Comunicación intercultural C1 y C2

No matter how well you manage your training and keep your stress in check, you might find that you hit a wall after 4-6 months of training. It won’t be physical. You might notice that you feel more soreness than usual, maybe the aches and pains acting up a little more, maybe some nagging tendinitis. Otherwise you feel good, without any of the expected “overtraining” feelings, but the spark’s gone. You’re just sick of training.

When that happens, I think that you’re as close as you’ll get to genuine overtraining by way of lifting weights. You lose the desire to go to the gym, you have no motivation to train. You’ve gone stale when, just a few days before, you were ready to go squat. When this happens after several months of high workloads, you can almost bet that you’re dabbling with emotional exhaustion. You’re literally sick of training.

The problem is all the more insidious because you won’t see it coming. You’ve learned to ignore the sickness symptoms, but the accumulation of allostatic wear-and-tear is inevitable with any productive training. Over a span of 2-3 months it’s not a problem, but you eventually reach a tipping point where the cumulative stress boils over.

Don’t panic, though. You can be saved.

If you notice this happening, the first thing to do is handle the symptoms. Mild doses of anti-inflammatories help both with physical pain but also in controlling cytokine production, which can be useful in blunting the feedback to the brain which triggers the central symptoms.

The key thing, though, is getting the skillet off the fire: remove the cause and the symptoms settle down on their own.

Plain old rest is one way to do this. Stay home, eat good food, and relax instead of worrying about your squat. Don’t be shy, either. Take two, even three weeks, and get your head out of the gym. That’s one option, though I don’t like it very much.

John Broz says to keep going through these dark times. “You can always squat the bar,” says Broz. Keep moving, rather than retreating to the couch, even if you’re only doing a whole lot of reps with the bar. You’re keeping muscles and joints mobile, and more importantly, you’re keeping in the habit.

I think the not-stopping part is key. Stopping means you lose your momentum, and it’s hard to get back when you’re feeling mentally burned out. Do something, even if it’s just body-weight squats or kettlebell swings. Active rest is better than atrophying on the couch.

Remember the Longtails strategy. Ups need downs, and light means light. Light doesn’t mean that you show up and think, gee, I feel pretty good so maybe I’ll work up to 95%, and oh what the hell, I’m already here so might as well take that shot at a new PR.

Light means light. Light means that the weights feel way too easy and you leave before you’re anywhere near tired. It means feeling like you wasted a workout. You feel like you didn’t go anything? Good. That’s the point.

What can you do for light days?

If you’re going by autoregulation, keep everything at an R P E of 7 or 8. With a planned-out training max, cap yourself at 60% for a set of 3-5 and call it a day. Everything should feel fresh and snappy, so if you have a day where 50% of your usual training max feels slow, you’re done. No arguing. Go home.

If you’ve been in the gym 5-6 days (or more) every week, scale that back to two or three. Keep mobile at home with body-weight exercises, stretching, and mobility drills.

I’m less interested in treating “active rest” as damage-control. That implies that we’ve done something “bad”, that we’ve “overtrained”, rather than simply dealing with a natural consequence of a hard-training life. A Longtails strategy means that ups will require inevitable downs, and this is for our benefit.

I’d rather treat this as a long-term wave: we spend a few months going all-in. Now it’s time to throttle back and train lighter for awhile. Just as your daily and weekly workouts will self-organize into a program, as if by magic, your yearly schedule will naturally break itself into phases.

This all assumes you have a flexible schedule, of course. If you’re an athlete with specific competitive seasons or events, you’ll need to plan accordingly, but otherwise, why not let things develop as they will?

You’re a step ahead if you keep records, logging your weights and your R P E scores and any abnormal good or bad feelings that might be relevant. Did you feel “on fire”?

Were you unusually down? Get in a habit of record those details for a few months and you’ll notice trends.

My suggestion is to not rely solely on feelings, as they will lie to you, but on feelings combined with performance. Feeling bad by itself can mean anything. Feeling bad and then having a bad workout means something.

For me a bad workout isn’t when I feel okay but grind at 90%. Neither is a day when I feel awful but still hit 95% pretty easily. Grinding on a single at 80% and feeling awful at the same time? That’s a bad day.

If you have access to any sort of H RV measurement, through a heart-rate monitor or online testing tools, or even the nifty plethysmograph smartphone apps which use cameras to do a quick and dirty estimate, that’s another tool you can use.

I don’t believe that any single H RV measurement tells you much, as per the current thoughts on establishing how “ready” you are to train ― I’ve had days where I’ve been stressed off the charts by HRV but still knocking over workouts like nothing.

A negative trend over time, though, and especially combined with feeling bad and underwhelming performances, can be a good sign you need a break. You can tolerate that

“excited” state for awhile, but even a well-conditioned body with well-managed training needs time to bleed off the wear-and-tear of fatigue.

If you’re willing and able to do be honest and take the down time when you need it,

then you can autoregulate your rest days and deload weeks. I will say that I think this approach works best as a group effort, even if it’s just you and a training partner. One brain can lie. A group can have a more objective eye.

For that reason, I think that you’re better off with scheduled breaks and even yearly blocks as a solo lifter. Even the Bulgarians took light and easy weeks once a month, and entire light cycles every few months. Penciling in deload weeks, a light cycle every 4-6 months, and even breaking your year into something like “heavy strength” and “light bodybuilding” phases means that you have reason to take the downtime and less incentive to skip it. The game plan takes your ego out of the picture.

But remember, you don’t even have to stick to that schedule if you find yourself overwhelmed, and if you’re exceptionally beat up, take two weeks or four weeks of casual training to recharge. I think that the mental reset is more important than the physical when you feel burn-out coming on, and flexibility is always the paramount concern.

In my experience, losing your motivation for training and falling out of the habit is the hardest thing to recover from, and preventing that is always better than trying to fix it later.

Remember: if you don’t do it yourself, it will be done for you.