As I’m moving away from a dogmatic SSLP mindset, and adopting the BBM approach, I find myself a little unsure of how much is ‘too much’ training and GPP. Trying to distinguish discomfort from pain, the injury articles, nocebo etc has my head spinning a bit, especially when mixed with the foggy memories.
I needed to, and I have been, losing weight and inches off of my waist. There is still plenty of work to do. Mixing in GPP days as prescribed has helped this progress tremendously.
Predictably, as I get closer to target waist circumference and my weight decreases, my rate of loss decreases as well. I find myself wanting to add more GPP into my routine, but I don’t want to do more than is actually beneficial. I find off days a little more annoying than comforting, even if I’m a little rough around the edges.
How do you determine for yourself how much is ‘too much’ training and GPP vs. just put on your grown-up pants and do some more?
I think BBM generally recommend that the more active you are the better. So get 3/4 weight training days in and make sure you’re hitting (ideally exceeding) the recommended aerobic activity levels and you should be good.
I am doing a modified version of the Beginner Template and I have substantially increased the volume of GPP and to a smaller degree on the main lift days as well.
I think as long as you are not slowing your rate of progress you have nothing to worry about. I don’t think I have yet. There were two times when I think I did too much volume, once on bench and once on DL, each time I did an extra backoff set and wound up sore for 3 or 4 days afterward. But even then it wasn’t a big deal and it’s not certain it actually slowed my progress.
To me it doesn’t seem to relate to injury risk. Spikes in DL volume can definitely lead to back tweaks though.
The only time I think I might have run into this I was experiencing nightly, sometimes multiple times a night, wake up cramps (calf, feet, hamstrings usually, sometimes neck, ) that shot me out of bed and no sex drive. 6 1.5-2 hour resistance training + 24 miles a week running + 20-25K steps a day, every day. Refused to cut any of it out, but I wasn’t making progress (mile times weren’t going down, weight on the bar wasn’t changing).
Switched to more reasonable programming and it stopped. Took me a couple months to get over mentally (I felt really lazy, even the heaviest workout days were lighter than my lightest days before) but it was getting results so I didn’t argue with it.
Everyone’s different, so I can’t argue that there’s a point where it gets to be too much for others, but looking back I just don’t think I was recovering one day to the next.
