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Trainer of Champions - November 2004 |
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Written by Charles Glass
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Thursday, 26 April 2007 |
Is there anything special you can do to speed up recovery after a brutally intense workout? Immediately after? The next day? I'm having a
problem with overtraining even though I've reduced my training. At one point I was doing as much as 30 to 40 sets per body part, but I have cut that down to 20 to 25, depending on how much energy I have that day. (Most days it's actually a struggle to get through 20 sets without getting exhausted). I've been told to take an entire week off, but it seems like the more days I'm away from the gym, the worse I feel. Is there a way to keep my two on/one off split and keep from overtraining?
You were wise to cut back on the volume of training, but I think you need to cut back even more. There are some pro bodybuilders who thrive on 20 or more sets per body part, but most of the ones I work with don't do more than 12. Overtraining is probably the most common reason bodybuilders don't make gains, and it's kind of ironic. Here you are all excited about trying to get big as fast as you can, and you go and do the very thing that will make that almost impossible- tax your muscles and nervous system with more exercise than it can recover and grow from by the time you train them again. It's not uncommon for a young enthusiastic guy to do six different exercises per body part for four work sets each. That must be pretty close to what you're doing right now. But it's overkill. You have to really put some thought into designing your workouts so you aren't being redundant and basically repeating movements. For instance, here's a typical chest workout I have seen done by over-eager lifters:
Incline dumbbell press 4 sets of 8-12 reps
Incline Smith machine press 4 sets of 8-12 reps
Flat bench press 4 sets of 8-12 reps
Decline bench press 4 sets of 8-12 reps
Pec deck 4 sets of 12-15 reps
Cable crossovers 4 sets of 12-15 reps
Now, quickly, tell me what's wrong with the above routine? There is a lot of repetition, meaning you're doing the same thing over and over. I am very much a believer in working muscles from different angles to stimulate growth. But- and this is critical- I don't repeat the same angles within the same workout. Why would you do two different incline presses? They both work the upper chest in the same way. And you should know that flat presses and decline presses both hit the middle and lower pecs, so you wouldn't want to do both of those in the same session, either. Finally, flye movements are also similar to each other. If anything, you could do one standard flye motion like a pec deck or a flat flye, and then a couple of additional sets on an incline.
In general, however, you'd be conserving your limited energy for training, as well as allowing for recovery with the limited recovery ability your body has, by honing that workout down to three exercises for four work sets each. With larger muscle groups like back and legs, you may want to do a little bit more, but not a whole lot. Sixteen sets for back would be the upper limit (legs are a different story, which I address in the next question).
Now that we have addressed overtraining issues, let's get into recovery and what you can do to enhance it. You should know that many of the pro bodybuilders who are able to recover while training with 20-30 sets per body part and three to six consecutive days of training before a day off are being assisted by anabolic steroids. Please do not take this as my recommending to you that you go out and start using steroids! I am merely pointing out the fact that steroids allow athletes to recover faster and more effectively from their training, so that you don't assume you should be training the same exact way they do in terms of volume and frequency.
Most guys who have been around a little while understand this, but newcomers to bodybuilding aren't always aware of it. The pros also often take afternoon naps to speed up the recovery process, which you may or may not have the luxury of doing. If you can sneak little naps in here and there, even if they are only for 10 to 20 minutes, this will help. Take it from me, a guy who often doesn't get more than five hours of sleep a night, every little bit of extra rest you can grab can only be a good thing!
Finally, you can get a jumpstart on your recovery by having a shake immediately following your workout. A lot of guys these days like to have whey protein, simple carbs and L-glutamine as a post-workout "recovery cocktail." My personal favorite is Cell-Tech by MuscleTech. For me, getting the Creatine and simple carbs right back into the muscles is the main thing. About a half hour after that I'll have a solid meal, something like chicken breast and rice. After that I can almost feel all the Amino Acids and glycogen filling up my muscles again, and my energy levels start coming back to normal.
So be sure you implement that entire three-pronged attack to get your body recovering faster and more completely: Pare down the training volume, get as much rest outside the gym as you can and don't forget the nutritional support post-workout to replenish what the training took away. Put all three into motion and I don't think you'll have too many problems with overtraining again.
