Is it possible to overtrain while on Mag-10, working out 6 days a week, one session per day?
For what it’s worth, Joel, I’ve been training for six days a week (which means squats, deads, and benches twice each week), one session per day, for about six weeks now, four of which were on MAG-10, with two weeks off in between. (Yeah, that’s too frequent for core movements, I know already.) I’ve gone from 195 to 217, and my best estimate says about 14 pounds of that is lean. My poundages continue to go up on this jaw dropping supplement, even in a high volume scenario. But, as I mentioned to Eric once before, I feel like mentally I’m burned out. I’m desperate for some days off. But every morning I wake up, decide to train, and my numbers just keep going up – a rep here, ten pounds there – no matter how subjectively difficult it was getting to the gym. So, is that overtraining? I think the moral of the story is, if your body’s ready to grow, and you’re really eating, and you’re truly responding to MAG-10, you can get away with some training strategies that would be ill-advised in any other context. I’d like to think that, if I’d had one really rotten workout according to the numbers and not just how I felt, I’d have had the sense to take a break. Also, it’s funny – if MAG-10 had been, say, twenty dollars a bottle, I probably wouldn’t have hit it so hard. By the way, congrats on BFL.
As long as you keep your cals up especially carbs, I don’t think that you can really overtrain in a 2 week period. From my observations on the forum and from my personal experience this seems to be the case. I do agree with Steve though, that you can feel mentally burned out from all the eating and the heavy training, so I would limit these cycles to 2 weeks. Overtraining is primarily a neurological issue, so I would say that mental burnout is an early sign of overtraining. In some of Bryan Haycock’s writing over at thinkmuscle, he cites a study where voluntary strength goes down after a workout, but involuntary strength does not change. This demonstrates that fatigue is primarily neural and that you can learn to deal with this. Anyways, I would say that training 6 days a week is a huge increase in volume. MAG-10 and lots of food make it physiologically a fine environment for growth, but you just need to be mentally ready to handle the challenge.
This might sound corny, but I have combated the mental burnout associated with twice a day training by reading something inspirational every morning. There’s a book called How to be Like Mike… As soon as I get out of bed, I read about Michael Jordan’s work habits and extreme passion for the game and that really gets me revved up for my workouts.