= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
billswift comments on Weight training - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (45)
I agree with your last paragraph completely, but I guess I wasn't clear about the "total lift" and soreness bit. I didn't mean a fixed amount of weight, I meant doing your maximum reps with a particular weight - the maximum number of times I can lift 70 pounds is a lot more than 5 times the number of times I can lift 350 pounds. In fact it is more than 10 times as much- 70 pounds by 50 reps (3500 pounds total) versus 350 pounds by 4 reps (1400 pounds total). And the former leaves a lot more aches than the latter.
Well, if you exercise until you can't lift 50 pounds for another rep, you've fatigued your muscles more (deteriorated more myofibrils) than if you exercise until you can't lift 180 pounds for another rep, although you're not going to build your fast twitch muscles as much only doing low weight.
... and you are quite possibly just overtraining, leaving yourself worse off than before!
Although I've never used it myself, I know guys who swear by the method of working with high weights to depletion, then lower weights, then lower, until they fail to lift a fraction of their maximum. Whether your muscles can recover from that in a timely manner depends largely on the kind of condition you're already in, I wouldn't suggest trying it if you're not already a veteran.
I have tried it and it is a lot of fun! It can work too... if done in the right balance.
I merely affirmed what you said and pointed out that turning the dial one step further into the 'high amount of fatigue' end of the spectrum can not only reduce strength gains but outright reduce them. Overtraining really does make you weaker. Not to mention chronically tired. (I've tried that too.)
Some would say that you need more recovery time if you are already well built than if you are less so. We can improve our ability to restore muscles via training but not as much as we can increase the amount of muscle mass that needs to be restored.
It is well established that you cannot really build endurance and strength at the same time. But as I wrote, it depends on what you want to achieve. I am reasonably, but not especially, strong, but when working at landscaping when I was younger I could work people who were substantially stronger than me into the ground. And endurance is more correlated with health than is strength, except for some increase in resistance to injury with increasing strength.
WTF? No it isn't. It's hard to build strength without building endurance. Sure, strength training isn't optimal for endurance building but it's far from terrible. (Although I suppose it holds for a really stretched definition of 'really'.)