Hot answers tagged rest
38
Evidence shows that more than 5 days a week training increases your risk of musculoskeletal injury.
Rest is physically necessary so that the muscles can repair, rebuild and strengthen -- continuous training can actually weaken it. Without sufficient time to repair, the body will continue to breakdown from intensive exercise.
Overtraining often occurs from ...
14
Without rest, you will build muscle mass quicker than your supporting organs can build and adjust to enable their proper use. At that point, you will hit a plateau which you will be unable to cross. However, this does not hold true for aerobic exercise, where the Mayo Clinic suggests 30 minutes daily. This is more for muscle building and strength training.
13
If you are looking to build mass, you should rest 45-60 seconds between sets of 8-12 repetitions for optimal gains. This timing builds optimal muscle mass and hypertrophy.
If instead you are looking to improve your strength or endurance, you should be looking at a 3-4 minute break between sets. You'll want 4-6 repetitions with heavier resistance for ...
11
If you want size, you don't want to rest very long - perhaps under a minute between sets. Your goal in the gym is to get your muscles as fatigued as possible as quickly as possible (and then go home to eat!)
I'm currently doing a hybrid workout to gain size (but I still want to work on strength a little, which is generally my long-term goal) and my workout ...
10
Exercise depends on several factors:
your muscles for doing the actual work and their local storage of energy;
your blood as a transfer system of O2/CO2 and energy;
your heart for making the blood flow;
your lungs as a transfer system of O2/CO2;
your liver as a supplier of energy;
your nerves for stimulating your muscles.
So depending on the intensity of ...
9
Among other things, sleep deprevation will effect metabolism, glucose response, and hormone production.
If you have severely reduced sleep (less than 4 hours per night) your hormones will be insufficient to recover from stressful weight training and your stored glucose levels will be too low for significant endurance training (>60 minutes).
You can train ...
9
You do have the right basic concept that low weight exercises can help build smaller muscles. However, it does require a better understanding of kinesiology (exercise science) to know which small muscles need help, how often, and when.
For example, lifters who focus on bench press and rows will have the major muscle groups exercised. However, the rotator ...
8
Here is an excellent excerpt regarding rest from the Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding written by the famous Arnold Schwarzenegger:
It is important to pace yourself properly through a workout. If you
try to train too fast, you risk cardiovascular failure before you have
worked the muscles enough. Also, you may have tendency to get sloppy
and ...
8
First, a bit about physiology. Just like some people have big feet and some people have small feet, some people have big hearts and some people have small hearts. Those that have smaller hearts have higher heart rates in general; their resting rates won't be as low and their maximum rates may be higher. That's just natural variability. It's also generally ...
7
It's not always necessary to focus so diligently on "out-of-the-way" muscles, but for many athletes with prior injuries or non-athletes it is.
More important than exercises like this is programming a lifting regimen that is well-balanced. Pushes like the bench press should be balanced with pulls like rows or pull-ups, squats should be complemented with ...
7
Without knowing your goals, your training plan, the time you spend in the gym, the workload you put in the gym, it's going to be difficult to prescribe anything that will 100% work. However, there are a few principles you can go by:
Set both short term and long term goals and work to beat them.
Well rounded programs include strength, hypertrophy, ...
6
Overview
Your supplements are called copious sleep, hydration (with milk if it's part of your diet, water if not), and food. You know--eggs, vegetables, olive oil, meat, butter, greens, starches.
Olympic lifting coach Greg Everett recommends walking, massage, self-myofascial release, and hot baths on rest days as well.
Beyond those, supplements are good ...
6
Your recovery will suffer some in the short term. Most of your muscle strengthening and adaptations happen while you are asleep. However, babies do learn to sleep through the night fairly quickly. At most you are looking at a month of the kind of sleep patterns that would cause problems.
So the short answer is "yes" you can go to the gym, lift weights, ...
6
You are correct to be suspicious of the "one muscle a day" prescription. While that method works fine, it is perfectly possible and very productive to do whole-body exercises every time you work out.
Many Olympic weightlifters do what's called Bulgarian training, which is training five or more days a week, sometimes several times a day. They use whole-body ...
5
Even though stress can have a lot of negative effects on your mood and energy levels, a lot of these effects aren't directly caused by stress.
Instead it's the actions that stress causes which have the bulk of the negative effects.
A common pattern:
Bad Effect (i.e stress) -> Bad Action (i.e. poor sleep) -> Bad Result.
