The Infonian

Almost anyone that’s picked up a set of weights has or will experience symptoms of over-training at one point in there muscle building program. Over-training can lead to serious injury, chronic fatigue, and even muscle loss.

Over-training is very common amongst athletes and particularly bodybuilders, since they figure that training as much as possible is the fastest way to massive muscle gains.

This couldn’t be any further from the truth however…

Training too much, or at too high of an intensity will lead to over-training.

Now this doesn’t mean you don’t have to put plenty of effort in to see some decent results… Whether you are a bodybuilder, athlete, or just someone that wants to add some additional mass to your frame, you need to train hard and be consistent-that’s a given. In order to get the most out of your genetics, you have to progressively overload the muscles by increasing the weight and / or intensity of each weight training workout.

The problem is however, that many of us increase the intensity of our workouts or get insufficient amounts of rest, or even worse, a combination of both. The trick is finding the right balance between workout volume and intensity, and rest and recovery. And that is exactly what I’ll cover in this article.
The Effects of Over-Training on Bodybuilders

First, let’s take a look at some of the effects of over-training and how one can prevent over-training from happening in the first place.

The Effects of Over-training on the Nervous System

Over-training effects both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems in the following negative ways:

If you are experiencing more than one of the symptoms outlined above, you may be in a state of over-training, and should evaluate your routine as soon as possible.

The Effects of Over-training on Hormone Levels

Many studies have indicated that over-training negatively effects the levels of hormones, as well as the hormone response in the body.  Since hormones play such an important role in the muscle building process, this can have a detrimental effect on your training progress.

Over-training has been show to:

The Effects of Over-training on the Immune System

perhaps one of the most alarming repercussions of over-training is it’s negative impact on the immune system-you’re bodies first defense against harmful viruses and bacteria.

Over-training can drastically decrease the levels of antibodies and lymphocytes in your body, making you much more susceptible to illness.  Simply put, this means that if you are in a state of over-training, you are much more likely to get sick.  Since you will have to skip workouts while you are sick, your muscle building progress will slow considerably.

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The Effects of Over-training on the Metabolic System

Here is a list of how over-training can  effect the metabolic system.  These symptoms are the ones that are most commonly discussed, and are ones we can’t ignore:

Is it Worse to Over-Train With Cardio or Weight Training?

Any form of over-training is a bad thing, however, I’ve personally experienced both types of over-training and can honestly say that over-training in the weight room is much worse, and much more prevalent than over-training through cardiovascular training.

Here are some of the reasons why:

How do I Determine if I’m Over-training?

Determining if you’re currently over-training is fairly simple.   If you’re in tune with your body, you can often see the signs of over-training before they get serious.  If you are losing interest in workouts, are having trouble sleeping, and feel weak and irritable, you may be in a state of over-training and should take a week or more off.

If you are experiencing two or more of the symptoms outlined earlier in the article, this should raise a red flag.

Another variable you can use to determine if you are over-training is by tracking the performance of your workouts.

Has your physical performance improved compared to your last workout?

For example, let’s say last workout you were able to perform 8 pull-ups using your body-weight, but were only able to perform 6 pull-ups the following week.  This means that you have not “out done” your previous workout, have not fully recovered, and therefore are likely over-training.  You nave to re-asses your program and make modifications so that you see progress every workout.

How Can I Prevent Over-training?

n order to avoid over-training, you need to take a multi-facited approach.  Determining the correct training volume and intensity, eating the right foods, and getting the right amount of rest and recovery must all be taken in to consideration.  Now let’s take a look at each of those factors in more detail.

Correct Training Volume

Determining the correct training volume can be difficult, especially when you are first starting out.  You have to determine how much weight to lift, how many repetitions and set to perform for every single workout.

You need to use your own judgment in this case, based on your recovery ability and your recovery methods.  Remember that the goal is that you improve every single workout, and if this isn’t happening, you have to decrease the intensity of your workouts.

This is where many people go wrong though.  You begin your workout and realize that you have not fully recovered.  You can either continue to train at a lower intensity than the previous workout, or skip the workout entirely.

As hard as it may be, skipping the workout is the right way to go.  Just turn around and go home!  Your body is telling you that it needs more rest, and you must listen to it!

