Splattered Angst

I have really been consumed with reading books about weight training lately. I have mentioned previously a book I picked up by Mike Mentzer called “High-Intensity Training the Mike Mentzer Way” and I am increasingly surprised by it. While there is some pretty dated diet information, the principles and logic outlined about training are quite relevant. In fact, I actually made a couple of dramatic changes to the routine with my workout partner mid stream this week based on some of what I was coming across.

The one chapter that really got me thinking was called “Adaptation.” Discussed are the three different stages the human body goes through when it is stressed by something in its environment:

• A General Alarm Reaction
• A Stage of Resistance
• A Stage of Exhaustion [if the stress persists]

No matter what form the stress takes, the body’s general response is to adapt. Stress is present during all three of the above listed stages, but its symptoms change.

One example that is given in the book that is easy to get a grip on is how your body reacts to the sun by tanning. If you think about how the body responds to the stress of the sun and draw a comparison to the way that the body deals with the stress of weight training, it gets interesting.

Where do you go if you want a tan – out into the hot sun! And the body initially goes through a stage of alarm, but if you give your body a bit of time between exposures, the skin darkens up [or in my case the freckles get larger] and the body builds a resistance to the stress by over adapting to prepare for the next exposure to the stress. We know what happens when you spend too much time in the sun … burns, blisters and if too long – you can even die out under the rays of the sun.

Likewise with weight training: If you want to pack on muscle you expose yourself to intense, brief and relatively infrequent, stress. The body will in turn over compensate and grow to make sure that it is capable of dealing with similar stress in the future. What I have been confronted with in my reading is my tendency to be a serious “pump junkie” that has not been giving my body the time and energy needed to adapt. I have been working out for extended sessions [hour and half or more at times] 5-6 days a week without giving my body time to rebound from the stress. I’ve made a change and I’m now taking Friday’s off - working out Monday - Thursday. Three “grow” days in a row each week. The goal now is to get the workout done in 40-50 minutes - and when I am there, to be intense and go heavy – like standing in the hot sun – and then get the hell out of there!

Another thing that I have changed after this bit of reading is slowing down the speed of the repetitions. In another part of the book he talks about the three different points of strength in a muscle. It is not all about “lifting,” but muscle is actually much stronger in lowering weight as well as holding it in a static position. When you slow the reps speed way down, you engage all three of these points of strength. That has been quite a discovery this week to walk away from workouts and not feel joints screaming at me as they have in the past and to sense in exchange a hell of a lot more muscle soreness – the good kind! The kind that makes me smile and say: NICE! I am sure as I get a few more weeks into this, what ever joint pain I have had from previous over training will be less and less of an issue.

One thing further that I’ll mention is energy – lifting and moving weight is not the only place that energy is used. Energy is also needed to adapt to the stress that I am putting it through. If I am in the gym doing set after set, day after day, I am not leaving my body the energy it needs to engage in the business of adapting. It is like insisting my skin tan by hanging out in the sun hour after hour, day after day without some time in the shade to recuperate. The body’s response to that is going to be complete exhaustion – over exposure and things other than a tan develop. If one can take the image of a really bad sun burn and apply it to over trained muscles, it is scary.

I imagine as I work to apply these principles workouts will be come less frequent and even briefer because as muscles get bigger [and they have been!] they will require more energy to move weight - it’s like I am growing horsepower… The “gas tank’s” capacity is somewhat fixed though. I can only use so much in a day. It will also take more energy for adaptation. I see workouts eventually getting down to just a couple of times a week and “grow days” going to 4 to 5 days a week!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 5:30 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.