Squat Every Day by Matt Perryman

Author:Matt Perryman
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Tags: recovery, strength training, squats, weight lifting, bodybuilding, overtraining
Publisher: Myosynthesis
Published: 2013-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

Taming Fight or Flight

I’ve outlined exactly why I think people recoil at the thought of squatting six days a week. To them, weight training is a battle, a blood-pressure raising, tooth-gritting, heart-pounding battle between you and the weights. There’s no graded effort, no thought given to training hard without the mental wind-up. Thanks to mainstream fitness culture, most people don’t even realize that it’s possible to train productively without physical self-destruction and psychological exhaustion.

Likewise, we’re also given a limited and naive view of recovery. The “feel bad” and the wacky hormones and HRV measurements aren’t, by themselves, any indication that you’ve overtrained. You need to see when these symptoms happen and how long they last. They might go away. They might persist through your entire training cycle and then vanish after recovery during a deloading week.

This is the problem that periodization, or planning and organization of training, was meant to solve. By spacing out maximum efforts with less-stressful training, you aren’t running with the throttle wide-open all the time. That saves on wear and tear and, ideally, keeps progress moving along.

So there’s one solution: manage training stress so that you only occasionally go all-in. Periodization side-steps the problem in the first place, deliberately limiting the amount of “effortful” training. Since the reserves are finite, we should avoid tapping them and prolonging our recovery.

Scaling back the stress of heavy lifts by way of periodization is certainly one way to address recovery. That’s the preventative strategy: fix the problem by avoiding it in the first place. The only problem is, you miss out on a potentially crucial skill.

Say you increase your volume by 10%, and you notice all the symptoms of “overtraining” within a few days. You start second-guessing the program (your ego’s depleted a bit, so you’ve got extra uncertainty and more moodiness to deal with) and have to make a decision.

You could rest, yes. Cut your workload back and get more downtime. If you’re still a supercompensation card-holder, the answer is clear. You have to rest and let all the fatigue symptoms settle down before training again.

But what happens if you keep going?

Conventional wisdom says you don’t have long before you exhaust your body and collapse.

Since you’ve made it this far, I hope it’s clear that I’m not entirely on board with that point of view. We don’t have recovery hitpoints that drop as we train and recharge with rest power-ups. Exhaustion of mental energy, accumulated wear-and-tear of tissues, and the processes of adaptation are three related but different things happening on their own timetables.

It’s not that I disagree with periodization; far from it. Back in Chapter 3, I mentioned the “superadaptation” concept: the idea that the adaptive processes can, themselves, adapt. I think we should treat the psychological as we treat the muscular and neural, as another quality to train. The “fatigue” response isn’t the enemy but another target of our training.

So you keep training, and after another week you feel great. All the stress symptoms are gone and you’re stronger than ever.

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