Everybody has heard it at some time or another "You're over training! That's why you're not making serious gains". But, do we understand what it means? I mean really understand what it means? Once you understand how to keep your body fresh and free from over training, you'll make some serious mass/strength gains.

Over training means the body is being put under greater stress than it can handle; it's that simple. Any additional stress that is above and beyond what your own body can handle will result in a failure to recover and grow. It follows that you could be fairly dedicated, training with a routine you believe to be a well thought out approach to getting big; yet fail to move ahead and grow if your body is over trained. The real let down with overtraining is that you won't grow regardless of nutrition! If you are in an over trained state, muscle growth and recovery comes to a dead-stop no matter how much you pump your body with protein, carbs, creatine, glutamine and/or essential fatty acids.

The intangible part of over training is that it varies greatly from person to person. Stress adaptation is the body's ability to deal with and recover from hardcore training. This is different for every bodybuilder out there; just as the metabolism will vary from person to person. We all know people who can eat a lot of junk and get away with it, while others seem to blow up when they marginally overeat. With training, you have to discover and hone what your body can handle and what it can't handle. Once you strike the right balance, the gains will come rather easily. With regards to overtraining and how it varies from person to person, let me tell you about a retired top pro I used to consult with. This pro frequently performed at least 20 to 24 sets for larger body parts and 15 or so for smaller body parts, taking each and every set to total failure. Every training partner he hooked up with never grew, ending up completely over trained while the pro continued to grow. Before you assume "Yea that's because all those pro's use anabolic steroids", I can tell you this pro trained clean (yes, drug free for the majority of the year) and very often his training partners were not drug free. There are several lessons to be learned from this anecdote:

1) What's too much for one individual may not be for another.

2) If you over train and hit the body too hard without adequate rest and recovery, you won't make gains even if you take steroids!

I always said, this particular pro made it to the pro ranks on hard work and exceptional recovery ability.

One of the dumbest things that I have ever heard is that "There's no such thing as over training, just under eating". The idea is so far off the mark and ill advised, I don't even want to spend much time with it. The fact is, nutrition can only support the body so far. When exercise stress exceeds your body's own tolerance for recovery, you go back wards. You don't grow; even if you are eating a lot.

When Dorian Yates burst onto the scene, he followed up on the ideas formulated by Tom Platz and Mike Mentzer years earlier. Dorian's take on things was consistent with Tom and Mike's which was that most bodybuilders fail to grow because they train with too many sets (known as volume) and usually train too frequently. This can be characterized by training everyday or not taking enough rest days. Platz, Mentzer and Dorian were right. When you train too much, you don't grow. However, Mentzer fell into the trap that "If more is not better than less – even far less may be radically better." So the pendulum shifted from heavy volume to far fewer sets. Suddenly, bodybuilders were doing 6 sets for chest or 8 to 10 sets for back which in my opinion is not enough to optimally stimulate growth. To understand why their approach may have been a little bit overboard, here's brief note on physiology. Building muscle relies on the weight you use. Pretty simple, right? If you can perform a set of barbell curls with 150 pounds, you'll stimulate far more growth than using only 100 pounds. No matter how you cut it, the weight you use is critically important in stimulating the muscle growth. After the weight comes volume or the total number of sets you perform. Volume influences muscle growth. If you do not perform enough sets, you'll fail to trigger growth. If you get carried away and do too many, you'll over train and also fail to grow. So you have to find a balance, a happy medium.

Continued in Part 2