What these papers do indicate clearly is a trend towards “more” as athletes become more trained over time. Workloads used in training expand and unfold as you improve, trending toward more sets and more workouts as strength improves over a career. Your body becomes more resistant to overload as you get stronger, and as a consequence of that resistance you need “more” in order to encourage adaptation.

  That’s an important hint, and I think it should lead us to question supercompensation. The scope of evidence drawn from outside exercise physiology suggests that our bodies just don’t work like that, and there are good reasons to consider alternatives. Banister’s fitness-fatigue model, as one conspicuous example, explains why you’d have the appearance of supercompensation in some situations, like a beginner just finding her legs in the gym, but it can also explain more things ― like the unpacking of workloads in more advanced lifters, or the Frequency Project.

  From all this, I believe that there is no fixed limit as such. Rather, we’re dealing with a dynamic, unstable limit that can change depending on how much you train (or don’t).

  Stress has positive effects, after all, and the entire point of adaptation is to make your body more resistant to whatever it perceives as a threat. The limit changes every time you set foot in the gym.

  Russian sports science, while still using the imagery of gadaptive energyh, knew that improving robustness was a critical goal of physical training (and they knew that there were no real energies, but rather underlying biological processes that restored you to a state of normalcy). In Supertraining Mel Siff wrote that “the capacity of these [adaptive] reserves is not fixed, but alters in response to the demands placed on them by stresses such as training.”25 Recovery itself, in as much as the word has a meaning at all, can be trained with practice. The more you expose yourself to stressful events, within reason, the less stressful they become.

  On one level this is obvious. A workout that absolutely floors a beginner can be a light day for an advanced lifter. You don’t stop training in your first few months of lifting weights because you got really sore after those workouts. We take it for granted that we’ll become more robust with experience, at least in that dimension.

  Instead of diminishing returns, we can think start thinking about positive feedback ― that doing more can, in turn, create more. Training and recovery are more of a “both-and” situation, rather than the “either-or” of supercompensation. Your body’s condition, its ability to handle stress and to recover from it, depends at least in part on being exposed to stress in the first place.

  With that in mind, I think we can start to look at training as a way of coaxing your body into a more robust condition, such that you can not only handle more training, but thrive on it.

  You can’t do that with a fixed cap on your recuperative powers. But treating the body as a “growth system”, one with limits but still far more adaptable than you might otherwise believe, gives us this option. We are less machines with limited resources and more ecosystems which can adapt and grow with the right encouragement.

  You wouldn’t run your garden like a factory, thinking in terms of efficiencies and maximum-minimum outputs. Gardeners tend rather than manage. Tending our bodies is a matter of exposing yourself to stress and gradually increasing that stress, but in such a way that it doesn’t overwhelm you. Hanging out in stress-mode all the time is bad, but spending a lot of time cruising with occasional bursts of all-in effort is actually good for you. This pattern of under- and over-stimulation is crucial (more on this later).

  What this all means is that you can train far more, and far harder, than you might otherwise believe. Want to train the same exercise five days in a row? Six? Seven? You can, and you can benefit from all of those workouts. You eventually have to pay down your fatigue debt, of course, and in order to see your gains realized ― to see that new muscle growth, to lift a new PR weight ― you may have to let the fatigue bleed off.

  But this is not about recharging your hitpoints. Instead, we’re letting the stress-response stabilize and settle down. It doesn’t matter if you train “legs” or “arms” two or three or five days a week as long as you allow for adaptation to occur at some point in time.

  Once you stop looking at recovery as hitpoints, a whole world of new possibilities opens up. Training is a continual process of biological growth and change which is balanced and checked by accumulated wear-and-tear. You’re always walking on a knife’s blade, at “the edge of chaos” so to speak, but as your fitness level grows, so does your ability to tolerate a thrashing. You can handle more intensity as weights get heavier, and more volume and more workouts as work capacity improves. The result is a system which grows to match what it’s been trained to do.

  It would be unfair to say that workouts based on supercompensation “can’t work”, because obviously they can and do. Minimalist-style workouts, ranging from straight-up HIT to meat-and-potatoes powerlifting workouts work, and work just fine. For some people.

  I donft think supercompensation is wrong as much as it is incomplete, and itfs in the incompleteness that we find possibilities.

  Two Stages of Overtraining

  Just on principle, there has to be some point beyond which more training becomes counterproductive. I don’t deny this, nor will I say that overtraining doesn’t exist. The phenomenon is well-studied and its effects are undeniable ― at least in high-performing endurance athletes.

  I’m more interested in how we define overtraining and “too much” training in the first place. The view held by most gym-rats and casual lifters is unsophisticated. Look at Arnold’s workout, with six training days and three hours worth of sets each day. That’s “overtraining”.

  Put another way, overtraining is an amount of work or volume that lies beyond some (incredibly vague) threshold of tolerance. Working within that threshold is fine, going beyond will wear you down and burn you out. To them, overtraining is something you do.

