Here’s an eye-opening quote from hypertrophy researcher Chris Beardsley on muscle repair and recovery:
It’s often assumed that muscle glycogen is replenished rapidly after a strength-training workout, just as it is replaced quickly after aerobic exercise. Yet, the presence of muscle damage greatly impairs the replenishment of muscle glycogen after exercise. While muscle glycogen is often replaced within 24 to 36 hours after aerobic-exercise workouts, delays of up to 10 days can occur after muscle-damaging eccentric training workouts. Such delays cannot be removed by eating carbohydrates, which indicates that the problem is not the availability of glucose to the muscle fibers but our ability to push that glucose into the muscle fibers… [That] inhibits hypertrophy from being stimulated. Low muscle glycogen is therefore another mechanism by which the presence of muscle damage can inhibit gains in subsequent workouts.
Once again, too much damage during your workouts will delay full recovery in a number of ways, such as the replenishment of glycogen in muscle tissue.
And you can’t accelerate repair by eating more carbs—the damage you’ve inflicted impairs the ability to replenish…
Beardsley mentions eccentric training, which is the lowering, or negative, stroke. That’s the very reason you don’t want to do too many sets with a slow lowering phase. Too much damage risks recovery draining and overtraining.
It’s why the OMYM workout has about half the sets in Speed style, a 1/1 cadence, to de-emphasize the negative stroke…
That results in less damage to allow faster glycogen replenishment and muscle recovery for optimal growth—rather than repair—after your workout.
OMYM is your efficient fast-mass blueprint: Learn how to accelerate your mass gains with the STX method, Speed Sets, and complete ideal-exercise-based training. The 35-minute workouts also include the best stretch and contracted add-on moves. Get 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
Former Editor in Chief, Iron Man Magazine
www.X-Rep.com
Recommended
Avoid These Fat Loss Fails
Don’t follow another fat-loss strategy until you’ve read this…
If you’re struggling to burn belly fat no matter how much cardio you do or how “clean” you eat, then listen up… Because you’re likely committing one of these 3 feminizing fat loss fails… And they’re killing any chance you have of achieving your most impressive physique to date.
Even though these 3 Feminizing Fat Loss Fails have probably been a part of your fat-loss programs in the past, here’s the good news… They don’t have to define your fitness journey anymore because…
Starting today, you can take a revolutionary new approach to getting lean without damaging your metabolism, shriveling up your male hormones, or spending endless hours on the treadmill…”
–> Discover the hormone trick that will turn your body into a fat-burning furnace.