Thoughts on Overtraining and Recovery in Strength Training

I recently finished this book by "skinny science geek", powerlifter/strongman, philospher, and author Matt Perryman. I will share my verdict at the end.

Every so often, an individual comes along to challenge a fundamental belief. This belief that Perryman's book discusses is the bedrock of the modern fitness industry: Work hard in the gym and go "recover" well, lest you spoil all your "gainz" and get injured.

Exercise is fantastic because it makes the body create it's very own "health tonic vaccine". This is the principle that homeopathic medicine is based on: using the body's stress response to heal itself. Stress to the body in the right dosage is useful and even essential to humans. The body is like a kitchen and say we want to remodel it by using exercise and proper nutrition. Your brain and muscles demolish your cabinets and walls through exercise, and then the immune system/master carpenter rebuilds it into a brand new kitchen while you are away at work. All the materials need to be in place because the carpenter requires quality wood and cement to build with and the time to build the kitchen while you sleep. Eat + Train + Sleep = Recovery and successful increases in our fitness level. This could be a faster mile time or heavier deadlift. How does recovery work?

Most strength and fitness training book I have encountered explain "Recovery" refer to Hans Seyle's GAS (General Adaptation Syndrome) theory. Seyle proposed that humans can adapt to the right amount of stress put on the body. This is what the fitness, strength training, and sport science fields are assuming to be true. Most personal trainers and health club workers I have encountered aren't even aware of this principle, much less applying this to clients. But even at the highest levels of exercise science, this theory of GAS/recovery is dogma and rarely challenged. What Seyle did not acknowledge is the mind/body connection, which is the meat of Perryman's book.

There are catchphrases that you will hear fitness professionals say like "overtraining", or "focus on recovery". With the GAS theory, if you put too little stress on the body then it stays the same. This is what happens to the general population who have no exposure to training science and just work out until they are sore or break a sweat. If you put too much stress on the body it can potentially lead to the person's death, or so it seems. This is referred to as "overtraining". But the right amount of stress and recovery should theoretically get your dream body. Housewives/husbands, athletes, and the wimpy kid all can benefit from the right amount of exercise.

So what does the "right amount" of exercise look like? If you've seen the movie "Captain America", the secret serum they give him to go from scrawny-civilian to super-patriot is something like what exercise is meant to do. Through reps/sets we can control the amount and type of muscle you can grow. It's called the "training effect", or what the vaccine/serum does to the body. We measure the "dosage" of stress very efficiently in strength training with the RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion) scale and measuring volume (sets x repetitions). The fellow responsible for most of what we know about the best sets/reps is on Prilepin's Chart.

Think of 5 sets x 5 reps @ 75% of back squats as a "25mg dose of medium health tonic-vaccine". The RPE scale is measuring how hard the lift (or stressor) feels on a 1-10 scale. 1 being very easy and 10 being the hardest thing ever, or measured percentages like 60% or 100%. If you do 3 sets x 3 reps of 90% effort, that is a hefty 9mg heavy-dose of vaccine. This is what Olympic weightlifters prefer to gain strength but little bulk. Likewise, 5 sets x 10 reps at 60% effort nets you a different effect, great for growing large muscles that win bodybuilding contests. That's why Arnold Schwarzenegger looked and performed differently than Bruce Lee. They were going after different training effects but use the same principles and compound barbell exercises.

How often should one be training? Every other day is what most conventional wisdom recommends. M/W/F or T/Th/Sat and rest on the other days. Rest usually means do very little physical work and let your body heal or you will not be able "top off your tank" and be ready for your scheduled training day. Almost all strength training programs are based on these principles so far:

1. Seyle's GAS theory of stress/recovery cycles
2. Measuring exercise dosage through volume and RPE
3. Control training effect by cycling compound barbell movements (squat, press, pull, hip-hinge)
4. Allow ample time between training sessions or overtraining will occur

This last principle is being called into question by Perryman. We take it for granted that if we stress the body through exercise and then we rest our muscles by eating, sleeping, stretching we will see gains in strength and fitness...right? If we train every day we will lose fitness and cause our bodies distress. But how do Olympic weightlifters train 6-days a week, up to twice a day at maximum weights?

