I know this is long but guys read this please. You know who you are...I was one too: John M. Berardi, C.S.C.S. You know the feeling. You begin a new training phase pumped up and raring to go. Then, at about week six, “it” happens. First, you start feeling a little bit drained. Next, you start feeling a specific brand of muscular soreness that you haven’t felt before. Finally, your motivation to get to the gym takes a dramatic downturn. While you try your best to fight through the apathy, the soreness, and the generalized fatigue, this phenomenon, known as overreaching, is stronger than you. At this point, while you’ve fought nobly, it’s time to take a few days off: If you try to keep fighting through it, you’ll slip into a much more dangerous condition known as overtraining. That’s right: No matter how tough you are (physically or mentally), in the end overtraining always wins out. According to Wilmore and Costill (1988), “No single physiological measurement has proven 100 percent effective [to diagnose overtraining]. Since performance is the most dramatic indicator of overtraining, it is not surprising to find that overtraining has a dramatic effect on the energy demands for a standard, submaximal exercise bout. When runners show symptoms of overtraining, their heart rates and oxygen consumption during the runs are significantly higher.” What does this mean to you? Well, it means that there’s no way to predict the arrival of overreaching or overtraining. You simply start to feel run down and, if you don’t take some time off—wham—you’re overtrained. Why worry about overtraining? For starters, it leads to decreases in performance and can, if you try to train through it, result in long periods of poor performance, illness, or even injury. According to Fry and colleagues, “Overtrained subjects reported an inability to resume their normal resistance training loads for up to 8 weeks after this study, thus requiring a long-term regeneration period.” This means that if you allow yourself to develop full-blown overtraining, it may be months before you’ll be able to train hard again. While little is known about preventing performance decline and overtraining, a few things are clear. First, while short periods of overreaching can be beneficial to strength and muscle gain, you must not let this overreaching go unchecked. After one week of overreaching, either decrease training volume and intensity or take a few days off. Second, nutrition may play an important role in preventing performance decrements and overtraining. Here are some nutritional strategies for intensive training periods: 1. Consume more total calories. Overreaching and overtraining increase the metabolic cost of exercise and recovery. To prevent immune compromise, weight losses, and decreases in performance, you must eat more food. 2. Eat more carbohydrates. Some symptoms of overreaching may be caused by progressive decreases in liver muscle glycogen concentrations (even in strength athletes). Eating more carbohydrates, especially when muscle glycogen resynthesis is most efficient (during the postworkout period), will ensure adequate liver and muscle carbohydrate stores. 3. Eat more dietary fat. While low-fat diets were all the rage in the 1980s and 1990s, new research has demonstrated that certain types of dietary fat can offer protection against heart disease, free-radical damage, and cancer, and can increase metabolic rate and fat burning, muscle mass, and the production of hormones such as testosterone. During overtraining, testosterone concentrations in the blood tend to decrease. Increasing the amount of fat in your diet may help prevent some of this decline. 4. Ingest a good postexercise carbohydrate/protein drink. After exercise, the body is primed for muscle glycogen resynthesis and the repair of muscle damage. A carbohydrate/protein drink based on the principles of the Nutrient Timing System can improve muscle glycogen recovery and muscle protein status. Furthermore, during overtraining, cortisol concentrations in the blood may increase. Postexercise nutrition containing carbohydrates and protein may prevent some of this rise in cortisol.
Posted on: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 13:50:06 +0000
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