Workouts: Intensity or Duration or Both

Dr. Gabe Mirkin, at Fitness & Health with Dr. Gabe Mirkin, has posted on the different demands an intense workout places on the body as opposed to a long workout. I tend to agree.

You train for competitive sports by taking a hard workout, which makes your muscles sore for the next day or two and then when your muscles feel fresh again, you take another hard workout. Every intense workout causes muscle damage and soreness. Biopsies taken on the day after a hard workout from the muscles of athletes show bleeding into the muscles and disruption of the muscle fibers. If you try to exercise intensely when your muscles are still sore from a previous workout, you are at great risk for injuring yourself. Regular exercisers and competitive athletes improve most with a weekly schedule that includes one or two intense workouts and one longer session for endurance. To prevent injury, they follow each of these three harder workouts with easy workouts or days off.

Intense workouts cause far more muscle damage than longer endurance workouts. That means that an athlete can exercise harder on the day after an endurance workout than the day after an intense one. So weightlifters should not lift weights with the same muscle groups on the day after the one day a week that they lift very heavy weights. Runners should run very slowly on the days after the two days a week that they run very fast. Most training programs include two intense workouts, say Tuesday and Friday, followed by days of very easy workouts on Wednesday and Saturday and a longer workout on Sunday followed by a moderate workout on Monday.

While he is right in general, I disagree with his statement that weight lifters should not work the same muscle again the day after a heavy training session.

Chad Waterbury has been developing a series of workout programs based on how athletes train. He is now creating programs that build the workload over time so that the trainee is working with weights 4 or 5 days a week, training full-body each time. What changes in each workout is the type of training. Rather than periodizing over a longer time frame, such as a year, Waterbury does it in a week.

For example (click the link to read the article and see a sample program):

Day 1 (Maximal Strength)
Sets: 5
Reps: 3
Rest: 60 seconds between antagonist supersets
Load: 5 rep max (The extra two reps are kept "in the hole" so you won't train to failure.)
Tempo: Perform concentric (lifting) fast; perform eccentric (lowering) under control.

Day 2 (Endurance Strength)
Sets: 2
Reps: 25
Rest: 90 seconds between antagonist supersets
Load: 27RM
Tempo: Same as Day 1

Day 3 Rest/Cardio

Day 4 (Hypertrophy Strength)
Sets: 3
Reps: 8
Rest: 75 seconds between antagonist supersets
Load: 10RM
Tempo: Same as Day 1

Day 5 Rest/Cardio

Day 6 (Explosive Strength)
Sets: 6
Reps: 3
Rest: 60 seconds between consecutive sets
Load: 18RM
Tempo: As fast as humanly possible while maintaining proper form.

Day 7 Rest

This program rocks -- I've done it. I would caution against being on an intense program like this for more than five weeks, but if you have the energy and focus, this type of program will build strength and muscle. If you do try this, remember to make sure your nutrition is optimal and that you get enough sleep.


Technorati Tags: Weight training, Chad Waterbury, Quattro Dynamo, Endurance, Intensity, Gabe Mirkin, Periodization
Del.Icio.Us Tags: Weight training, Chad Waterbury, Quattro Dynamo, Endurance, Intensity, Gabe Mirkin, Periodization