Overtraining systemic vs. localized?

R

R_Coyote

New Member
Forgive me if this has been covered before.

If a full body 24 hour training frequency will likely cause over training, and over training is largely a systemic CNS issue, then it seems that we could hold back the total volume of whole body compound lifts to say one set per 48 hours, while at the same time perform a isolation movement, say biceps curl every day, even twice a day, to bring up lagging body parts w/o causing over training?

unless over training is also a localized effect.

make any sense?
 
Yes.
Working isolations on the biceps and such will put relatively little stress on the CNS.
Frank Zane used to bring up a lagging body part by working that one body part exclusively every day for 2 weeks. This is an extreme example of your hypothesis.
 
Another issue to consider is immune suppression due to overtraining. CNS fatigue in and of itself will likely only lead to loss of strength and a decrease in performance, both detrimental to hypertrophy mind you, but immune suppression is why people who overtrain end up sick.
 
Wait a minute. You guys are saying we can train a muscle like biceps something like 6 days a week and still grow the muscle, and not suffer from overtraining? You would just have to keep the volume per bicep workout low, right? Thanks.
 
Yes. Forget about overtraining.

What make you muscles hypertrophy is the presence of microtrauma. The fact that you make microtrauma has nothing to do with overtraining.

What you must do is to make microtrauma every workout. It is not that obvious because your muscles increase their resistance to microtrauma progressively. This is called the Repeated Bout Effect. You have to increase the load every workout to increase counter the RBE to continue to make microtrauma.

Since your strength cannot increase quickly enough to garantee a sufficient overload, HST uses a period of deconditionning during which you do nothing in order to reduce the resistance of your muscles to microtrauma ( loose the RBE adaptation). Then you can start with a light load that can make microtrauma again and overload quickly after to overcome the RBE.

Hope it makes sense. :)

HDD.
 
When people talk of overtraining, they are referring to overtaxing your Central Nervous System (CNS). You can't really overtrain your muscles other than by training so hard so infrequently that you can barely move from the pain of DOMS after every workout.

You could literally train your muscles several times a day every day. However, the harder your workouts are (i.e., the heavier the weights are, the more anaerobic the workout is, the more exhausted you feel at the end, etc.) the more taxing they will be on your CNS. Full body workouts are very taxing, but workouts on just a few specific muscles tend not to be.

If you still question how you can train so much so often and not "overtrain", consider marathon runners who run one hour or more every day. That's a lot of training, but they can do that because they aren't overtaxing their CNS.
 
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]You can't really overtrain your muscles other than by training so hard so infrequently that you can barely move from the pain of DOMS after every workout.
Click to expand...

Well this is not entirely true; an unbearing degree of myotrauma (much more than we can accomplish during many repetitions of active, unaccustomed eccentric contractions) can be considered "chronic myotrauma" leading to necrosis (the death of cells/tissues). Hence the reason why we deem most myotrauma as being "acute". However, there is a varying thought that chronic myotrauma is inherently linked to musculoskeletal hyperplasia (the formation of new muscle fibers). The research supporting this claim (sadly) does not have a degree of rigidity toward a single conclusion, so at this point (from my understanding) it is merely hypothesis.
 
ilFacell wrote:
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]an unbearing degree of myotrauma (much more than we can accomplish during many repetitions of active, unaccustomed eccentric contractions) can be considered "chronic myotrauma" leading to necrosis (the death of cells/tissues).
Click to expand...
Thanks for clarifying what I was trying to say.

So, what could cause such an unbearing degree of myotrauma?
 
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]So, what could cause such an unbearing degree of myotrauma?
Click to expand...

Many unaccustomed, active eccentric contractions; there is not a finite limit or a calculation to determine what degree of myotrauma can be considered acute or chronic. Equally, I doubt that there is a human whom has the neural ability to voluntarily induce chronic myotrauma.

Dont sweat it
laugh.gif
 
[b said:
Quote[/b] (Insane_Man @ June 16 2004,5:35)]Yes.
Working isolations on the biceps and such will put relatively little stress on the CNS.
Frank Zane used to bring up a lagging body part by working that one body part exclusively every day for 2 weeks. This is an extreme example of your hypothesis.
Click to expand...
Stuart McRobert used to work a single muscle every couple of hours for at least 24 hours and then leaving it for a while. He did an example for a pec workout (or was it triceps), then left it without direct work for 2 weeks. After the rest period the muscle was still larger than it was before the 24 hour workout.
 
This is the same idea as the "one-day arm cures" and "bigger biceps in 6 days" stuff you'll see at t-nation.com -- increasing the time under a certain load. It'll probably only work well for the smaller muscles in your upper body and maybe calves, otherwise you'll get too darn wornout.
 
