RECUPERATION 101
My performance in the gym is directly proportional to the amount of quality rest I get. I've tried all the shortcuts. Nothing works best than a good 8-9 hours of deep sleep for me.
If I am sleep-deprived I notice it in my endurance and my strength. Sometimes, I need to sleep 10-12 hours to catch up on my rest. I may even go without training for 2-3 days just to give my body a chance to reset. I train very intensely. The other day I did half hour of Cardio (climbing Baldwin Hills) and then hit the gym to do 2 hrs of abs! By the end of that routine I was spent!! My abs are good for another 3 days. That's the minimum they'll need to recuperate. In the meantime, there are other muscles to train! I've been known to do 2 hrs of chest - alone - hitting it from every imaginable angle, from big movements with heavy weights to tiny partial movements for the "tie-ins", hitting the lower, upper, lateral, medial sides, aiming for both size and shape. The best way to determine how much rest you need is to experiment. The last thing you want is to run into "the Wall". The wall is when you train so intensely and with so little rest that you develop a form of Chronic Fatigue that makes even walking to the gym a chore. It happened to me in 2001. It takes weeks to bounce back from the Wall. So, don't hit the Wall, whatever you do. |