I think that it can happen. I also think people are undertrained, ignorant and lazy. I believe if you train smart you really shouldn’t have to worry about that happening often. I’m making this one to get it out the Max thread and I’m interested in people’s opinions.
I like what John Broz said about this.
Paul Carter and Jamie Lewis talked about this in their most recent podcast. Paul said that he found an article saying that most CNS burnout symptoms are related to glycogen and ATP depletion, among other physical aspects. I’ll see if I can find said article.
I just don’t get how your CNS can “burnout”. Are you running out of neurotransmitters or something? Are your muscle fibers not receiving action potentials? CNS burnout seems more like broscience than anything else to me.
[quote]HatersGunaHate wrote:
I like what John Broz said about this.[/quote]
Just remember they don’t do things like deadlift or practice grinding reps.
I think that people get caught up in the terminology. Can your CNS “Burn out”? I have no fucking idea. I don’t know shit about the central nervous system.
BUT i think it’s pretty obvious that if you squat/deadlift, or even bench to a max one day, you PROBABLY aren’t going to be able to do that quite as well the next day.
AND it’s obvious from people like Broz lifters and bulgarians, that even if it is not easy to lift heavy as fuck day in and day out, you CAN train yourself to cope with those demands and still lift very well and very heavy, even if you are fatigued.
Bottom line for me is, don’t use “CNS burnout” as an excuse for lifting shittily, because there are tons of people who train hard and heavy every day without letting that phrase stop them. But use your common sense - if you’re fatigued, you’re more likely to have a rough day. And we all know proper recovery is important. It’s a balancing act.
It might be true to some extent but “burnout” is the wrong word for it. That word implies it went from 100 to 0% when in reality it might have gone from 100 to 99%.
I only have my personal experiences.
Last Sunday, after a meet, which I gave myself 5 days off leading up to, i hit 2 new PRs at the meet. I was just so damn tired and lethargic the start of this week. A shit load more food than I normally would eat and a few more hours extra sleep (ontop of the 9h I usually get), 3 days later I was feeling alright again.
It was only a temporary thing for me, but I felt pretty raggedy. I didn’t try lifting heavy during those days, so I can’t comment if I was actually weaker or not, but I felt poor enough to not try.
How can this even be a question? Of course it exists. I can’t be bothered to actually argue about this.
It would be sweet if it didn’t though.
ps: Btw, for those who want to bring John Broz’s “thoughts” into this, he never said that it doesn’t exist.
Has any neurologist ever made mention of the effects of physical activity on the energy levels of the CNS?
It’s not CNS “burnout” it’s just mental fatigue. Everyone gets it, even people that don’t lift.
And what John Broz said is correct to some extent. However, unlike his garbage man analogy, lifters have to increase loads as progress continues. A garbage man can do the same routine for a decade, but you won’t be doing the same loads 10 years from now.
You could call it fatigue, cns burnout, overtraining, underrecovering etc… Either way there is definitely diminished returns after a certain point of intensity/duration/frequency. I think the biggest obstacle to the average lifter’s progress isn’t not lifting hard enough, but not lifting smart enough. Like others have said it is a delicate balance.
I agree that it can exist somewhat, but not to how some people describe it. One of my biggest hates for a lot of today’s programs are a deload once a month. In my experience ,depending on how demanding my job is, I need one every 10-12weeks.
Yes it exists, you can call it what you want but it is related to CNS activity. Nerves are like any other tissues, they get tired and they need to regenerate/heal/rejuvenate. The leading theory for why we sleep is that we need to take our system off line and allow it to heal and it has to be shut down for that to take place (similar to the idea that you don’t work on a train rail while the train is running on it, you shut the track down to repair it).
Examples of this abound in the fitness world. Why doesn’t Usain Bolt and literally every other sprinter that is good in the olympics just run flat out in the 100M dash each time? Physically a 100M race is not very demanding. Neither is maxing out. But for those well trained people who can target the vast majority of their system and channel it into a single burst, it is very draining. Great lifters tell those all of the time to save their big lifts for the meet, you just can’t do it all the time. Louie says continued training at 90% in the same exercise for 4+ weeks will cause CNS fatigue. Zatiorsky talks about this extensively in his fitness/fatigue theory. This is a big problem with chronic overtraining as opposed to acute overtraining. It takes much more to overtrain the CNS but once it happens it takes much longer for it to recover. I know personally when I pulled 700 the idea of doing that lift again heavy for literally a month or two was just draining, I wasn’t up for it. That had been a bucket list item and I dumped everything I had into that lift.
You can overtrain all of your tissues (ie give them more stimulus than they can adapt to at the moment) including your nervous tissue
There was a time when I was running a weird Starting Strength routine with DL in place of all the squats cause I had a knee injury. After a few weeks my DL had stalled, and I started missing reps and going down in reps. But the weirdest part was that after training my muscles did not feel tired, but instead felt weak and ‘frazzled’.
I would go play pool shortly after training on those days and found that I had trouble keeping my hands and legs steady. It definitely was not a muscular fatigue; no DOMS and the weights did not even feel that bad. It felt much more like what I imagine CNS fatigue would be.
[quote]ishinator wrote:
Has any neurologist ever made mention of the effects of physical activity on the energy levels of the CNS?[/quote]
I am an electroneurodiagnostic technologist and had never heard of this concept until i began powerlifting. So, i spoke to the only person i know who knows more about neurophysiology than i do, Richard Lee, MD,FAAN,FAANEM. We deliberated the possibilities for about an hour and decisively concluded that it was broscience. There is no physiology behind the idea, it’s just some phrase that people came up with to describe when they feel weak and worn out.
[quote]Loftearmen wrote:
[quote]ishinator wrote:
Has any neurologist ever made mention of the effects of physical activity on the energy levels of the CNS?[/quote]
I am an electroneurodiagnostic technologist and had never heard of this concept until i began powerlifting. So, i spoke to the only person i know who knows more about neurophysiology than i do, Richard Lee, MD,FAAN,FAANEM. We deliberated the possibilities for about an hour and decisively concluded that it was broscience. There is no physiology behind the idea, it’s just some phrase that people came up with to describe when they feel weak and worn out. [/quote]
nice
Certainly, fatigue as a result of cumulative intense effort does occur. I am not sure ascribing it as ‘CNS burnout’ is necessarily correct. How would one determine, if this were a muscular, endocrinological, neuromuscular, neurologic phenonomenon, or a combination? I am not sure if anyone has studied this beyond hypothetical pontification.
Beefcake MD-PhD
Here are 2 pretty well researched articles that talk about this concept:
Also all of the HRV training information that has come out lately is based around this idea that one will be more or less ready to train based primarily on how the nervous system is functioning
[quote]Tim Henriques wrote:
Here are 2 pretty well researched articles that talk about this concept:
Also all of the HRV training information that has come out lately is based around this idea that one will be more or less ready to train based primarily on how the nervous system is functioning[/quote]
also nice
[quote]Tim Henriques wrote:
Here are 2 pretty well researched articles that talk about this concept:
Also all of the HRV training information that has come out lately is based around this idea that one will be more or less ready to train based primarily on how the nervous system is functioning[/quote]
I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting for something like these links.