There is no point in training at a lower intensity, further breaking down the muscle tissue.   By doing this you will increase your risk of injury, and make it harder for your body to fully recovery for your next training session

Proper Nutrition

Your diet plays a huge role in your muscle building program.  It helps regulate hormone levels, provides energy, and provides the raw building blocks that are used to create new tissue.

Here are some dietary recommendations that will limit the chance of over-training:

• Do not skip breakfast.  This is one of the most important meals of the day.  Skipping breakfast is very catabolic, and can promote muscle loss.
• Never let yourself get hungry.  If you’re trying to build muscle mass, you have to constantly feed your body quality foods so that it never has the chance catabolize muscle tissue.
• Unless you are trying to build muscle and lose fat, make sure you have eaten prior to your training session and are not hungry.
• Have the largest meal of the day within an hour after your workout.  Do this every single workout!
• Consider taking proven supplements like creatine, and antioxidants to increase performance and fight free radicals.
• Eat every 2-3 hours to ensure that your body remains in an anabolic state.
• Keep glycogen levels at full capacity to inhibit muscle tissue breakdown.

Rest & Recovery

Rest and recovery is essential when it comes to avoiding over-training.  Make sure that you get at least 7 hours of sleep each night, and that you are on a consistent schedule.  As for recovery time, it’s important that you have days off between weight training workouts.  Try to have one rest day between weight training workouts, and never train the same muscle groups on consecutive days.

On Friday afternoon after you leave work, you probably think about going out and having a few drinks with friends to relax and wind down. Even though you may think you deserve to go out and have a few drinks, there are some things that you should certainly keep in mind.

Like any other day, tomorrow is going to be a day for exercise, and since you are exercising on a regular basis, a few drinks of alcohol won’t really hurt anything, right? Before you decide to rush out to the local bar, there are a few things below that you should think about before you make your choice about going out to drink some alcohol.

Research has proven that even small amounts of alcohol with increase muscular endurance and the output of strength, although these types of benefits are very short lived. After 20 minutes or so, the problems will begin to surface. All of the negative side effects associated with alcohol will easily outweigh any possible benefits that it can have. No matter how you look at it, alcohol is a poison that can really harm your body if you aren’t careful.

The negative side of alcohol can reduce your strength, endurance, aerobic capability, recovery time, ability to metabolize fat, and even your muscle growth as well. Alcohol will also have an effect on your nervous system and brain. If you use it long term, you can cause severe deterioration of your central nervous system. Even with short term use, nerve muscle interaction can be reduced which will result in a loss of strength.

Once alcohol reaches the blood cells, it can and probably will damage them. With alcohol users, inflammation of the muscle cells is a very common thing. Over periods of time, some of these cells that have been damaged can die which will result in less functional muscle contractions. Drinking alcohol will also leave you with more soreness of your muscles after you exercise, which means that it will take you a lot longer to recuperate.

Alcohol will also have many different effects on your heart and circulatory system as well. When you drink any type of alcohol, you may begin to see a reduction in your endurance capabilities. Anytime you drink, your heat loss will increase, due to the alcohol simulating your blood vessels to dilate. The loss in heat can cause your muscles to become quite cold, therefore become slower and weaker during your muscle contractions.

Drinking alcohol can also lead to digestive and nutrition problems as well. Alcohol cause a release of insulin that will increase the metabolism of glycogen, which spares fat and makes the loss of fat very hard. Due to alcohol interfering with the absorption of several key nutrients, you can also become anemic and deficient with B type vitamins.

Because your liver is the organ that detoxifies alcohol, the more you drink, the harder your liver has to work. The extra stress alcohol places on your liver can cause serious damage and even destroy some of your liver cells.

Since alcohol is diuretic, drinking large amounts can put a lot of stress on your kidneys as well. During diuretic action, the hormones are secreted. This can lead to heightened water retention and no one who exercises will want this to happen.

Author: Robert Bell

I use to be a gym rat, go to the gym and lift weights like everybody else In the beginning I made some advances. After a while, those advances stopped happening. And who isn’t motivated by the feeling of making progress?

As if by luck, I found some information on bodyweight exercises. You remember those exercises, from the physical education days? So when I started doing the bodyweight exercises, I started to feel like I was making progress again.

