Hi. I have a question about the G-Flux article...I mean what it says makes sense...the more you workout and eat the better your body comp gets. But should one train through soreness in the beggining?
I’m usually a bit sore the day after a leg workout, so should I just push through and do some HITT or something anyway? Or what about on a day when a do a morning workout…will I be compromising mass if I do HITT or some other aerobics in the afternoon?
Is it okay to be perpetually sore…will you still be gaining mass or does that mean that you’re overtrainig? I’ve recently switched to 4 days a week lifting, 3 off. That would make for only about 3 hours of lifting a week plus maybe one 30 min session of HITT…that falls way short of the minimal 6-7 hours Berardi recommends.
Should I cut out some weights in favor of more aerobics? My friend recently gained 20 lbs just running an hour 6 days a week and doing a light full-body workout 2 times per week and she didn’t even go up one waist size…she is incredibly lean. I on the other hand also gained about 20 lbs but I went up from a 25 in waist to 27 or 28. (I’m female) Should I reconsider and cut out so much weights and cross over to more aerobics or should I keep the weights, add the aerobics and just always be sore?
If you read Chad W’s articles on high-frequency training, you’ll find he is an advocate of gradually increasing the frequency by careful selection of low-rep, high-weight, followed by high-rep, low-weight exercises. You could try to do that as a means of getting your body to the condition where soreness is reduced to the point where you don’t feel it?
A good way to determine if you are experiencing overtraining symptoms is to test your resting heart rate. You have to determine a baseline when you know you are rested, but after that it should stay essentially the same. If you see a sudden rise (3-5 bpm), then you are in a metabolically “over-reaching” state, meaning you are stressing your body more than it can handle. In the short term, this is good, you need to overload your body to progress. However, if it stays elevated for the remainder of the week, you probably need a back-off week.
There is a fine line between overtraining and just plain working your ass off. I tend to err on the side of “overtraining”, because as long as you are paying attention to your body and backing off properly, you should be able to recover. If you can beat down your body so badly in 3 weeks that you can’t recover on the 4th week, you’ve got some great work ethic! Now obviously injuries, etc. are a different story.
One final note, overtraining is usually a result of volume and not intensity (if you are stressing your CNS too much you will be able to tell because your performance will start declining), so don’t neccessarily throw out the HIIT, just cut down on the volume at first and work up from there if that makes you more comfortable.