  Sports science defines the Overtraining Syndrome (OTS) by a checklist of symptoms, which include a loss of motivation to train, changes in biological stress-markers, and most importantly, reduced performance. This makes more sense, but full-blown OTS is rarely seen outside of athletes at the highest levels, and even then it’s usually endurance athletes training with tremendous weekly workloads. These unfortunates can take months (or longer) to dig themselves out of their fatigue-hole.

  Overtraining, in official sports-science terms, is not an amount of work but a condition or state of being: the stress-response gone haywire, the system-wide damage accumulated from months of excess.

  Overtraining, by definition, reflects diminished performance. Coaches and athletes and gym lifters would never concern themselves with stress or overtraining if it had no impact on 100m times, on 1RM performance, on the 10K run. We care about overtraining precisely because it limits what we can do.

  That means performance, irrespective of biological stress markers, is our number one indicator. Even if all the right signs are there, can you be overtrained when you’re still you’re hitting PR numbers?

  Back in 2001, Dr. Michael Hartman and Glenn Pendlay put this idea to the test, coaching a team of weightlifters through a grueling training cycle designed to push them to their limits. Throughout the training, the lifters, all squatting and doing the Olympic lifts many times each week, were tested for levels of testosterone and cortisol.26

  Hartman and Pendlay hypothesized that the ratio between these two hormones (the T/C ratio) would provide a marker of overtraining symptoms. As predicted, after several weeks of extreme training, lifters were coming in with crashed T/C ratios. But despite crashed-out hormones and fatigue so crippling that some of the lifters could barely make it up the stairs to the gym, something remarkable happened.

  “We still had several lifters set all-time PRs at the end of a week in which we worked up to a max five times,” says Hartman.27

  While the T/C ratio rebounded after the training cycle, and the rebound correlated with strength gains, their research also demonstrated that while any heavy-enough training will make hash of the hormonal profile, it’s still possible to keep making PR lifts.

  Are you really overtraining if you’re still hitting PR numbers?

  It might help to think of this whole “overtraining” phenomenon as a two-step process, with two related but different phenomena in play.

  What gym-rats and casual lifters experience as “overtraining” is rarely so vicious as full-blown OTS. You trigger feelings of tiredness and lethargy. You feel sore and stiff. You may not feel like going to the gym. Blood work would likely show a depressed T/C ratio and other markers of stress. You’re suffering the effects of fatigue and the stress-response, certainly.

  But if you show up, it’s possible to keep training near or at your best. Even floored by the dreaded Arnold workout, restoration will come about with a week or two out of the gym, sleep, and good food.

  Researchers have wisely separated overreaching ― which appears quickly and reverses easily ― from genuine OTS for exactly this reason. No matter how bad you feel, indicators of physical stress don’t always reflect decreased performance.

  For some reason, people seem to have it in their heads that overreaching, being a short-term form of overtraining, means that OTS is both imminent and inevitable if you don’t cut back on your workloads.

  It’s certainly true that many athletes, especially nationally- and internationally-ranked, often walk the edge between productive effort and overtraining. They also stick to grueling full-time schedules that aren’t remotely indicative of your 4-10 hours a week in the gym.

  Here’s what I think: overreaching, what you might variously call the “squat flu” or the post-training blues, is a biological response much like that of the sore muscles you get after training. You’ve posed a challenge and the body responds with stress-mode’s profile of neurological, hormonal, and immune-system signals meant to cope. In mild cases, it just means you’ve outdone your body’s current ability to do work, be it intensity or duration or both. You lifted heavier, did more sets and reps, or some combination thereof, and now you’re feeling the effects of that.

  Of course it’s still very possible to overdo it and experience extreme DOMS to such a degree that you can’t even move your arms or legs the next day. The muscle is legitimately trashed and needs rest; you’ve done a degree of damage that won’t regenerate inside that 24-72 hour window.

  All this means is that there are degrees of trauma. That you can largely ignore mild DOMS is in no way suggestive that you can ignore the kind of DOMS that hospitalizes you with kidney trauma.28

  The unsophisticated view argues that any post-training indicators of stress mean that we should rest. This position doesn’t allow for the motion of adaptation. This blip of stress-markers might be transient and, ultimately, tolerable by your body. As evidenced by the findings of Hartman and Pendlay, the body reacts strongly to a large and unfamiliar stress ― and then it stabilizes.

  As with DOMS, there’s squat flu, and then there’s squat flu. What the vast majority of gym-trainers experience is low-grade overreaching. You’ve stressed your body to be sure, and it will display all the symptoms we’d call “being stressed”, but you’ll adapt. Collapsing into a neuro-endocrine disaster area because you trained too hard is unlikely in the extreme.

