Before I ask the question, I’d like to say I realize that with proper training stress, RPE gauging, diet, and other factors I realize this wouldn’t be an issue to begin with - so I don’t think either of you can relate to this right now in your careers. But perhaps you could think of when you were first starting training.
The question is: Do you ever force yourself to lift when your body doesn’t feel like it? Should you “listen to your body”?
There are times where I can’t wait to get in the gym and tear it up. But there are times where I’ve really misgauged RPE the previous workout, had recovery issues for personal reasons, etc., and I’ve had the complete opposite desire - to not lift. However, I always have forced myself to go to the gym no matter what.
This discipline seems to have caused more harm than good these last few years - maybe its a better idea to push a workout to the next day, or take an extra day or two off if needed?
Or should you always hit the sniffing salts and caffeine pills and lift anyways, and eventually your body will adapt?
I’m not one of the docs, but I can assure you I, and they, do sometimes go to the gym and train because we know it’s what needs to be done for our goals. If I don’t “feel” like lifting, that simply doesn’t matter. I go and get the work done, even if life has made it so I need to lower the weight, shorten my rest times, and get in and out. If you are managing your overall training and your overall recovery, I do not see how this is doing more harm than good, so there might be something else going on.
Here’s the thing-getting strong is actually not easy. It’s actually pretty freaking tough to get really strong. But there might be a lot of things going on in your post here-you need to think long-term, keep training because you have decided that it matters to you, know it’s not easy, know that you need smart programming and you need to take care of yourself, know that our feelings often don’t mean we change much even though our feelings can matter sometimes, and since you’re training for life certainly do not go to smelling salts and more caffeine all the time. Those can both be used, but they are an added stress, and you don’t need to make every training session a high priority/balls to the wall session.
It’s interesting to hear you say shorter rest times - I’ve heard Austin also say that sometimes longer rest times causes more fatigue. I was naturally inclined to think longer rest times are good for days when you’re fatigued, but I suppose I’m wrong about this.
Where can I read about this? Or is it just as simple as keeping rest times shorter…? How short?
And if you keep rest times short, do you take a substantial amount of weight off the bar or do you just take off 5-10 pounds?
Do you know why shorter rest times are better for managing fatigue?
My diet is fine, my programming is fine (it comes from BBM), so those aren’t issues.
I think the issue might be that when I’m tired instead of taking weight off the bar and gauging RPE correctly, I get myself amped up even more and push myself even harder, thus digging deeper into my recovery reserves… I guess I have this mentality that when I’m tired it means I’m weak and need to get stronger by lifting heavier weights and pushing myself harder… this does me more harm than good because it actually makes me detrain or haunts progress over the long term even though I lift heavier weight initially.
When I am in the gym I like to listen to heavy metal, let loose and train as hard as possible. But I’m starting to think perhaps my training sessions are causing too much fatigue… maybe I need to “relax” more while I’m lifting?
Another issue too is that a year and a half ago I squatted a PR 400 for a set of 5. After that, I detrained quite a bit and ever since I’ve been trying to get back to where I was. Right now I am so detrained that doing 275 for a set of 5 would be really tough. So when I train I’m trying to make bigger jumps to get back to 400 for a set of 5 (and get my other lifts to where they previously were) but perhaps I need to just slow down and make smaller increments even if it takes forever to get back to 400.
Maybe greed is my issue when it comes to lifting. It’s just frustrating when you once lifted a reasonable amount of weight and now you struggle with a fraction of that.
Artificially extending your rest periods longer and longer allow you to handle heavier weights. As we have discussed elsewhere, heavier is not always better. We often keep rests in the 3-5 minute range.
This sounds likely, and is a good example of why heavier isn’t always better.
This also sounds likely to be a component of the issue here. It sounds like you’ve been through the process before, but you don’t actually want to remain patient and go through the process this time around.
Yes I’ve had this problem for quite some time now, and I believe I just found my answer - shorter rest times. I often times wait 7-10 minutes between sets to get the set complete, and I think that has probably been my problem along with pushing myself when I’m tired.
I think I got what I need now to make long term sustainable progress.