Hey gents, first time venturing onto this side of the forum. Quick backround, in college I used to train with strength as my main goal, even was prepping for my first raw meet before I got derailed from the injury bug, then kind of switched to BBing type workouts after that. Had almost a 2 year layoff recently due to injury and career demands, got back in the game about 12 months ago, again mainly training like a BBer. I really miss my strength and want to put a focus back on it during the next few months while I diet down a bit.
Question: does your CNS have the ability to rebond relatively quickly kind of like you can quickly regrow muscle?
In my experience, the answer is almost always yes. I can’t recall ever seeing someone I knew come back into the gym after an extended layoff and stay at the level of those first few sessions for very long.
As a personal example, I was a pretty good bench presser in high school. Set some records in different feds at 18, then walked away almost entirely until I was 24, with only a few sporadic weeks of screwing around in my college gym in between. For the first two weeks back, I’d say the most I could manage was a few ugly singles at 275lbs. After three months, I was back up to a touch and go 405lbs. Hopefully, you see something similar.
[quote]Waittz wrote:
Hey gents, first time venturing onto this side of the forum. Quick backround, in college I used to train with strength as my main goal, even was prepping for my first raw meet before I got derailed from the injury bug, then kind of switched to BBing type workouts after that. Had almost a 2 year layoff recently due to injury and career demands, got back in the game about 12 months ago, again mainly training like a BBer. I really miss my strength and want to put a focus back on it during the next few months while I diet down a bit.
Question: does your CNS have the ability to rebond relatively quickly kind of like you can quickly regrow muscle?
Thanks in advance[/quote]
Should rebound pretty quickly. There was a poster a few weeks ago who had a thread about regaining 300 lbs on his total that had been lost due to a few years of being out of the game in just one month after getting back into it.
Something like 5x5 or MadCows may be very good for someone in your spot until you get back to your old strength levels, or even a little higher.
Absolutely, if anything it comes faster than muscle. I just recently had a 4 year break(after lifting for 4 years), and got back into the game 2 months ago. During those 2 months I’ve gained more than 300 pounds on my total from doing strength specific training (sheiko).
Now, you had been doing BB training for a year, so obviously such gains do not apply to you, but you should still be able to get more plates on the bar quickly. One of the best parts of hypertrophy, is that it can lead to great strength gains later on.
recent studies show that the reason why we regain strength faster the second time round is because we have more muscle cells. The muscle cells differentiate and we get more active nuclei, with reconditioning the nerves “shrink” as well as the muscle cell size but the amount of muscle cell nuclei do not decrease, therefor you can more easily re-recruit the muscle nuclei to start working again but the nerve efficiency has to be rebuilt.
From what I have read from the experts and from personal experience the hardest part of gains is when the body builds the neurological pathways to handle more strength/more muscle. It doesn’t go away when the training stops. This is how you get back to where you were a lot easier than getting there the first time.