I'm making some good gains lately, having put on 20 pounds in the last year. Although I weigh 233 pounds at 5-8, most of it is on my upper body. I recently did an incline press of 405 and a military press of 275 and I have a 52-inch chest and 20-inch arms, just to give you an idea. My question is, how do I bring up my lower half? My legs are strong. I can squat 500 pounds for a deep rep, no problem, but they're not as dense as they used to be some years ago when I was smaller. I had a much bigger sweep, probably due to the leg extensions of 329 pounds I used to get up. My leg training is basically powerlifting style; squats for sets of one to three reps are pretty much all I've been doing for them. I just need some help with adding lower body size.
I can tell you one thing. If you keep training your legs the way you have been, they will never get much bigger than they are now, even if you manage to get your one-rep max on the squat up to 600 pounds or more. If you're trying to look like a bodybuilder, you shouldn't be training like a powerlifter. Sets of one to three reps will build strength, no doubt about it, but they do not cause a growth response in the muscle. In fact, for the lower body, even sets in the range of eight to 10 reps don't produce results very often.
I have found, and many thousands of other bodybuilders and personal trainers have found also, that legs respond much better to higher reps. Furthermore, they seem to thrive on volume training, meaning plenty of sets and reps. I have gone on record in print in this very column before saying that I think it's almost impossible to do too much for them in any one workout. You could argue that 100 sets would constitute overtraining, but I have yet to meet anyone who could complete that many sets, working hard mind you, in one workout anyway.
My most important recommendation to you is to stop worrying so much about using as much weight as you can, and instead start trying to feel your legs working. Squatting 500 pounds for a single rep is very hard to do, but honestly, you can't tell me you're able to squeeze the quads and get a pump and burn with that one rep; am I right? Try squatting just 225 for 20-25 nice, slow reps, pausing a little bit at the bottom and feeling the stretch, then slowly driving up with purely the force of your quadriceps. It's less than half the weight you've been squatting, but I bet you 100 bucks you'll feel it in your legs 10 times more than you did the maximum rep with five plates.
Another thing you may not be doing is working your legs from multiple angles. I harp on this because I truly believe it's a major key to muscle growth. You mentioned that you used to do leg extensions and you no longer do them. You say that basically all you're doing for legs is squatting. While squats are an excellent exercise and it's important to do them, they do not provide the multi-angular workout that produces big legs. You also didn't mention anything about hamstring training. With all that in mind, I have taken the liberty of designing a new leg workout for you that I feel will make a tremendous difference right away. Start doing this now and write back to me in three months. I fully expect to hear that your legs have started growing faster than you ever thought they could.
Leg extensions 4 sets of 20, 20, 15, 12 reps
Squats 4 sets of 15-20 reps
Leg press 3 sets of 20-25 reps
Stiff-leg deadlift 3 sets of 12-15 reps
Lying leg curl 4 sets of 12-15 reps
I am currently 180 pounds at 5-11. I am trying to burn the last bit of fat off my body, but I want to get back up to 190. How can I do this without gaining fat? I'm currently jumping rope in the morning six days a week.
Building muscle while losing fat is not an easy task, but it can be done. First off, let's address your cardio. Jumping rope is a great form of cardiovascular exercise, but with any type of cardio you do, you must make sure you keep your heart rate in the target range (170 minus your age) for at least 20 minutes to see fat loss results. Heart rate monitors are sold inexpensively at any sporting goods store. You could also try using other forms of cardio. I like fast walking on a treadmill, set on an angle. It's easy on the knees and ankles and gets your heart rate right up there.
As for your diet, you need to focus on eating enough protein. I suggest 1.5 to two grams per pound of bodyweight every day, a combination of solid food and protein shakes. You need to pay close attention to your carbohydrate intake. Not only should they mainly come from low-glycemic sources like yams, brown rice and oatmeal, but you need to find the right balance where you are eating just enough to support muscle gain without consuming an excess that will be stored as body fat. To accomplish this, you will have to keep a food diary for a while. Start with one gram of carbohydrates per pound of bodyweight and begin gauging your progress. If you're losing fat, but also either just maintaining muscle or worse, losing muscle, you need to start eating a bit more carbs. If, instead, you're gaining muscle, but also either stuck at the same body fat percentage or it's actually getting higher, you need to reduce your carb intake. It takes a little bit of patience and you have to be diligent with your record-keeping for this to work, but the end results will make it all worthwhile.
