Q: Your newsletter on how you got sick after overtraining struck a chord. That happened to me also. What exactly were you doing different? Were you still using the workout from Old Man, Young Muscle?
A: I discussed a lot of damage reduction strategies in the newsletters prior to the one on overtraining. My illness spurred much of that, and I’m now applying those…
After I became ill and looked at my training, I realized I was using a bastardized version of the original OMYM workout…
Why had I deviated from the workout that got me these spectacular gains at age 62?
Chalk it up to experimentation or too much motivation or flat-out stupidity. Any way you slice it, I had driven myself into an overtraining rut over the holidays…
The deviation I regret the most was shelving Speed Sets a few months prior. As I’ve mentioned, those sets with 1.5-second reps reduce the damage from “garbage negatives.”
If you lower the weight slowly on too many sets, you trigger excessive damage without a lot of hypertrophic return…
In the OMYM workouts, I was doing around half my sets in Speed style. Before I got ill, I was doing zero Speed Sets. In other words, I was lifting in one second and lowering in three on every set.
So I had essentially doubled the number of slower negatives at every workout. Not good from a damage standpoint.
I had also upped my sets here and there. My workouts pushed to 55 minutes each, up from 35. My new cable setup had me experimenting with lots of new exercises and angles. Again, not good…
While some of the extra workout time was due to adjusting cable height, positioning the bench, etc., it was mostly because of added volume. At age 63, I shouldn’t be experimenting with volume increases…
If I wanted to add a set for chest due to it lagging, reducing a set somewhere else would be best in order to keep my workouts at around 40 minutes three days a week.
Note: For a chart of stretch-position exercises for each muscle, as well as the ideal and contracted-position moves, see pages 42 and 43 of Old Man, Young Muscle.
Sculpt your perfect physique: Get the ideal exercise for each muscle, the best stretch and contracted add-on moves for ultimate mass, complete 35-minute workouts, exercise start/finish photos, and details on building muscle fast and efficiently in Old Man, Young Muscle.
And you still get The Muscle-On, Belly-Gone “Diet” ebook FREE for a limited time when you add Old Man, Young Muscle to your mass-building library. Go HERE.
Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
—Steve Holman
www.X-Rep.com
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