So I’ve given a pretty serious try with the 30-30-30 metabolic challenge for hypertrophy “we built an athlete over Christmas holidays”
Anyway everything went fine with impressive feel and results until the end of the third week, where I started to struggle with horrible insomnia - usually terminal where I woke up at 3 a.m. after going to bed around 11:30pm.
I strongly suspect it’s overtraining or CNS meltown after consulting a few pros. His book also adverts to the dangers of going too far with the program and NOT going to failure but I think where I’ve messed up was with the RESTING INTERVALS.
Dr Darden instructs us to take 30 seconds between exercises in the first week, eventually reducing it to 15 seconds or less in the fourth week but I went beyond that, taking 2-6 seconds maximum already in the second week just because I could switch exercises that quickly with calisthenics.
After a particular workout, at the Finnishi g exercise ( 7th ) I gasping for air and my heart was very stressed.
At 3am when I woke up I was kind of hot, tingling legs, some involuntary spasms as well.
Could this very short transition between challenging exercises be stressing too much and releasing too much cortisol ?
Metabolic conditioning, as described in original Arthur Jones’ writings, is nothing more than a misguided description of lactate threshold training. Training can increase lactic acid clearance, but for resistance training is counterproductive to muscle recruitment, as lactic acid production (H+ ions) inhibits such recruitment and causes massive fatigue .
Metabolic conditioning never caught on as Arthur Jones envisioned, after the now forgotten Total Conditioning at West Point. Runners and athletes long ago learned how to deal with the lactate threshold, and It is not the infamous rush factor of Nautilus training protocol.
Furthermore, the breakdown of fats is different than the breakdown glucose in many important detail as regards the Kreb’s cycle. While anaerobic work may breakdown glucose and stack pyruvate up for mitochondria clearance, fats use a differing means of breakdown. Thus, aerobic conditioning and beta oxidation of fats is different in manufacturing ATP from lipids. The main constituent of beta oxidation of lipids is oxaloacetate. This is news nugget that never gets explained on most HiT sites. Metabolic conditioning, and Global Metabolic conditioning are not founded in science.
There’s less painful ways to train your heart. Talk to Marc/ATP, if you have a couple hours to spare. He’ll tell you all about them.
As far as training for hypertrophy, you’d be hard-pressed to find a WORSE WAY to train than what you’re doing. Shorter rest periods have been coming under increasing fire, with actual studies and numbers [in favor of not-short rest periods (I hesitate to say “long”)] to back up what started as nothing more than prejudicial dislike.
Take a week off and then start back without such ridiculous extremes in mind…
P.S. You might want to rework your rather ‘clickbait’-ish title. It implies Doc’s 30-30-30 program is to blame for your CNS shock (if that’s what it is), when you clearly brought it upon yourself.
