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...
Use This Training Concept for Better Athletic Performance and/or New Gains in Size and Strength In my article The Fighter’s Physique , I mentioned the benefit of “weaving” together one’s strength training with one’s fighting art in the same session. While proper strength training improves athletic performance, martial arts or otherwise, it will have even more benefits when both the strength training and the sport one competes in are performed simultaneously. This concept is nothing new. The idea was originally “created” by German strength coach Peter Tschiene in the 1980s, though I have a feeling that other athletes going back decades—or perhaps even centuries—were already using the method, even if Tschiene coined the term “mixed training” and was the first to widely promote it. Monks at the Shaolin Temple were combining resistance training—bodyweight calisthenics, isometric holds, and lifting stone locks (ca...