Skip to main content

Overtraining Doesn't Exist

Over at the "Iron Samurai" (see my "links" section), Nick Horton has a post that I wish I would have written myself.  It's entitled "Overtraining Doesn't Exist."

 I imagine the title alone would enflame many of your H.I.T. pundits or others who may think that Mike Mentzer was actually on to something.

 Here's a portion of the article:



I’m going to say something many people in the fitness industry will get pissed at me for. But I believe it to be true (within reason).
OVERTRAINING DOESN’T EXIST
That’s bullshit, of course. Overtraining is a medical syndrome that some people do get themselves into. But… it is EXTREMELY rare, and YOU have never had it.
I want you to avoid ANY thought of overtraining. In all of the years I have been coaching, I have not EVER overtrained a single athlete. Ever.
  • CNS fatigue is not overtraining.
  • Feeling tired is not overtraining.
  • A loss of appetite is not overtraining.
  • Being massively sore is not overtraining.
  • Watching your numbers and performance fall is not overtraining.
All of that is part of the adaptation process. You are SUPPOSED to feel like you are getting your ass kicked during a loading phase. If you didn’t, you weren’t loading hard enough.
Lifters always come up to me saying that they have been feeling tired and sluggish, and they wonder if it is time for a deload/taper. My answer is nearly always NO.
Why? Because feeling like shit is part of the point.
You don’t get stronger by only doing light weights that feel easy, do you? Of course not. You force your body to deal with weight that is actually TOO heavy to do comfortably to FORCE the issue. That’s what progressive resistance is all about.
Loading and deloading are simply applying those progressive resistance principles on a grander scale. A well-designed loading phase FORCES your body to adapt to a stressful situation. Without a massive amount of stress you don’t get to have massive gains. Sorry, that is just reality.
Slow gains are very common in the gym in large part because people don’t do enough work. My programs produce infamously fast gains because I make people do more. It’s not magic, it’s nothing special, it is just focusing in on the ultra basics in a big way.
Do work, son.
And here's a link to the full article:
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Feel free to leave us some feedback on the article or any topics you would like us to cover in the future! Much Appreciated!

Popular posts from this blog

Marvin Eder’s Mass-Building Methods

  The Many and Varied Mass-Building Methods of Power Bodybuilding’s G.O.A.T. Eder as he appeared in my article "Full Body Workouts" for IronMan  magazine.      In many ways, the essay you are now reading is the one that has had the “longest time coming.”  I have no clue why it has taken me this long to write an article specifically on Marvin Eder, especially considering the fact that I have long considered him the greatest bodybuilder cum strength athlete of all friggin’ time .  In fact, over 20 years ago, I wrote this in the pages of IronMan magazine: In my opinion, the greatest all-around bodybuilder, powerlifter and strength athlete ever to walk the planet, Eder had 19-inch arms at a bodyweight of 198. He could bench 510, squat 550 for 10 reps and do a barbell press with 365. He was reported to have achieved the amazing feat of cranking out 1,000 dips in only 17 minutes. Imagine doing a dip a second for 17 minutes. As Gene Mozee once put ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lift Big, Eat Big, Rest Big, Grow Big

An Old-School Powerbuilding Regimen from the Golden Age Powerlifter Hugh Cassidy      The other day, a reader suggested that I write an article on Hugh Cassidy, a legendary powerlifter from the ‘70s.  It reminded me of something I had forgotten.  A few years ago, I had made some notes on Cassidy, with the intent of turning those notes into an article.  After reading the comment, I scoured through several notebooks filled with various ideas—I probably have a dozen or so notebooks crammed full of my thoughts for articles—until I found the page of scribblings I had made on Cassidy.  After reading over what I had written in ‘23, I have no idea why I didn’t write an essay on Cassidy back then.  Perhaps it was too similar to other articles I had written at that time. Usually, when I let something fall to the wayside, that’s a possible reason.  Sometimes, I simply lose interest in an article.  Oh, well.  After reading over my not...
3 comments
Read more

The 30-Rep Program for Dragon Door

     It is, apparently, the end of an era as I just discovered that Dragon Door has shut down. Dragon Door, if you're not familiar, was the place where Pavel Tsatsouline pretty much got his start. They were the OG kettlebell company, publishing books, DVDs, and selling equipment for the new "functional fitness" craze. They also published a handful of my articles over the years. If I'm not mistaken - you can't access their articles anymore, so I'm not entirely sure - I wrote my first article for them sometime in 2008. So, since they are no more, I thought, over the next several weeks, I would re-post those articles here on my blog.      The most recent article that I wrote for them was The 30-Rep Program. When I have referenced that program in essays here on the blog, I have often inserted a link to that article, and since that link is no longer valid, I thought it would be the best article to start with.      I have long been a fan of ...
3 comments
Read more