  Genuine overtraining, in strength athletes, has more to do with psychology than physiology, and in fact I’m hesitant to even call it overtraining. Overtraining Syndrome is identified by a profile of symptoms which are largely physical, with loss of performance and no immediate sign of recovery with rest being number one on the list.

  I think that leads us in the wrong direction. Many an “overtrained” lifter will say “I feel fine” with confidence. They aren’t lying. They really do feel just fine, and might even be lifting just fine. But they don’t feel quite right about it, and probably notice motivation waning. Without any obvious physical symptoms, no muscle soreness or lethargy or anything obvious like that, they assume they’re okay.

  Overtraining for “high output” activities like lifting weights is first and foremost a problem of mental ― or neurological ― output. To understand why I say this, we have to move past our body-centric prejudices and realize that psychology is physiology (and vice-versa).

  The Russians had an even better way of defining this phenomenon, using the term staleness to describe a burned-out athlete with flat-lined performance. In Science and Practice of Strength Training, Vladimir Zatsiorsky notes that staleness comes not from volume but from regularly lifting weights which are too heavy. “Because of the high motivational level needed to lift maximal weights, athletes using this method can easily become ‘burned out’,” he writes.29

  “Burn out” or staleness in strength training is a consequence of training too heavy, with high emotional and psychological arousal, rather than the amount or volume of training. When you go stale, performance plateaus, weights feel too heavy, and motivation evaporates.

  That sounds a lot closer to what gym-lifters and even serious strength athletes experience. Staleness is a problem of intensity: weights are too heavy and athletes are pushing too hard, emotionally, to lift them.

  When gym-rats feel themselves “overtraining” with high-volume or high-frequency training, it’s likely that they’re coming in psyched up and throwing everything into their workouts. In strength athletes, “overtraining” ― and its late-comer friend “CNS fatigue” ― is more like a code-word for “I worked too hard and now I feel bad.”

  We fear the idea of daily training because we relate it to how we feel after a hard workout. You feel sore and stiff. You may feel warm and feverish. You feel like you got hit by a truck on the worst days. The idea of getting under the bar to grind out more sets is the last thing on your mind. Feeling bad doesn’t say much about what you can do, if you actually make it to the gym, and in fact “feeling bad” might not imply what we’ve been taught.

  PART TWO

  Recovery Matters

  3

  How You Feel is a Lie

  “Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”

  ―Marcus Aurelius

  Of Two Minds

  Whether you realize it or not, you probably think of your mind as a separate thing from your body. Even if you don’t believe in a soul in the religious sense of the word, you’ve still grown up in a culture that treats the inner life as mystical, abstract, and even divine. Body is just crude flesh. Internal consciousness, thoughts, and feelings are the primary mode of existence.

  Intuitively, that probably feels right to you.

  Western philosophy of mind truly begins with Descartes and his famous cogito ergo sum. The mind is an ephemeral thing, out there somewhere, experiencing a nonphysical mode of existence. In the 18th and 19th centuries, philosophers furthered the view of mind as a rational entity distinct and removed from the body. The spirit, being unique to humankind, must grant us our powers of reason and rationality, separating us from the primitive instincts of animals.

  This notion of mind-body dualism, rational mind removed from physical body, has dominated Western culture since the beginning, and most of you reading this will probably think along those lines even if you don’t buy into any particular religious doctrine. We just take it for granted as true. Despite that, increasing piles of evidence suggest that we’ve got it all backwards.

  Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there was an intense interest in artificial intelligence among computer scientists. They wanted to build brains, copying the rational powers of human beings in machines. These early efforts fizzled out, leading to the so-called AI Winter of the 1980s and 90s. Computer scientists and philosophers of mind, backed by a growing body of neuroscientific understanding, found that rational thinking and abstract reasoning ― things like math and language ― are immature, underdeveloped, and comparatively primitive when compared to the emotional and instinctive parts of our brains. In his book Mind Children, computer scientist Hans Moravec wrote:

  Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.30

  Reasoning is the easy problem. We can make computers handle all kinds of abstract number-crunching, and they do it effortlessly. Building a “smart computer” that can handle things like recognizing a picture or navigating through a crowd ― abilities possessed by any toddler ― continues to stump the bright minds working on the problem.

  These miraculous powers of motor control and sensory processing that confuse programmers originate in the oldest and most refined (in evolutionary terms) parts of our brain. Evolution’s processes of trial and error have had hundreds of millions of years to work out the bugs, which is why you can work out all the differential equations required to follow and catch a baseball without ― consciously ― knowing the first thing about arithmetic.

  The rational brain doesn’t have anything like that refinement, and instead draws heavily on its older siblings to do what it does. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt analogizes the rational brain to a rider atop an elephant. The unconscious brain lumbers along, responding to the tugs and prods of the rational mind as it pleases. To a bystander, the rider appears in control. He’s got the reins, he makes great plans, and the elephant seems to obey orders.

 

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