If you train with weights correctly, you will turn your muscles on. This simply means that they will be stimulated to get bigger and stronger. Conversely, if you don’t train correctly, your muscles will never get turned on, or they will turn on to start with, but end up shutting down by the end of your workout.
Some people never really put forth enough effort to get bigger or stronger. Without sufficient training stress, the human body will not change because it can handle a mild training stress in its current condition. Other people train hard, but they overdo it. They strain, struggle, and brutalize themselves to gain strength and size. The end result is that their bodies shut down and refuse to grow bigger or stronger. Your body does not want to get stronger and allow you to lift even more if it is already overwhelmed with the amount of sets, reps and weight you are currently lifting. It is important to lift the right amount of weight, for the right amount of sets and reps. The right amount will vary from person to person, and can also increase over time as your condition improves.
Energy, Strength Level, and The Pump
If it is important to train hard enough to stimulate size and strength, but it is also important to refrain from training too hard in order to avoid over training, then how do you determine the right amount of training? There are three basic things that you will need to be aware of to determine this including:
1. The amount of energy you have during workouts, as well as the amount of energy you have between workouts.
2. Your strength level from workout to workout, and your strength level within a workout
3. An awareness of whether your muscles are becoming increasingly pumped, or have become fully pumped, or are starting to diminish in the amount of pump during a workout.
Awareness Of Your Energy Leve
Be aware of your energy level. Are you tired before you even start to work out? It could be that you haven’t fully recovered from your last workout. If this is the case, you need to give yourself more time between workouts to ensure that you are fully recovered before starting a new workout.
It could also be that you are doing too many other activities, or you are not getting enough sleep. The only way to solve this is to cut back on your schedule so that you are not so busy, and to also make sure you get enough sleep.
When considering your energy level, it is also important to monitor the amount of energy you have during workouts. In my opinion, you should still have a decent amount of energy when you finish your workout. The more exhausted you are at the end of your workout, the more time it is going to take to recover. Long recovery time between workouts translates into less workouts per week. I suggest training each muscle group at least twice per week. If you train properly and don’t overdo it, many of you will be able to do three or more workouts per week for each muscle group.
Monitor Your Strength Level
When trying to determine how much training is enough, maintain an awareness of your strength level during your workout. I do not recommend training yourself into a severely weakened state by the end of your workouts. Ideally, you should be nearly as strong at the end of your workout as you were at the beginning. If you do a tri-set or a giant set consisting of several consecutive sets for the same muscle group with no rest between sets, you will certainly be weaker when you finish the tri-set or giant set. However, if you rest for five minutes and find that you are within 5% of your starting strength level, it is doubtful that you haver overtrained. In contrast, if you find that you are still quite weak after resting five minutes, it is a sign that your body is shutting down because you pushed too hard. Be strong when you finish.
How Pumped Are Your Muscles?
A final consideration you should be aware of during a work is to monitor the amount of pump you are experiencing in your muscles. The pump simply refers to blood filling a muscle that has been worked. A fully pumped muscle will feel very tight and will be swollen up due to an increase of blood flow to the muscle. A partially pumped muscle will be a little bigger and feel a little tighter than it did before you started exercising. A muscle that is not pumping during exercise will not look any bigger or feel any tighter than it did before you started exercising. The attainment of a full pump is the best-case scenario, but a partial pump is ok. Zero pump suggests that your muscles are not turning on. The ideal is to work your way up to a full pump and finish your workout with a full pump.
The degree to which your muscles are pumping up is generally a more important consideration for bodybuilders than powerlifters. Powerlifters who do low reps and rest three or more minutes between sets may gain a lot of strength without experiencing much pump. This is not bad if you are more concerned about gaining strength than muscle size.
For those who are trying to achieve a full pump, it is important not to push to the point where your muscles start to shut down and lose their pump. It is better to push to the point where your muscles are fully pumped and turned on, and to keep them turned on and pumped as long as possible. However, don’t push to the point of shutting your muscles down with the loss of a pump.
Advice From Vince Gironda
Listen to the advice of Vince Gironda, a trainer of several champions during the 1950’s and 1960’s
“All bodybuilders have looked in the mirror during a workout and noticed that they were getting a terrific pump in a particular muscle group. Usually this is encouraging, so you continue to train that body-part.
But after a certain point, you notice that the pump is suddenly gone. Then you should remember the last set on which you still retained the pump. That’s the set you should have quit on.
If you do too many sets, the body goes into shock. It does that to protect itself from injury. If you could continue to pump a muscle, you’d rupture capillaries and injure yourself. That’s why your pump goes down. In other words, the loss of pump (over-tonus) is caused by overtraining.
Over-tonus also occurs in cases of generalized overtraining, when the muscles begin to slowly shrink, regardless of how much you train them (or probably because of how much you train them).
I think that anything over 8-10 total sets per body-part will eventually lead to overtraining and overtonus.”
Leroy Colbert
Leroy Colbert was the first man from the 1950’s to develop 21 inch arms without steroids. If you listen to him, he definitely believed that you had to train hard to get bigger, but you also had to be cautious not to train too hard. His way of saying this was that you had to have “that feeling.” The feeling he was talking about was an instinctive sense of when he did the right amount of work with the right amount of effort. He tried to put this feeling into words in a video when he said,
““I just had that you know…, it’s like something fascinating because you just know when you did enough, when to rest and when to stop, no more. It’s not a number that you wrote down, I just knew it was enough for the day.
Some of those guys spent a whole day training their arms completely oblivious to the rest, recovery aspect of training. They thought the more they would do….none of them ever got nowhere near me because they didn’t have that feeling. I could tell you the truth, I don’t know where that feeling comes from. If you paid me a billion dollars, I don’t know (how), I just know. I said, well that’s enough for now. And then I continued to train and continued to grow and added different exercises to the routine. And just kept growing and growing. Of course, that’s the thing that we instinctively knew and a lot of people don’t know today.”
“If you want to continue to grow, you got a have a feeling of when to go next. If you stay too long, it’s detrimental to your growth, if you train too hard it’s detrimental to your growth and not a soul in the world can tell you that but yourself.”
You Can Learn When You Are Turning On and Turning Off
Leroy may have had a difficult time describing the feeling he was trying to achieve that led to his exceptional results, but don’t let that feeling be so mystical that you can never find it for yourself. You can still learn to tune into your own body and be aware of your energy level, your strength level, and the degree of pump you are experiencing. If you get good at monitoring these things, you will start to learn the difference between when your muscles are turning on, and when they are turning off. Another way to say it is that you will learn the difference between doing too much, not enough, and the right amount. Best of training to you. God bless.
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