When we indulge in physical training & workout, one thing we want to see is improvement in our health quotient. This is not the only reason we train our body. Some workout to relieve their stress, some do it for fun, a lot of us do it to improve our health, perform better at sport & look better. Optimising your performance from training is a tricky task. Sometimes you overdo it while on a lot of occasions we underdo it.
Let us examine & discuss this. When we do a particular circuit of workout consistently, our body adapts to that particular routine. This adaptation can be both specific or a particular body part- say biceps by doing biceps curls, legs by doing squats, improving aerobic fitness by running 3 to 5 kms daily or general for the entire body as a whole. Weight training, calisthenics or aerobic training can help someone lose fat as well as improve insulin sensitivity. You may think that this is linear- more training you do, more positive results & improvement you would see. However, this is a flawed assumption. Too much training can increase the chances of injury. We have discussed overtraining in our earlier blog.
Briefly, overtraining essentially means the body hasn’t had sufficient time to recover from training over an extended period of time & starts to shut down. The opposite is also true! For a beginner, picking up 30 kgs weight might be sufficient to stimulate adaptation. Picking 30 kgs consistently for a period of time say 3 to 4 weeks, your body will get adapted to it & hence it will not show improvement further. At the beginning, optimal training is all about you making sure you work hard & progress your training load at the correct rate- it should not be too less or too heavy.
So how should you plan your training progression?
In my workout experience, this is one the most difficult questions to answer! I have myself faced situations of both overtraining & undertraining. There are some guiding principles we can use & leverage to make better judgement & decisions. The first & the most important one is to progress slowly. Adaptation to exercise is cumulative! While you feel fresh on day 1, you may not feel energetic on day 7. It is better to slowly build up & be consistent than training hard one day & taking two to three days off for recovery. Big spike in exercise volume & intensity has been linked to high risk of injury. Please take a note of this. It is also important to note how you feel. If you feel easy, say, picking up 30 Kgs, then you are well placed to increase the weight load. On the flip side if you are feeling too exhausted or tired, you are picking up weights beyond your capacity & pushing yourself too hard. Subjective measures are as good predicting or forecasting fatigue as are objective measures.
However, this does not mean that you should feel tired. Athletes sometimes indulge in functional overreaching- temporarily increasing training load to overload their bodies and shifting to a period of relative recovery in order to bring the body at a recovered stage. There are certain periods in our training when we need to take the pause & deload. For instance if you are competing for a sport, it is a good idea to decrease your training either in terms of duration, intensity or frequency during a certain period before the race. This is called taper & athletes generally use this to improve their competition performance. There are other times when you need to deload your physical training – when you are ill or you are overstressed for other activities in your life such as meeting some project deadlines given that exercise itself stresses our body & we have to adapt our body when other stress is increased.
Most training programs require a certain period of time when training load is decreased to help our body to recover. This has been common in 4 week training blocks having 3 weeks of increasing load & one week of deload. There is no standard 28 days workout cycle for every individual. As such there is huge standard deviation & variations between individuals as to what is the best training setup. Monitoring your recovery on a regular basis helps you to know how you are feeling and this can act as a building block on how hard you should train.
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