And then I started doing exercises with very light weight, not iron pumping exercises, but exercises that challenged me in ways like no other. And sometimes I only used as little as five pounds. I guess you could also classify these as bodyweight exercises.

Then I added to my ever-increasing routine, I started using kettlebells and balance exercises with the Swiss ball. I now have more routines than I know what to do with. I don’t think I’ll ever get bored again. Is there anything worse than dragging your butt to the gym not psyched for your workout?

When it’s time to workout, I can’t wait. Just some of the variety of exercise I’ve grown accustomed to:

1. Hindu pushups

2. Leg swings

3. Running on the mini-trampoline

4. Feet on stability ball pushups

5. Pushups, feet on stability ball, hands on balance disks

I have literally hundreds of exercises in my arsenal that I can do. There’s no wonder that I’m feeling great and in the best shape of my life. When you add variety back to your workouts, you go a long way in making a commitment to yourself to get in great shape again.

Believe it or not, everything I’ve found on the internet has been free or low cost. I never spent a lot of money, like those ridiculous infomercials. Ok, maybe I did once, but I learned my lesson.

Whenever I feel like I need more variety in my workouts again, I usually pick up another book out there on the web. Before you know it, I’m off and running again. This approach may not be for everyone, some guys like hanging around the gym. But not me!

I head down to my basement, a Swiss ball, my kettlebells, my skip-rope and I have a better workout facility than any gym can provide. And believe me, it’s at one one-hundredth of the cost. I guess you could say I’ve found the Holy Grail when it comes to staying in shape.

Author: Robert Bell

For some bodybuilders, achieving the perfect state of pump can best be described as being what nirvana is to a Buddhist. It’s everything they strive for when working out. So it’s no wonder that some of the world’s most famous bodybuilders-including Arnold Schwarzenegger-have described the pump as, “the greatest feeling you can get in the gym.”

Depending on who you talk to, you’re likely to get different opinions about the importance of the pump. For some guys, it’s kind of the “holy grail” of bodybuilding, but there are plenty of other bodybuilders who don’t pay much attention to it at all.

The guys on the “pro pump” side say that a good pump is what all bodybuilders should strive to achieve when they train. From their point of view, the pump signifies that you’re training with sufficient intensity.

They also say that achieving a good pump during a workout means that the systems are functioning properly and that you are delivering lots of nutrient-rich blood to the muscles, which in turn indicates that they are primed for growth. Furthermore, they say that when a bodybuilder is able to achieve a good pump quickly, it is a clear signal that his body is in an anabolic state, ready to grow.

Without getting too deep into the whole science of things, the pump is the result of both sarcoplasmic and mitochondrial hypertrophy, both of which generally occur at the highest levels through workouts that focus on medium or high rep sets. These types of hypertrophy result in an increase in the volume of the muscle, which gives the appearance of the pump. The downside to this is that this type of growth is temporary-it only lasts a short while and there is also no real increase in strength gains here either. This type of training is sometimes referred to as “form over function,” because while they may look good, the muscles are not nearly as strong as they appear.

Real muscle growth occurs through myofibrillar hypertrophy, which is the result of heavy training (heavy weight, lower reps). Myofibrillar hypertrophy is also the type of growth that brings about the big strength gains. The guys who focus on this type of hypertrophy are not only big, but they’re strong too. This is where you really get the explosive strength, but this type of hypertrophy does not result in much of a “pump.”

Which brings me to point of view of the guys who say that the pump isn’t all that it’s made out up to be. These are the guys who tend to focus not just on size but on strength as well. In other words, they don’t want to just look powerful, they want to be powerful too. When training, these guys focus on progressive overload and intensity, doing fewer reps with maximum weight.

In the gym, you’ll see them doing compound exercises like squats and deadlifts with heavy weight, not doing rep after rep of leg extensions with a light weight.

What you do is going to depend on what you want to achieve. One point of view isn’t right and the other wrong-they each just lead to different results. The decision is going to come down to a personal preference on your part. I will give you a tip though-you can have the best of both worlds. One way is to mix up your workouts, initially focus on high weight/low reps to get the myofibrillar hypertrophy going, and then afterwards move on to lower weight/higher rep sets to give you the pump. This will ensure that not only are your muscles primed for growth but they’ll get bigger and st

ronger too.

Author: Mike Westerdal