AmpedTraining Blog
2010 June 22 | 5 Comments »
By Matt
Solutions?
Anti-inflammatories. 400-800mg of ibuprofen taken immediately post-workout, on up to 6-8 hours later. I am absolutely loving this strategy. I train at 7am. I take 400mg at 10pm before bed.
Warm baths with epsom salts are nice and relaxing. Warming or lightly working (via stretching, light repetitive movements, etc) the muscles and relaxing mentally is a good idea in general.
If oral anti-oxidants were absorbed worth a damn, they might be worth consideration. Things like green tea, vitamin E, ginger, turmeric (the curcumin in it) and other neutraceuticals show promise and are cheap, but may not be absorbed enough to matter. I drink a lot of green tea and spice my foods anyway, because I enjoy the taste.
The body may eventually adapt to arbitrarily large training loads. It’s also possible that Broz and that Chaos and Pain guy are right and overtraining is something like a unicorn. We’ve been discussing this at Glenn Pendlay’s forum with Dr. Michael Hartman and others.
But there’s no denying that it can suck in the mean time, and there’s no use suffering when the process can be smoothed. I am not a fitness guru that places value on discomfort for the sake of discomfort.
2010 April 9 | 9 Comments »
By Matt
The title is a topic that’s come up a lot over the years, and it’s been on my mind lately. I’ve written about this quite a bit in the past, on forums and in some detail in Maximum Muscle, but I think this is something that could use some elaboration for my blog audience and those of you that aren’t familiar with my older writings.
I also want to scoop all these upstarts that think they’re on to something. What I want to do is define “CNS Fatigue” and talk a little about fatigue in general, as it relates to strength training and exercise in a broader sense.
Firstly, just so we’re all on the same page, CNS is short for Central Nervous System. That’s the brain and the spinal cord, for you bio-illiterates.
Fatigue, at least in exercise-science terms, is a reduction in your ability to express physical fitness for a given task. Fatigue is a temporary reduction in your ability to perform at some activity, in other words. Note also that fatigue is fairly specific, although like everything else it can overlap with other things. Get tired from lifting weights and you may still be able to go for a run, as an example.
Fatigue can be both slow-acting and fast-acting, depending on the activity and the rest time allowed. Doing singles with 10 minutes rest between each rep will generate less fatigue than doing sets of 10 with 60 second rests between each set. Work out every day and you’ll accumulate more fatigue than working out once a week.
Fatigue is largely a function of the work:rest ratio, in other words. More work and less rest yields higher fatigue.
CNS fatigue (also known as central fatigue) is therefore a reduction in performance attributed to factors in the CNS, as opposed to the peripheral nervous system and neuromuscular system (peripheral fatigue; that is, the rest of the body besides the brain and spinal cord).
The question is, how much can you separate the two? It’s hard to distinguish central (CNS) action from peripheral (rest of the body) action because the CNS tends to influence everything, and is in turn influenced by everything. CNS fatigue will filter down through the rest of the body through hormonal feedback loops and similar mechanisms, so it’s not always so clear-cut.
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2009 July 8 | Comments Off
By Matt
I was surfing around lately and stumbled across this old article I wrote for Mind & Muscle, going on five years ago. Interesting to read back through it now.
http://www.mindandmuscle.net/node/167
EDIT: I also found this thread on the M&M forums, where we discuss the article as well.
I do enjoy my discussion about moderating effort on a weekly scale with RPE values, which kinda blows Waterbury’s whole idea about “revolutionizing” the fitness industry out of the water, since I beat him by a good five years.
But I’m benevolent about it; I stole it from Supertraining just like everybody else has. I do enjoy me some irony, though.
2009 April 4 | 1 Comment »
By Matt
It’s been awhile since I’ve written a good old-fashioned hater post, which is ironic since that’s one of the reasons I started this site: to serve as a place to rebuke claims of guru bullshit. I’ve pretty well gotten away from that lately, for better or worse, but today I saw something that got me interested enough to write up a response.
Namely I want to talk about this recent obsession with movement speed (tempo) and motor unit recruitment. This is being touted as “revolutionary” by certain parties; although it might be new to the current crop of would-be Internet lifters and bodybuilders, this is not a new concept. In fact, in my brief decade in the gym, I can remember running into that same idea in half a dozen places in the early days of the ‘net, back when places like Deepsquatter and MFW were the only real places to get decent info.
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2009 March 2 | Comments Off
By Matt
You grow outside the gym, not in it. That’s the mantra so often repeated, used to justify everything from training a muscle group only once a week to taking off whole months from exercise. There’s certainly a lot of truth in that statement. One thing that’s come into vogue these days is the concept of the unloading week (sometimes called deloading; it’s the same concept) where you do what the title says: remove the training stress from your body to “unload” it.
This is a valuable tool. Yet, as obvious as “take it easy” is, I don’t think a lot of people get it. So I want to talk about that.
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2009 February 17 | Comments Off
By Matt
I made this post on another forum, and it’s one of those things I tend to write off-the-cuff that tends to summarize things fairly well, so I thought I’d share. The context was a discussion about ‘overtraining’ and stress/fatigue in general.
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