The research suggests that, on average, a muscle recovers from a workout after 48 hours, or two days. But, as Doug observed…
[After 48 hours] a muscle may have ‘recovered’ from the damage/trauma induced by the previous workout, but that says nothing about supercompensation that should follow.
In other words, if you’re seeking optimal hypertrophy, you want to recover, but you also must allow even more time for the growth phase to occur.
So how much time is enough, and how much is too much? A brutally intense workout with a lot of junk volume or damaging exercises would require even more time—in excess of 4 days—to recover and then produce growth.
Studies have shown that eccentric, or negative-stroke, overload workouts cause so much damage that it takes weeks to recover. Back to Doug…
There MUST be a theoretical ideal intensity, paired with an ideal frequency, for optimal gains. It can’t possibly be that less intensity and more frequency is automatically EQUAL to more intensity and less frequency. Otherwise, we might be tempted to work a muscle every hour, but with very light intensity……or bomb the hell out of the muscle and wait a week. I think it’s obvious that both of those are LESS productive alternatives.
A solution I mention in Old Man Young Muscle 2 that is built into the workout week is an extra day of rest after the more damaging workout. For example…
You train the upper-body muscles on Tuesday—and the add-on exercise is a stretch-position exercise. Stretch loading has been shown to create more damage and require extra recovery time…
Then four days, or 96 hours, later, you train again, but this time you use a contracted-position add-on, which is less damaging. Now you have three days, or 72 hours, to recover and then grow before your next workout on Monday.
Basically, our attitude should be that we’re going to seduce a muscle into growth. We’re going to poke it and prod it, but not pound it. Then, we do it again “soon,” when it reaches the peak of the supercompensation phase—not after that peak passes.
That is precisely how the OMYM2 workout works—you poke and prod the muscle with three to four sets, most of which are subfailure; however, at one workout you poke it harder with a bit more unique damage using stretch overload. That requires an extra day of rest to produce growth.
And you also get variation in fiber recruitment by following the ideal exercise with a different add-on move at every other workout—stretch at one and contracted at the next.
Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
—Steve Holman and Jonathan Lawson
www.X-Rep.com
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