Hypothesis: Inflammation is the main reason you can’t train daily.
22 Jun 2010- Inflammation is thought to be a proximate cause of overtraining.
- Inflammation is associated with feelings of perceived stress & fatigue, immune system depression, and disturbed mood & sleep.
- Inflammation signals central fatigue.
- Inflammation is strongly associated with the metabolic syndrome, which can do nasty things to nutrient partitioning.
- Did I mention that inflammation makes you feel bad?
Solutions?
Anti-inflammatories. 400-800mg of ibuprofen taken immediately post-workout, on up to 6-8 hours later. I am absolutely loving this strategy. I train at 7am. I take 400mg at 10pm before bed.
Warm baths with epsom salts are nice and relaxing. Warming or lightly working (via stretching, light repetitive movements, etc) the muscles and relaxing mentally is a good idea in general.
If oral anti-oxidants were absorbed worth a damn, they might be worth consideration. Things like green tea, vitamin E, ginger, turmeric (the curcumin in it) and other neutraceuticals show promise and are cheap, but may not be absorbed enough to matter. I drink a lot of green tea and spice my foods anyway, because I enjoy the taste.
The body may eventually adapt to arbitrarily large training loads. It’s also possible that Broz and that Chaos and Pain guy are right and overtraining is something like a unicorn. We’ve been discussing this at Glenn Pendlay’s forum with Dr. Michael Hartman and others.
But there’s no denying that it can suck in the mean time, and there’s no use suffering when the process can be smoothed. I am not a fitness guru that places value on discomfort for the sake of discomfort.
Since you say oral antioxidents may not be absorbed enough, are there any oral supplements or herbs you take?
@Angelo – besides what I listed, no. There may be some worth experimenting with. Right now I'm not really playing with anything.
Interesting stuff. I think the key to making it work is autoregulating the workload in each session.
In a recent interview, pat mendes said that if he's drained and not feeling up to it he'll only work up to ~80%, so it seems as though while there are no preplanned deloads and despite training everyday, there will be periods of reduced loading that allow for recovery.
So it might not be that overtraining doesnt exist, but rather that the way most implement it, you'll back off when needed
Doesn't taking NSAIDs reduced the growth mechanism associated with training? Inflammation can suck and can prevent you from training everyday, but isn't it a necessary part of the growth process?
If not, that's another point for creatine, since creatine also acts as an antioxidant.
@Tim B – There is evidence that NSAIDs and some strong antioxidants can interfere with that signaling in some circumstances yes. However I'm of the opinion that it's more the presence of anti-inflams during the workout that has the negative effects. There's also some implication from the Russians (via Supertraining) that the timing of restoration methods post-training should depend on when you want to train again. If you're training daily, then a window of 1-6 hours is suggested in order to have you up to speed for the following day.
Of course, labcoating aside, I'm also of the opinion that you should do what keeps you functional enough to lift. Getting ibuprofen in me before bed, and (less frequently) after a workout that leaves me beat up, gets that job done. At this stage the training is taking priority over maximizing the benefits of any single workout, so it's an acceptable trade-off even if gains are being inhibited to some degree (and I don't really think they are, given performance).
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Martin Berkhan covered the topic of NSAIDs in his latest post.
http://www.leangains.com/2010/07/do-raspberries-s…
See "juicing with aspirin"
Turmeric is made more bioavailable by two ways. First you can get a phospholipidized form of it (this is preferred). Second you can take 5mg of bioperine with it. Bioperine typically comes in 10 mg capsules so a good strategy can be to cut the capsules in half and seal them with food grade parafin wax.
Cool, that sounds pretty useful.