The western view of sports science and body mechanics is largely based on an idea from the Enlightenment: the human body is a machine and science knows how to build and fix machines. I have read some seriously boring exercise textbooks and they never fail to mention "second-class levers" and very mechanistic views of the human body. BORING. It is the same kind of thinking that identifies a bicep curl as a form of leverage and not a willful act of movement by a living ORGANISM. This kind of information (not knowledge) is what they drive into exercise science and kinesiology students' brains in universities. The people who are destined to become exercise science professors, physical therapists, PE teachers, strength coaches, and personal trainers are all operating on these four principles. But what if this is not the whole picture? What if Perryman found the crack in the foundation of exercise science?

Western science has a tendency to act like an "ego". It only gathers what information it finds true and discards the rest that does not agree with it, or forgets to include it. Although science is meant to deduce what is NOT possible through experimentation, that leaves a lot of other possibilities open. The body has many possible reactions to exercise and one of them is to simply get TIRED and change virtually nothing in our physique. This is what typically happens to the people who join a commercial gym on January 1st, buy a P-90x DVD, eagerly take workout advice from the high-school quarterback friend, or the girl-friend who lost 6-lbs with an insane cardio routine. Recovery isn't even in the minds of these people. They simply use sweat and soreness as their measures.

Here's the big take-away: Recovery involves much more than simply letting your muscles heal from the trauma of heavy squats, presses, and dead-lifts. The link between your mind and body is so intimate that how you feel about your workouts (i.e. dreading leg day or excited to PR in the snatch) will affect how much energy you can expend on exercise and also the healing before your next bout of training. Psychosomatic effects in the mind manifest in the body. If you are mentally psyching yourself up before lifts, that "willpower" costs energy and is limited. How you feel is a lie" according to Perryman, a phrase coined by John Broz.

What Perryman does a great job of is suspending our beliefs and looking at where the principles come from. The title of his book says it all. Squat Every Day and find out. When I told people I was doing Nick Horton's 21-day Squat Challenge, they thought I was nuts and going to kill myself. The idea is to squat to a maximum every single day and then, do back-off sets at lighter percentages, and then speed sets. And then go Olympic lift after or before your squats. Insanity? Not quite, the devil is in the details.

Here is one CRUCIAL detail that is not discussed very often: The connection of the mind, body, and emotions and maxing out daily. To the uninitiated, "maxing out" means an all-out heroic effort to complete the lift no matter what. To imagine that your family will be kidnapped by Nazi's if you don't dead-lift this weight. But in Nick Horton and Perryman's version of daily squatting, maxing out means different things. To Horton, maxing out is getting to a heavy single repetition that is no longer in good form, or a "grind" rep. To Perryman, it means that if you are having to mentally arouse willpower, then you are using too heavy of a weight for daily squatting.

I will add this caveat: Perryman does not dismiss other training programs. In fact, he discusses why high-volume sets, low-frequency training can be a good program for people who have trouble recovering between workouts and need rest. Some people such as myself respond well to higher-frequency (think 5-6x/week) and low-volume (10 reps per day). The point in all this is that "recovery" is not so simple. An introverted person who is stimulus-phobic and does not do well in highly-stimulating situations may not respond well to a "cookie cutter" magazine routine, or a program they found on the Internet. An extroverted person might seek high-frequency training like a drug, which incidentally describes me perfectly and might not get enough with a 3x5 Starting Strength routine.

As a former hedonist, lots of stimulation appeals to me and I know this about myself. This is one reason CrossFit greatly appealed to me when I started exercising regularly in 2008. It was a huge thrill and I didn't care how I got my high. But when it came time to get serious about competitive lifting, which program was the best for me? I have been trying to answer that question for myself for the last five years of weightlifting. This journey lead me to become a competitive Olympic weightlifter and movement coach. Things were starting to stall in my training and so I searched every Olympic lifting source and read all the books, blogs, and watched all the videos. The closest I got was using Nick Horton's Squat Nemesis method, but I burned out because I was not aware of the MENTAL side of daily maxing. Nothing ever quite fit and I didn't know why. In fact, my lifting took a turn for the worse until I read Matt's book.

