Overtraining Your Movement Pattern

[BendtheBar]

Overtraining Your Movement Pattern

C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength: Overtraining Your Movement Pattern

While it’s relatively difficult to actually overtrain, it’s relatively easy to overtrain your movement pattern. I believe this is the reason that the methods of Louie Simmons have been so successful. Westside Barbell understands this, and they make good use of it. This is also the reason why you can’t continually train heavy on the same exercise and make good progress. Your body grows too accustomed too quickly to the exercise, and another exercise needs to take its place.

If you have attempted to train your bench press heavy (and by heavy, I mean sets of triples, doubles, or singles) on successive weeks, then you probably know this. The first week, everything goes well. The second week – especially if you’re new to these almost maximal loads – things go even better; you’re stronger. By the third week, however, you’re often back to your week one poundages. And if you attempt it for a 4th week, then you’re even weaker than week one. Well, technically you’re not weaker, but you are slower from training the specific movement pattern just too damn often.

Here’s another thing: depending on the exercise, certain movement patterns become more quickly overtrained than others. Let’s take powerlifting as an example. You can train the squat frequently for long periods of time. This is the reason that Olympic lifters can max out on this exercise every damn day (although I don’t advise training that extreme). But you can’t train the bench press and the deadlift to anything approximating the same frequency. You can train the bench press more frequently than the deadlift, but I still wouldn’t advise more than one all-out bench press session more than once per week. As for the deadlift: about one all-out session every two to three weeks seems to work well for most people.

To make all of this very simple to understand, here’s the “in-the-gym” version of how to apply what you (may have) learned here:


• Build up your work capacity to the point that you can train with a fairly large amount of volume 4 to 6 days per week.
• Train your squat frequently. I think that 2 days per week will do fine.
• Train the muscles that you squat and deadlift with even more frequently. I think 3 to 4 days per week is ideal. Not all of this has to be weighted workouts – I love sled dragging, tire flipping, and farmer’s walks.
• On average, I believe that you should train your upper body three to four times weekly. Just make sure that the movement pattern is different at each workout. At every session, put the emphasis on a vertical push or pull movement and a horizontal push or pull movement. That’s 4 different movement patterns for each workout.

[LtL]

Very interesting post. Definitely agree with their grading of the big 3. If it weren't for forearm issues, I can easily squat 2 or even 3 times per week but I have found that deadlifting at even moderate weights any more than once per fortnight, kills me for other sessions.

LtL

[BendtheBar]

To be honest, other than deadlifts I have never really thought about overtraining movement patterns. Definitely a concept that challenge me to think more about programming in general.

2 workouts come to mind when I think about exercise rotation...DC and Westside.

I'm trying to lay this concept side by side with all the successful lifters that do/did train the same lifts week in and out...

So I'm not sure what I think yet.

[glwanabe]

I don't have time right now, but I'll get into this thread tomorrow. This topic is exactly what I've been working on lately.

This thread can be of use in this discussion, as it relates to pulling.
Bulgarian Weightlifting

[BendtheBar]

Looking forward to your thoughts GL.

[Off Road]

It's an interesting topic. Not sure where I stand on the issue. I usually just train the same old lifts and alter them slightly when I stall. But I'm certainly open to things like the conjugate method.

[BendtheBar]

It doesn't appear that in the context of the article that many of us overtrain movement patterns, except for maybe the deadlift...possibly the bench.

certain movement patterns become more quickly overtrained than others

When talking Olympic lifting this comes back to less eccentrics stress.

I have never personally tried any form of exercise rotation so I am curious if it would be beneficial.

At every session, put the emphasis on a vertical push or pull movement and a horizontal push or pull movement.

This comes back to something we've talked about a few times. Most lifts fall into 5 categories:

1) Pulling toward the body. Horizontal pull.
2) Pushing away from the body. Horizontal push.
3) Pulling down from overhead. Vertical pull.
4) Pushing overhead. Vertical push.
5) Squat/deadlift movements. Squat/hinge.

Just random thoughts of mine. Still working through this, and my personal programming methods.

[glwanabe]

Somebody go tell a large portion of the weightlifting community their training wrong.

A lot of Olympic lifters train the exact opposite of what Mr. Sloan is saying.

They, train the lift

They perform that lift over, and over. They use varying intensity's but they train the lift. There has been a lot of research done on this topic.

The post in general reads more like an infomercial for Westside as far as I see it.

I need some sleep.

[Pull14]

I wrote a lot on this, but deleted it for an easier read:

He conveys the message of overtraining when the issue is actually one of stalling. Overtraining points in the direction of to much work whereas stalling can mean to much or to LITTLE. Only going to your 1RM once a week is not enough. That little amount of work is no more than a test, not a building block.

His main argument, rotation is needed, can simply be nullified by adjusting volume and intensity. Simple example: olympic lifters - not going balls out daily (see below), volume/intensity changes, the lifts stay the same.

As for the stuff about maxing out daily... its that a daily max, not a true max. This can be 85% or 92% of the actual max. BUT NOT A TRUE MAX! As such both bench and deadlift can be trained as frequently as the squat. The only exception being that deadlifts cannot be "daily maxed" freqently not because of movement overtraining but because the stress is to great to recover from on a frequent basis. To fix this, do speed deads.