Bodybuilding Workouts
“Four Ways to Sabotage Your Bodybuilding Workouts”
Training too long and too oftenMany trainees spend way too much time in the gym. They fail to understand the importance of the recovery phase. While weight training stimulates muscle growth, the actual growth of your muscles will occur during your resting period, especially during sleep. Believe it or not, many times spending less hours in the gym will accelerate your progress. While the exact frequency can vary among individuals, you can see impressive gains with as little as two workouts a week. Instead of having to worry about the symptoms of over training, why not prevent them from the beginning?
Training to failure
One of the basic tenets of both basic and advanced bodybuilding workouts is training to failure. In a nutshell, this means that you lift a weight with enough repetitions until you cannot physically lift it anymore. While there’s certainly a place for this concept, many have taken this too far – we might call this absolute failure. Training to exhaustion can leave a heavy toll on the nervous and immune systems. It will take you longer to recover from this kind of fatigue than it will from simple muscular fatigue.
Not getting enough sleep
We have already mentioned that your muscles will grow while you are at rest, not while you’re in the gym. Adequate sleep in particular is crucial for muscle building, since growth hormone and testosterone are released during heavy sleep. The average person needs about 8 hours of sleep a night. You might need more or less, but you must be honest with yourself about how much you really need.
Not training above your threshold
While training too hard and too often may be dangerous to your health, you do have to have a certain intensity to promote muscle growth. You must continually push your muscles beyond what they have previously been exposed to, even if you only make small increments from one workout to the next.