Are You Overtraining!?!
December 7, 2009 | 1 Comment
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.
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1 Comment so far
It’s hard for someone who ends up in the gym on a daily basis, like myself, to explain to others the principles behind not overtraining. I’m glad to see that someone has finally touched on the topic. Nice work!