It's important to distinguish this ...
5
Without resting, you won't have enough energy to properly break down your muscle tissue so that it can build back up. If your goal is to build muscle, then to get the best results, you need to break down that tissue.
If you're tired from doing other exercises, you won't achieve the most repetitions in your sets.
5
My source for flexibility is Stretching Scientifically, by Thomas Kurz:
Kurz has this to say:
Isometric stretches, to increase flexibility, should be done at least twice a week, but it all depends on your recovery. If your muscles are sore then no isometric stretching should be done as long as soreness is felt. Wallin et al. (1985) recommends ...
4
I think a short nap might be a good idea if you are very tired. You want to be well-rested when lifting weights in order to be able to fully work your muscles, not to mention alertness and safety. However, I think you'll want to keep your nap to 20-30 minutes or else you'll go into a deeper sleep (see When I wake up after a two hour nap I feel like I was hit ...
4
If you're working the same muscles each day, you're likely exercising far too much. Typically, a person should only work a muscle every 2-3 days. Check out the chart in this answer to "Is it healthy to exercise a muscle when it's still sore?" and a similar chart as figure 2 in this answer to "Importance of Rest Days". The optimum time to work a muscle out ...
4
Supercompensation would be some of the explanation if the goal is to get in better shape.
As I understand it: When the body rests it creates more muscle mass than what was actually destroyed during the exercise.
4
Well, these are two different types of stress...
When you are stressed from negative emotions they have to be released somewhere. The gym or boxing, or any kind of sport will do. But when you are overtired, then you need to rest... It is simple, you cannot cure tireness with work(pushing weigths is also work), you need to have a good meal and a good ...
4
According to Practical Programming (p. 148) the continuum of adaption persistence (from most persistent to least persistent) is:
Hypertrophy
Strength
Power
Technique
Muscular Endurance
Cardiovascular Endurance
Significant loss of VO2 max (cardiovascular endurance) can occur in a
matter of days, whereas the significant decay of added muscle mass
...
4
Anecdotal answer: I am also a new father not getting much sleep. I made it a point to continue working out 3 times week to keep in good health and to get out of the house a little bit. I definitely notice that my performance is not as good on the days when I have not slept well. However, I also feel better, and sleep better (and go to sleep faster) on days I ...
4
From Training Dimensions:
Greasing the Groove is a technique used to practice any strength movement at a high volume without requiring a long period of recovery. If you are new to pullups, greasing the groove allows you to practice pullups often, teaching your central nervous system to perform the movement more efficiently. In greasing the groove, you ...
4
Typically, no. What I've been doing is getting through the warmups as quickly as I can without rushing. When I'm done with the warmup work, I allow myself a proper amount of rest before the first work set.
How much rest you need really depends on you. If you have a head cold, or are running on too little sleep, you may need an extra few seconds after ...
3
Like Tsvetan says, you can't cure tireness. BUT you can cure the stress you get from work type stuff...
My advice to you is to put some PLAY in your training. Make it fun. Don't just do boring routine repetitive movements, but try to add some game characterestics to it.
Winning should not be your main goal here. PLAY itself is.
It brings your MIND & ...
3
If we want to grow muscle, we need to give it a reason to grow.
This reason (ie the stimulus) can be a 185 lb bench press or a 400 lb bench press - it all depends on the person.
If the stimulus is not enough, we will not grow. If it is too much, we will not grow either. If it is just right, however, and we allow for proper recovery (sleep + nutrients), we ...
3
It has everything to do with the person. Top athletes train every day, and a lot of hours. Usually, they have spent some years making the body able to withstand a lot of training.
I was the fastest running youth in Norway some years back in 60-200m, and trained about 20 hours a week in the weeks with the most load. That was when between the age of 15 and ...
3
If I find myself wanting more time between warm-up sets than it takes to change the plates, I know something is wrong. Most likely I'm not recovered enough, indicating my program or eating or sleeping or stress is messed up. It's not a big problem, but it's something to note. I should be getting warm and mentally ready for my work sets, not getting tired.
...
3
Here are some things I do (this is strength training, not body building, though):
If I missed one or two workouts, repeat the last completed workout (not increasing weights on any of my lifts).
If I miss more than that, I deload 5-10% and just slowly rebuild as my program would normally progress.
If I miss a lot of time (usually just on one exercise due to ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
