Q: How much should I be training with weights to see the best results without overtraining?
It would appear that readers are enjoying asking questions that could get me lynched by the fitness mob. Overtraining is one of those contentious issues, though it shouldn’t be.
On the one end of the spectrum you have trainers who spend almost half of a session on prehab, warm-ups, cool downs and refuelling. These guys tend to have their clients doing just enough, but never too much. Forever afraid of overtraining, their sessions tend to be comfortable and quite appropriate for a culture always “suffering” from something.
“Hi, welcome to the class, is there anything you need to share?”
“Yes, I suffer from high blood sugar / Yes, I suffer from heartburn / Yes, I suffer from [insert anything]”.
Then on the other end, you have hard-core weight trainers who scoff at the idea of overtraining. CT Fletcher went viral about a decade ago for calling those afraid of overtraining soft, bonbon-eating you-know-whats. David Goggins would tell you to pull yourself towards yourself and go put in the work because success never came from cowardly analysis, it came from blood, sweat and tears.
While not all, many in this camp train with the aid of pharmaceuticals and when natural trainers try to mimic their frequency and intensity it ends in tears.
The problem with overtraining syndrome is that there is no standardised test to diagnose it. There are signs and symptoms: Fatigue, decreased performance, insomnia, repetitive bouts of sickness, low libido, mood problems, higher resting heart rate and blood pressure, and more.
I don’t know about you, but reading the news in SA every morning causes every one of those symptoms to occur in my life.
How much can you do to achieve the best results without overtraining? A good start would be to keep an eye on your performance, recovery, motivation, sleep, mood and all the other telltale signs, cognisant that we live busy lives and must face far more stressors than just walking lunges.
A study was published in July that answers the “how much” part of your question. The study called “Weekly minimum frequency of one maximal eccentric contraction to increase strength of the elbow flexors”, published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology says three times a week is the tipping point and more is better.
This is exactly what the overtraining crowd don’t want to hear, but it is actually good news. The fancy name of the exercise in the title simply means the negative part of a bicep curl. One group of people trained twice a week, while the other trained three times a week, for a month.
The twice-a-week crew saw no noticeable changes, whereas those who did the exercise three times a week enjoyed significant gains, however the authors say these gains were less than a previous study that tested five times a week.
It would appear then, that to enjoy good gains, three times a week is the recommended frequency according to this study, but more is better. Now, the Water Cooler is no exercise journal, but this does not mean that you should become Goggins and do ridiculous two-hour sessions six times a week.
It is entirely possible to achieve the three times a week mark with clever programming that balances frequency of training with the correct volume and intensity per session.
It’s exciting for me as I have rejected the body-part split training methodology for at least 13 years. Monday — chest, Tuesday — back, Wednesday — legs, and so on. These programmes only stimulate the muscle group once a week, and let’s be honest, they belong in muscle magazines documenting the training methodologies of professional bodybuilders whose hormonal environment, and how they react to training and diet, is on a different planet compared to most people reading this.
Push-pull, push-pull legs, or full-body splits, performed on alternating days have been programmed by strength and conditioning coaches for years. Why? Because they work. We’ve said this before: find a reputable coach and invest in professional programming that targets progressive overload without overreaching and overtraining.
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