I started lifting again, and I’m using Ian King’s workouts from The Book of Muscle. I am experiencing some frustration and confusion.
First the confusion: on Stage 2 weeks 8-10 Workout A, there are several exercises where the qty. of reps says “max”. Does this mean 1 rep max?
Now the frustration: on page 230, they outline the workout duration, which ranges anywhere from 20 min. in week 1 to 50 min. in week 6. Even with just pushing a pencil, the number of exercises times the seconds that it’s supposed to take to perform them, plus the rests in between, you’re over the alotted time. I’ve read countless times how overtraining is bad, and I believe Ian King has said it’s ideal to keep a workout to within an hour. I"m at 45 minutes for 1 circuit, but when I have to progress to 2 and 3 circuits, I am working out for 1.5-2 hours or more. What am I supposed to do without overtraining, and still stay on the program??
I don’t have that book, so it’s difficult to follow some of the technicalities of your question, but I have some general suggestions.
First of all, no rest period between sets ever needs to be longer than 3 minutes. If yours are longer than that, reduce them to that; if they’re shorter than that, reduce them by 30 secs (to a minimum of 30 secs between sets: reduce incrementally, every other week in 30 second steps). You should be drenched by the end of a workout and breathing so loud people stare. This should cut down on the time of your workout.
Secondly, carefully look over your exercises: are there obvious places you can be doing supersets rather than successive sets? Do your bench press and immediately move on to the lat pulldown, no rest (take rest after the two sets). Do the lunges and immediately follow with the military press (and so on). Supersetting is a more efficent use of time, burns more fat, and according to the experts can build more muscle too (if you superset antagonistic muscles, as in the first example I gave). I hope this helps some.
By the way, if your preworkout and postwork nutrition are really on point, and you’re taking in enough calories overall (and enough of the right kind of calories) it’s extremely unlikely you’ll have any problems with “overtraining” (which might better be thought of as “suboptimal nutrition”). Take a look at Berardi’s “Massive Eating” for some pointers.
Thanks for the suggestions, but the stage I’m in right now already uses supersets, and I’m getting very frustrated at the amount of time it is taking me to complete the workout. Maybe if I wasn’t led to believe in an unrealistic time frame, by this book, then I could accept that it takes me 45 mins to do 1 circuit and therefore when the program calls for 3 circuits I’m gonna be in the gym for 2.5 hours or more.
I guess I was just wondering if anyone out there has gone through this program and if so am I doing something wrong or did the authors just push their pencils around to come up with a ridiculously low time estimate??