I’m a little confused as to why some people say that less is more.
The body is always trying to remain in homeostasis or balance. When you enduce a stress like lifting weights, your body percieves this as a threat and works to recover the damaged muscle fibers and supercompensate to a higher fitness so that it can handle the stress easier the next time.
So wouldn’t this mean that at the end of the day more is more is more? Since the more damage you cause to the muscle, the more it has to supercompensate to better handle the stress?
It’s usually because they have been in the game a while and have some experience. Now if you want to do 1000 sets a day 7 days a week to try out your theory and learn yourself then go for it.
The key is to do as little as possible to stimulate growth yet still be recoverable, this will change over the years. Your a beginner you don’t need too much volume to see results, and more will not always equate to faster results, but like I say if you want to try go for it.
Ignorant guess here, but the body has a limited capacity to recover. Even with the best recovery strategies and the best scenario available, at some point it won’t be able to fully recover if you kept doing more, thus keeping you into that lowered fitness state you see in the breakdown curve.
And people tend to do dumb shit with the intention of “doing more”, i know i did and sometimes still do it. It quickly eats into your recovery and drives you to the ground.
Another ignorant guess here, but more IS better - moving more weight, doing more reps, packing more volume or density or intensity and so on. That’s progress.
But you have to work towards it by gradually increasing work capacity within your recovery limits, not by throwing everything you can at your body hoping it will recover.
Because your body can only recover from so much training. When training outpaces recovery, you will make worse progress than you would have if you had just done less volume. Recovery can be optimized by sleeping enough and eating enough, but there is a point where less volume would have worked better.
1 bar of chocolate is good right? Eat 100 and tell me if that’s better.
A few reasons…
Your body only has a limited amount of resources to repair and rebuild. Doing too much too is frequently will hinder it’s ability to recover, which will kill your progress in the gym, no progression equals no growth. Not to mention injurys.
Quality is better than quantity, if you learn a great mind muscle connection, use good form and appropriate weights you can totally destroy a muscle in very few sets.
Forget high volume for a bit and put all your thoughts and energy in to progression, that is really the key.
Also I’m speaking from experience, I trained high volume body part split for a year and made little progress. I switched to a lower volume upper lower split, working on quality reps and progressing and gained around 28lb in around 9 months.
Well yeah… My point is that if it gets to the point where you’re body isn’t recovering properly and you rest for an extended period of time (say 5 days) then your body would end up recovering and supercompensating and adapting eventually no? That it’s not actually lost or wasted progress.
I agree with this. I’m still developing that good mmc but im feeling it already. The thing is that right now I don’t work. I can sleep a long time and eat what I need, and im not exerting any energy outside of the gym and there is zero stress in my life.
This is why I can handle a bit more than maybe other begginers can. And I can tell you that from my own workouts nothing I do is halfassed. I hit every exercise with as much intensity as I can
But is it better to destroy yourself for 1 day every week, or stimulate your muscles for 5 days per week? I think there is a good bit of anecdotal evidence that frequency is good when you are trying to get big and strong.
At some point, if you do too much you don’t stimulate your body to recover and make gains. You go into fight or flight survival mode, and your body tears itself down and uses stress hormones to keep you going.
Think of some stereotypical super tough Military training. Dudes don’t come out bigger, stronger and better conditioned. They have to rest and recover just to get back to normal.
strong graph skills. but i dont see how its relevant? im talking about overreaching then deloading. not overreaching for months to the point you destroy your body
If you rest for 5 days, you have done FAR LESS WORK over that course of time, and if you grow during that time - like your post implies - then less has indeed led to more.
This is a bit like crossfit, where the mantra is “more is better”. Each workout was historically a balls-to-the-wall, maximum effort race to complete exercises to get your name on the wall.
Consider, though:
Let’s say you do 10 sets of squats at 10 reps each, each to or very near failure. (plus other things). You are so sore you the next day you can’t do a quality workout. In fact, it takes you 3 days to recover and get back into the gym.
Let’s say someone else does 10 sets of 5 reps, submaximally, plus other things but keeps everything well below failure and focuses on mind-body connection and explosive reps and slow progressive overload. This person could come back the next day and get in another quality workout.
Person 2 will, over the long haul, get more work in, feel better, avoid energy, and be more likely to keep up a consistent training regimen.
Person 1 will feel like crap after running himself into the ground, will be more likely to get injured, will sleep worse, and not see the longterm training benefits of person 2.