My problem is a little embarrassing. I have really bad gas and it's even worse when I'm in the gym. Certain times, like when I'm doing squats or leg presses or running on the elliptical trainer, it's almost impossible to keep from letting loose. If nobody is around I used to just do that, but people seemed to always end up coming around the area and I wanted to crawl under a rock I was so ashamed. Anyway, I did see my doctor about this and he quizzed me about my diet. He said it's because of how often I eat, plus some things I eat, like broccoli and oatmeal, that I feel are essentials for a bodybuilder. I'm not about to cut back to eating three times a day like average people and have an average body. And finally, I have tried Gas-X pills but they didn't do much. Any suggestions would be welcomed and I appreciate you taking this seriously. My friends laugh about it, but it's not funny to me.
I guess there aren't too many bodybuilders in your gym, because let me tell you- your problem is one of the most common in the sport. If you have ever walked through Gold's Gym in Venice during morning or evening rush hour when the place is packed, it can be deadly. You'll be walking along and all of a sudden, wham! You're right in the middle of an invisible, foul cloud of stink that someone couldn't contain. The smart thing to do is to keep walking, not just to escape the horrible aroma, but so you don't get blamed for it. And if you ever talk to the wife or girlfriend of a bodybuilder, they all share similar "war stories" of having to put up with seemingly endless gas, particularly at bedtime. (Sometimes I think these poor women should form a support group).
Your doctor hit it right on the head. As bodybuilders, we do eat a lot more frequently than the average person and we do consume a lot more fiber. The frequent meals help us carry more muscle and less fat than you could with the standard three square meals a day. And the high-fiber diet we follow is a great thing in terms of preventing maladies like arteriosclerosis and colon cancer, but the unfortunate side effect is uncontrollable bloating and gas due to the indigestible nature of cellulose, as found in raw vegetables, oatmeal and rice husks.
You can try spacing your meals just a little further apart, for one thing. Instead of eating every two hours, try stretching that out to two and a half. Also, try steaming your broccoli. Trust me, I know all about how broccoli causes gas. The stuff just kills me. But steaming it seems to blunt that gas production a bit over eating it raw and crunchy. Finally, go to your local GNC or health food store and pick up some digestive enzymes. I found these to be very helpful in assisting your body in breaking the food down more completely and cutting down on the gas.
My last suggestion is to not train too close to eating. If you can have your pre-training meal three hours before your workout and then just have something like half a protein bar a half-hour before to hold you over, you should notice you don't have as much gas building up during the workout. It's kind of a trade-off, but which would you prefer: a few hunger pangs, or the cramping pains associated with trying to hold in a large volume of gas trying to exit your colon? You sound like a sincere young guy, so I wish you the best of luck.
I have always heard you should do your aerobic exercise first thing in the morning on an empty stomach for maximum fat burning. What about weight training first thing in the morning? Wouldn't this maximize the fat- burning effects of lifting weights as well? I seem to remember when I was a teenager and my friend bought the Cybergenics kit, he had to work out early in the morning without eating first. He got pretty cut, but not much bigger.
Let's make this as clear-cut as we can. You lift weights to get bigger and/or stronger and you do cardio to lose fat. Why are you worried about trying to burn fat while you're training with weights? I don't think it's a good idea to do your weight training on an empty stomach, and here's why. The muscular contractions during training are fueled by muscle glycogen and they also deplete Amino Acids from the muscles. Glycogen is what the body converts glucose into and then stores to use as this fuel. A certain amount would be stored from the night before if you had eaten carbs, but that would be burned up pretty quickly, at which point your workout would fizzle out as you began to feel weak and tired.
So you would want to eat some carbs before your weight training workout. Carbs are protein-sparing, but to be on the safe side and prevent your muscles from feeding on their own Amino Acids (putting you in a catabolic, or muscle-wasting, state), you would also want to eat some protein. An ideal breakfast would be egg whites and oatmeal, about an hour and a half to two hours before your workout with the weights. If you need to be at the gym a little quicker than that due to your daily schedule, try oatmeal and a serving of whey protein.
I also want to mention that since you're burning up that stored glycogen when you weight train, immediately following your weight workout is an ideal time to do your cardio. Most of my clients do their weight training, then hit the treadmill so they can burn fat. A lot of them have cardio machines at home, so they will do one session on an empty stomach when they wake up, then another session later on after their weight training. And as you probably know, my clients are some of the leanest and most muscular specimens you will ever see. But they are all well aware that weight training and cardio are two different activities geared toward different outcomes- building muscle and losing fat, respectively. You wouldn't go running on a treadmill to build bigger arms, so don't go doing curls trying to lose body fat.
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