I thought that I had a handle on the downsides of weight lifting. Mostly it is a massive sink of time and money, in that you have to not only work out but also cook and eat a *lot* of eggs. You know that your routine is burning a ton of calories when you need to schedule extra time in just for eating all the eggs you need!
But the month of March taught me a new lesson. I have maxed out all the weights in my gym so increasing my difficulty is a matter of doing more reps. Throughout February and early March I added on reps for all of my exercises and then found myself feeling positively ill for most of my workouts. Sore muscles, this is normal, but working hard not to barf for forty minutes a day is not fun.
A sensible person would probably decide to dial back the reps a bit. After all, nearly vomiting from working too hard is a pretty good sign that the exercise you are doing is not healthy.
I am not as sensible as that.
The only concession I was willing to make was that I stopped adding on reps and purely focused on improving enough that I could do my current sets without constant nausea. It took a month, but by the end of March I was able to do my regular routine with only minimal complaints from my tummy.
In April I added on a few more reps but only on a couple of exercises. I seem to be hitting a plateau where increasing gains are becoming difficult to come by, so I will need to be gentle with my increased demands.
Still, I am not capped out. I have added 20% more reps across all my exercises in the past six months, which is a pretty substantial increase.
The weird thing is that although I am obviously still increasing in strength I am no longer increasing in size. I am the same weight as I was half a year ago, hovering right around 205 lb, (93kg). I don't know if my extra strength is me converting my relatively sparse body fat to muscle, basically just shifting percentages, or if I am getting more efficient somehow without adding muscle mass. Possibly some combination of both explains it, though I have no good way to be sure.
Quite some time ago I had thought that if I ate a lot and worked really hard I could add on a ton of muscle and maybe get my weight up to 250 lb (113kg) or so. Now I don't think that will work. I could probably eat a truckload of sugary calories and get my weight up by adding on fat but my muscle gains seem to be capped, barring heavy drug abuse, which isn't part of my plan. There are probably some marginal gains over time that I can achieve, but most likely I am as heavy as I can be while staying lean.
This is a fine thing really. I like the way I look now and I am plenty strong for all practical purposes. I even had a bit of a moment the other day when I lay down on my back, putting my arms beside me on the floor, and my elbows couldn't touch the ground. Too much tricep muscle on the back of my arms, apparently. RAWR /flex whoot! and such. These sorts of small things drive me on ever further, even through great suffering.
It isn't surprising that you aren't getting bigger when you have stopped increasing the weight you are lifting. Type 2 fast-twitch muscle fibers don't get engaged at all if you are lifting a weight that is less than about 75% of your one-rep max. So your size and strength won't increase.
ReplyDeleteIncreasing reps will increase your endurance, but it sounds like you were trying to go too fast and overtraining. It's a bit counter-intuitive, but you'll progress a little faster if you slow your rep progression a little--and you won't be nearly as sick.