I have had epiphanies galore and know because in the last 9 days of daily squatting, I have put 30# onto my back squat for a heavy single (I haven't maxed out yet). I can do back-off sets of 10 with my previous heavy-5's. My squatting mobility was already a gift (I am Asian, long-torso and short legs) but everything feels even more limber. My Olympic lifts have more snap and I just practice for the sake of enjoyment. I also feel much more skilled at lifting. Fun fact: Seratonin response becomes higher as the weight lifted becomes heavier! That is why high-frequency lifting of heavy weights responds to me. I get my daily fix of brain chemicals as lifting maximum weights is now my drug. The Bulgarian weightlifters training under Ivan Abadjiev were the best known to do this and their world record lifts show it.

So now I have the best gift that anybody could have: the uncanny sense that I will one day reach my lifting goals. I can actually visualize success because I have the patience to practice weightlifting and squatting daily.

This book is a red pill for the fitness industry at large. I highly recommend it for the intelligent trainee or "Mental Meathead". Are you ready for the real thing? If you don't want results then just take the blue pill and continue with your "Men's Health Ultimate Workout". Then we can have a squat-contest in six-weeks and see who fares better...

15 months ago I followed the recommendations in this book: I squatted and clean-and-pressed every day. About 3 weeks into the program I started feeling a pain in my left elbow. After another week the pain became excruciating. Finally I stopped. That was 15 months ago and today the pain persists. I went to a doctor several months back and he said it will take up to 2 years to heal. For me, the information in this book was dangerous to follow.

This along with the Gain Muscle Blueprint may be my favorite books on weight lifting & gaining muscle.

This book will challenge your beliefs about training. The fitness industry is so filled with BS and there are only a few good guys out there who speak the truth. Matt Perryman is one of those guys. He cuts to the chase with interesting fresh ideas that will help you transform your body, health, and fitness. It's fascinating and enlightening.

I won't write a whole big summary of this book. You just need to pick it up and read every word. It's that good. Perryman knows his stuff and hopefully he keeps writing. I'd love to read more books from him. He, along with Robbie Rourke of the Gain Muscle Blueprint, are beacons of light cutting through the scams and darkness of the bodybuilding/fitness industry.

Love this book! Perryman has made me a big fan.

Well written and thoroughly researched referenced. There are several specific points but where I felt he inferred incorrect answers from data--but that might be very subjective on my part, he certainly sourced everything like a pro. I'm left feeling daily squatting is possible but have no idea why anyone not involved in Olympic or power lifting would want to do this. Very lucid and articulate book.

High-volume training (without reaching the point of failure) has always been to the key for me to progress in my lifts. This book has confirmed what I already knew: weightlifting is a skill, so the more you practice, the better you become. It's as simple as that.

This is a difficult book to summarise without missing the point of it entirely. As the book progresses, Matt's critique of the modern hit-points based thinking on recovery is related to (and shown to emerge from) broader ideas on the philosophy of science, neuroscience and neurophysiology, cognitive science, psychology, and several other disciplines I can't recall here (omitting evolutionary psychology). As a result, Matt begins by criticising the idea that you can't squat every day by pointing to the success of volume-based programs in Russia and Bulgaria, the lubricative effect of regular lifting on joint mobility, the benefits of volume-based programs for the recovery of tendons, and simply Matt's personal experience. Following this, Matt's question can be said to turn from 'what are the benefits of regular lifting and will it kill me?' to 'why did we ask that question in the first place?'. As such, the main purpose of this book is to challenge how people think about recovery by undermining the ideas that sustain contemporary approaches.

