Overtraining or Just a Bad Day?

I’ve been pushing myself like an animal, doing a push/pull/leg routine for 3.5 solid months, training every other day.

Numbers increased dramatically, diet is in order, been on a roll, etc. Life was good.

Some problems in the past week though:

Squat session: sharp pain in my right quad, chalked it up to an unbalanced bar and just kept pushing.

Really bad DOMS in my chest and painful cramps in my left calf – woke me up a couple times while sleeping.

Left rotator cuff screwed up, just noticed today while stretching.

I’ve felt pretty drained physically the past week, a lot more than usual, but haven’t lost motivation to hit the gym whatsoever.

However, tonight I completely missed a DL for three plates (Which I normally can hit for reps all day long), took it down to 275 and couldn’t get it off the ground. Had to drop all the way to two plates and still struggled.

Everything else went to hell, like my strength just disappeared overnight. I stopped about 20 minutes into the session and went home.

Usually my training is periodically interrupted: business trips, pesky girlfriends dragging me on vacation, etc. I’ve been running straight without missing a beat, maybe its taken a toll?

No issues in my personal life either.

I’d really HATE to take time off: keep going for another week? Stop now? Kinda obsessed with lifting weights (like a crack addict, just can’t quit), what do you guys think?

i know the feeling of taking time off, but it might be an idea to just drop it off for a week, if you need to do something just do some bodyweight stuff.

I’d probably say that you need to listen to your body. If your lifts are getting messed up, your body is starting to constantly feel run down, or you start losing your training edge, it’s possible you may need to take a week or so off. It never hurt anyone, and you can’t (won’t) lose any strength or muscle in that time. If your body doesn’t feel up to par, take it easy until it does.

There’s no downside to some extra rest. Take a week off. You wont lose any size and I bet your strength increases as well.

Plus, if you get really hurt and can’t train because of it, you’ll REALLY be pissed.

lol…he invoked a crack addict, and a pothead (SSC) showed up.

This sounds very weird though. If you can rep 315 (that i assume most men can after a year of good training) and couldn;t budge 275 with the same training program, I would be really worried. That sharp pain in the quad is not good news either.

[quote]SSC wrote:
I’d probably say that you need to listen to your body. If your lifts are getting messed up, your body is starting to constantly feel run down, or you start losing your training edge, it’s possible you may need to take a week or so off. It never hurt anyone, and you can’t (won’t) lose any strength or muscle in that time. If your body doesn’t feel up to par, take it easy until it does.[/quote]

I recently was forced to take a week off due to very painful tendons around my knees and my left elbow…but here’s what I did so that I could still be in the gym doing SOMETHING productive, because I too am obsessed.

I would go every day for the the week I took off (M-F) and I did nothing but grip strengthening work, calf exercises, and abdominal/core work.

I did that 5 days in a row, just picked different things to do each day. It kept me in that going to the gym strait from work groove and helped me stay semi sane. By thursday/friday though I was getting very irritated that I couldn’t lift any weight for real though, lol.

Thanks for the input guys, stepping back for a moment and really thinking about things changed my perspective.

Definitely time for a mini vacation. Training heavy to failure for this long really delivered a beating – like a bunch of unpaid parking tickets, its finally caught up to me.

Upside? Plenty of time to pinch plates, read up on T-Nation AND be 100% refreshed.

Ahhh yes, plate pinches. I did those every day for my 5 days off. Among many other things including wrist curls, farmer’s walks, etc. Got boring doing nothing but that after several days, but I actually saw a 1/4" increase on my forearms in just the like 3 weeks since then. (that week off is when I decided to start directly training forearms and calves, hadn’t been doing them at all). Saw a 1/2" increase in my calves too. Those measurements are compared to measurements that were taken about 2 months prior.