How to Improve and Increase Your Work Capacity for Better, More Consistent Gains in Size and Strength There are several problems that I see in modern-day training and among modern lifters. I probably rail against them quite a bit in my writings, but that’s only because I want to see lifters get better and achieve their training goals. One of the major issues in today’s training world is that gym-goers think a workout or training program is “good” if it produces fatigue, makes them tired, or leaves them exhausted at the end of a training session. That might be good, at times, and is even necessary periodically for increasing one’s work capacity, the very thing that we’re going to discuss here. Because another major problem is that modern lifters—both strength athletes and bodybuilders—rarely increase their work capacity, or their ability to handle greater and greater workloads in their training. Without the ability to handle he...
How and Why Planned “Overtraining” is a Key to More Size and Strength At some point, “overtraining” became a bad word in the world of strength training and muscle building. Basically, or so the thinking goes, one of the keys to making continuous progress is ensuring that you never overtrain. Many of the greatest strength athletes, not to mention strength coaches, of all time, however, thought that not only is overtraining not bad, but that it’s also a necessity once the lifter reaches a certain level. My original strength mentor was the late and great strength coach Bill Starr. Starr wrote several articles on the need for overtraining. He believed that, in order to make continuous progress, you must do “too much” for a certain period of time—the so-called “overtraining” period—before backing off after that. It was during this “de-load” period when the athlete makes the most gains, but those gain...