If you're going to strength train, this pretty much represents how your strength programming will go. It means over the course of time, your strength will go up. The dips in the graph account for strength lost through rest, strength lost through lack of motivation and many other factors like insufficient protein intake or sleep or just not having enough time to workout.
The first incline on the graph represents quick gains or beginner gains. Your body will start to align its joints and muscle fibers in response to your training, thus making it able to complete the lifts in a more efficient way enabling you to lift more.
After the beginner gains, your strength gains taper a bit and the real training takes place. Your training program will have to shift focus onto the crux of strength training: the adding of muscle and hence strength by way of proper recovery of the central nervous system through rest and significant protein intake.
So if your programming doesn't match the above graph, that means you're the problem. Either your training is not providing you enough of a stimulus for muscle growth. Maybe you're not taking in enough protein to allow for sufficient muscle growth. Maybe you're eating way too many sugary foods in between training sessions thus causing your body to lapse into a sugar coma where the body is eating away at your muscles causing you to lose strength.
A big one for me was I was over training. I wasn't allowing my body to rest adequately between training sessions. I would go into a gym forty eight hours after my last workout and start lifting and I would repeat this process three or even four times a week. The result was I wasn't allowing my body to repair itself adequately through maximum amounts of protein ingestion and rest of the central nervous system thus I wasn't making strength gains.
It took me a long time to realize I was over training. I thought it was that I wasn't training hard enough, so I hit the gym even more continuing the spiral of not getting strong and even getting weaker in some of my upper body lifts and my deadlifts. I thought how can this be? I'm training more, so I should be getting stronger but I was weaker.
So to fix that I rested more. There. It's pretty simple. I did nothing. I stopped looking at all the meatheads on youtube busting up their bodies with weights and I sat right on my glutes and watched television. Basically I became a couch potato to get stronger.
I think the main problem why people have trouble busting plateaus in their lifts is that they underestimate the damage that occurs to them while heavy lifting. They are taxing their central nervous system and their muscles to the the limits of their potential. This places a heavy toll on the body and it requires an abundance of rest to recover from that. Sure you can still accomplish daily tasks like walking or picking up something after a heavy lifting session, but once you get under that bar it's a different reality. You're attempting to achieve maximum lifts, and only then does how much you rest factor into the equation of you being able to complete the lift. The only way you can tell if you've gotten enough rest is recording your lift amounts in a journal and noticing over the course of time which rest periods are best suited to make you strong.
The strength graph represents a solution in an equation. It's the 4 in a 1+1+1+1= equation. The addends are significant rest, sufficient training stimuli, maximal protein intake, and stabilized blood sugar levels. These should equal more strength. If you don't get strong, you're erring in one of the addends.
No comments:
Post a Comment