No Pain No Gain”, “Go To Failure”, “ 1 rep more” is often overlooked in the fitness industry. I can’t name a single motivational bodybuilding video that doesn't use one of these statements.
If you've listened to them, and you followed their approach to training, there is a high percentage that you could possibly get injured or suffer from symptoms obtained from overtraining.
Injury risk and overtraining is something you definitely want to avoid.
Why do you ask? Do you risk becoming injured when you followed “No pain No gain “ approach?
If your body doesn't recover properly and you manage to run into fatigue.
Perhaps your training technique also slipped because of that?
Let’s get first into how training affects our body:
When we train, we stress our body with the extra load. Our body feels that we've stress them repeatedly, in reaction, and our body needs to adapt to it. But before the body adapts, it must recover.
Recovery is called SRA “Stimulus Recovery Adaptation” curve. Stress is the stimulus rest days and non- training hours are the recovery process, then the adaptation naturally occurs within our body and it becomes smarter at dealing with the stress process.
Take this scenario:
Josh went to the gym and trained chest on Monday. Then the next day went to the gym and repeated the same routine and trained chest again.
Do you see the mistake Josh made here?
he only used the “Stimulus” training process from SRA Curve. By not resting on Tuesday and then hitting the same muscle group the following day this resulted in negative affect.
Wednesday which was more optimal. resulted in Josh's technique reducing because he didn't implement the recover phase properly which has massively increased his risk to injury.
Why is Recovery important?
1-Manage Fatigue
When you incorporate rest days into your program and your training routine you won’t feel so sore when you train again. This will help you recover and replenish your muscles from the previous session helping refuel stores that were depleted.
2-Improve Fitness
Prioritizing the recovery process will make you perform better whilst training. Making you feel fresher and stronger will give you an extra boost to help get better results this is far better than going sore and fatigued. Makes sense right?
3-Prevent Injury Risk
When you don’t take rest days and train every day, your technique will reduce this will increase your risks. Because your nervous system hasn’t been given enough time to recover.
4-Allow Adaptations to occur
As previously discussed, The SRA curve must happen to maintain performance and achieve goals. You stress your body, it recovers, then adaptations occur and your body improves.
Ways to improve Recovery :
1-Sleep More:
Sleeping is an essential action of recovery. It affects our body tremendously. Especially our brain, nervous system and our muscles.
Consider Sleeping between 7-10 hours daily with 20-30mins nap afternoon.
2-Eat Enough Calories:
Calories and especially protein is from the most important things when it comes to recovery. How could your body recover if it is short in supplies? Eating enough calories and protein will make sure your body muscles grow and recover properly.
3-Massaging:
As the scientific literature is not clear about this at the moment, but in my personal opinion, I believe that getting some massage in your routine will make you and the body feel better and whilst relieving stress.
4-Handle Your Training:
Training too hard too often is going to make you over-trained.
Try to consider having some low sessions, medium sessions, and hard-smashing sessions. Also, don’t forget to get 1-2 days rest days per week as a minimum to aid with muscle recovery.
TRAIN HARD, BUT SMART!
