I listened to Abel and Dave have a conversation on their podcasts and while I approached it with minimal expectations, it was an honest discussion that hit on several points that clicked for me. Abel always strikes me as a guy who tries to train as little as possible. He’s about a sustainable lifestyle after all. So I was surprised to hear he trains every day. I do as well, and while I sometimes think I should reorganize to take some days off, I can never seem to come up with a good reason.
I remember discussing the idea commonly known as Strategic Deconditioning, which is to intentionally take time off to allow some level of detraining to occur so when we begin to train again, the body will react like it did when we first started lifting. The idea makes sense, but biology just isn’t like that. You won’t lose any muscle in a short 9-14 day layoff, which is the common suggested timeframe, but you will also not get renewed growth when training again. What you will get is very sore, and the argument I made is that if you enjoy training, taking 10 days off will really suck.
Abel touched on that idea today. The context was around tweaking things to try to optimize your training, diet, sleep, stress, etc. to get the most possible gains, when in reality, even if one were to do everything “right,” whatever that may mean, the differences will be pretty minimal. Probably not even noticeable. But if you just enjoy training, and you enjoy tinkering, and eating healthy and getting in your sleep, well do it anyway. I think that’s where my mindset should be more often that not. I like to train, so I do. My days are more organized and interesting when I train, I feel better about myself and even if I’m not going to make discernable progress, I’m still doing something productive. There’s not much in our daily lives that has inherent meaning, so if you can find something that does, all the better.
My focus is on hypertrophy, which is a difficult thing to measure progress on. I will say, as I’ve said before, that I’ve absolutely made obvious progress on neglected muscles, but that progress has probably slowed dramatically at this stage. What I need to remember is that staying injury free is probably the most critical component, because I won’t be enjoying training if I can’t do it.
I’m nursing some injuries now and they’re going to take a while to heal. It’s an unfortunate reality but think of how much stress I can alleviate by reminding myself that the changes I have to make to train around these injuries will have minimal impact on my results. It’s quite a load off the mind. I plan to lift until I’m cremated, so even if I can’t do Pull-ups and Rows tomorrow because of my medial epicondylitis, I think it’ll be okay.
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