For example, Matt draws on research regarding the draining effect of emotional investment and Baumeister's work on finite willpower to explain why workouts can be deceptively difficult to recover from. Contemporary approaches to recovery focus intently on the muscles as the sole source of energy expenditure. But they ignore the draining impact of psyching yourself up for a lift, pushing beyond a comfortable threshold or having an end-goal mindset where each lift is a vital emotionally-supercharged contribution towards some form of Adonis-complex inspired physique. Matt offers practical solutions drawn from mindfulness and the role of the ego (see Baggini's 'The Ego Trick') to these self-imposed obstacles.

Towards the end of the book Matt provides guidelines for a program of daily squatting. Matt's hope is that by the time readers arrive at this section, questions regarding what is 'optimal' and what sort of progression can be expected within a short time-span will have been dissolved. Overall, this book is a critique on contemporary ideas over recovering from weight-training. But this critique follows from a broader criticism of how people think about exercise and the body in general. This discussion is not just a scholarly musing. As Matt shows, how we think (and not just what we think) has a dramatic impact on what can and cannot be achieved over the long-term.

This book is meandering and weird and utterly captivating. The thesis statement is in the title. There's not much programming and no Big Secret. It rules. It's almost a self-help book with universally applicable lessons.

you can pretty much purchase this book and never worry about buying another training manual again. It's all here. The frameworks you need to build programs for yourself, the insight behind adjustments and when/how to make them, and best of all, the judgment to know when to apply the wisdom in the book. It's not a how-to guide, but it gives you all of the tools to assemble things yourself, if you're paying attention.

the secondary benefit is that it shatters some myths around training handily, by citations in the scientific literature, and plenty of anecdote.

And finally, the best part is that Perryman himself has taken the knowledge in this book and, with the same mediocre genetics we all have, has turned himself into a fairly strong person through dedication and the application of his own principles. He walks the walk. Some other people out there just like to talk.

The book was very informative and well written. The only problem with the book is the younger generations won't get the importance of what the author was trying to get across. I say this because the younger generation are stupid and lazy. They will read the book and then find out they have to come up with their own program plus base their lifts off their lifts of what their energy level is at.

This book is a goldmine of training ideas. If you are serious about lifting I strongly suggest that you buy this book. The ideas written in this book will assist in your training, regardless of your skill level.

This book is fantastic for everyone who thinks about their training. I am a fan of HIT for it's efficiency, but I am always willing to question it and this books helps to reconsider most of weight training dogmas. I am not going to implement the programme laid out in the book now, as I am not really willing to commit that much. Honestly, first thing I would try if HIT didn't work would be laid-out periodised programme by Brad Schoenfeld, which calls for usually about 3x a week frequency. That said, this is a good option and I believe it can bring tremendous results. Certainly great read for everyone knees deep in any one commercial theory of lifting and for everyone who likes to think about thinking and life. This book is more about how we make choices and how average people percieve biology and complexities of our body and try to fit them in a training chart, which is not really possible.
Question for the author: What is the "best" way to train if you want to invest 3-4 hours a week at most?:-) Would you use the same intuitive approach?

I picked up this book without the expectations of anything grandiose, but I did expect to walk away with some things that I didn't already know, some practical things I can implement in my own training and/or that of my personal training clients.

I didn't even get that.

The book was way too wordy, and the author could have condensed the entire book into maybe 2 or 3 pages. That's how much actual content there was in the book.

Much of the book is talking about philosophy, and the actual, practical training information is scarce.

The information that actually is there is scarce, but hardly new. Instead, Pavel Tsatsouline wrote about it much better in "Naked Warrior."

Overall, a disappointing book.

This goes so much further than squatting. His writing style is interesting, but it kind of grows on you after a while. There are great historical references that makes you think about modern man and how we view things. Adaptation and consistency is where the money is. Good stuff to consider.

Thank you for a finely written book. Great wealth of knowledge is passed down. I like that the over all meaning to me is just Squat, put in the work and it will come your way. That everyone's different and remember that. Thank you again.