BUMP


sorry, but I thought I've read many places that a muscle takes 48 hours to 'heal' it's self.

Could I say do my normal HST cycle buy exclude biceps, then PARELLEL to that cycle do a 'double' HST cycle just for the biceps but do it ever day so it takes the same time amount as the normal HST cycle. (ie. do a 12 week HST cycle on just the biceps but do it every day so it only takes 6 weeks).
 
What you're saying here is that you would like to work one muscle on your off day, is that right ?

For one I would rather work my triceps than my biceps because the bicep is a tiny muscle (I read somewhere that your tongue is larger) while the triceps has a lot more potential.

Also, I believe this would put too much stress on your muscle (maybe not the system since the extra load really isn't that much measured in weight and damage) and I don't think the result would be what you expected from it. Note that all the "cures" (as Brian called it - good word for it, by the way) dictates a break after a short period to let the muscle heal properly.
 
Just another question here fellas....i'm not too sure about this but i was wondering about CNS fatigue and i just want to confirm my understanding. Say if you did do too much leg exercise which were isolations....say leg curls on monday and did an extreme amount[100 sets of 5@ high intensity]. How does this effect your CNS? Will you be able to do bicep curls the next day? Is CNS fatigue no matter what bodypart you've overworked? or is it independant as in if you overtrained your leg it doesn't mean you wont be able to train your arms tomorrow....do you get what i'm asking?

I ask because i see some ppl having push and pull days back to back like on mon and tue....some might say this is ok because they are not related hence their CNS ability is not linked. Some might say this isn;t ok because CNS is a whole body thing and not restricted to any muscle group.
hope you guys understood that.

Illface incidently what would be a real life example of someone beinf able to experience chronic myotrauma? If nobody has the neural ability to achieve this.....what might induce it? or it can't be done?
 
Of course you have the localized overtraining of your muscles, and the general overtaining of the body.

If you train your arms a hell of a lot, say 20 sets to failure, it's not gonna make your body overtrain. However, the nervous system of your arms will be so damaged that it will take some time to regain your strength on your arms.

What limits your frequency for a particular muscle is how long it takes for its strength to recover, because you can't afford to loose strength because you want to continue to overload.
 
Ok if that is so....does that mean you still can train your arms everyday if you were on a specific routine to build up a lagging bodypart. I mean you'll be frying your arms on mon then you look to train them back on tue?...is that possible. Does it take a shorter time for it to recover because you're only training your arms therfore the localized CNS fatigue is gone by tommorrow? Ive read a few articles lately on bringing up a lagging bodypart by training it everyday...can you explain how this is done? will the localized fatigue recover quicker as you are not training other bodyparts or training low volume other bodyparts?
 
wait is that overtraining of the localized body part refered to as the periphery[sp?] nervous system overtraining?...sorry to sound abit slow...lol...cant get my head around the concept here. If so...does this recover quicker compared to the CNS overtraining as in you'll be good to go tomorrow with bringning up the certain bodypart again?...so if this is so....then do we fry our periphery nervous system of a certain bodypart everytime we train it and thats why you et the inability to go on for that bodypart but you're good to go next with another bodypart?
 
Naz, systemic overtraining can be both, an overaccumulation of localized training efforts, mostly larger muscle groups, or a reaction to overtaxing the entire neural system.

Training arms, bi or tri's can be accomplished everyday, if desired. Even training the whole body can be done everyday if desired, with little to no overtraining effect. Overtraining or actually more correctly overtaxing the nervous system is accomplished when heavy loads are lifted to failure, endurance exericise is taken to exhaustion, or other physical, emotional stresses are imposed repeatedly beyond the nervous systems ability to recover.

So training your arms everyday for specialization may not induce an overtaxed nervous system, unless there are other factors that this additional training compounds. A simple way to find out is, since Overtraining is a neural aspect and so is strength, if your strength decreases from workout to workout then you are overtaxing your nervous system.

I personally have been training this way for this entire cycle, whole body 4X per Week, Arms(bis & tris), calfs and some additional shoulder work here and there every day except one per week. I have not truly been sick(cold,flu) in the last 12 years. I have had injuries (due to stupidity) which is why I started this to begin with.
 
2 weeks ago before I deconditionned I became overtrained. This had not happened to me in a long time. I was training 3 days on/1 off while cutting on a low carb. It left me really exhausted and I felt I was even a bit sick. I stopped because I prefered to deconditionn right away. 2 days later I had recovered.

So it takes quite a lot to overtrain your body and it doesn't take that long to recover.
 
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