscle contraction is not possible. Oral administration of creatine increases muscle stores and may increase muscle strength and improve exercise performance. In the diet,creatine is found in meat and fish – although cooking destroys most of it. Creatine claims to increase energy, power output, and enchances muscle size and strenght.

A significant gain in physical performance in high-intensity exercise has been shown with creatine doses of 20 to 30 g/day, but more recent research is indicating that similar performance benefits are possible with much lower doses in the range of 2-5 grams/day though benefits may take longer to be noticed).

Taking very large doses of creatine daily seemed to increase the strength of muscular dystrophypatients’ muscles by about 10 percent. Although that may be considered a relatively small gain it may be very important to that person who can now pick up a glass of water. Ten grams of
creatine per day for 5 days followed by 5 grams per day for another week have produced increases in muscle strength in the legs, hands and feet of patients with muscular dystrophy.Such patients usually have lower creatine levels than healthy people, so boosting muscle stores may help augment cellular energy production and support muscular contraction.

The most common regimen for creatine supplementation follows a two-phase cycle with a 5-10 day loading phase (20-25 g/day) followed by a variable length maintenance phase (2-5 g/day)to maintain muscle saturation. It is unclear, however, whether the loading phase is actually
needed to achieve the same end result. Creatine absorption appears to be enhanced when the supplement is taken with a high-carbohydrate drink such as fruit juice.

Purchasing creatine involves three basic choices:

1. 100 percent pure creatine monohydrate – It’s a white powder(not unlike baking soda) that is basically tasteless and odorless.You can mix it in water, juice,protein shake, etc. Do not,however, mix creatine with a citrus drink. The combination of creatine and a citrus drink may result in some
breakdown of the product, converting creatine into creatinine,hich is useless to your body.

2. Creatine and sugar (premixed) – Studies showed that ingesting a carbohydrate solution with creatine promoted a 60 percent greater increase in total creatine concentrations in the muscle, compared with taking creatine alone. Sixty percent is a big difference.However, the subjects who took the creatine and carbohydrates were pounding back 93g of carbs four times per day for five days. 93g of carbohydrates is an additional 1,488 calories per day, or 7,440 calories for the five-day experiment. Any way you look at it, that is a good way to get fat. So, if you are going to follow the protocol of this study and suck back four sugar shakes per day for five days, that’s where I would leave it. In other words, if you are not concerned about how big your gut gets in a week’s time, and you want to load creatine, this is a proven method. After the loading period is over, if you wanted to continue with this type of
drink, I would reserve the 93g of sugary goodness for your post-workout meal only. Post-workout is when your muscles are begging for sugar like a crack addict looking for a fix. If one were to critically compare this study to commercial creatine premixes,most supplement manufacturers would fall short on the amount of sugar in one serving. The sugar increases insulin, which transports creatine into the muscles. For now, suffice it to say I have tried many premixed creatine drinks and can say with a great degree of certainty that they do work better than creatine
alone. Like I said, though, if you want to follow this protocol,reserve this drink reserved for a post-workout shake,and you won’t have to worry about bustin’ your gut.

3. Creatine and insulin mimicking agents – Agents that mimic insulin, such as Alpha-lipoic acid, have an effect similar to sugar on your body. When you consume high levels of simple sugars,your insulin goes through the roof. The insulin is responsible for getting nutrients (i.e. creatine) to the muscles. So these products theoretically punch up your insulin without the 93g of gut-busting sugar.