Overtraining by The Iron Addict

[EricT]

Originally Posted by 0311

Yet everything in his article above is contrary to that! This of course reinforces my belief that his overtraining article is ONLY intended for neophytes.

Yes. And Kelly Bagget says that many beginners would be better of under-reaching and I'd agree with that in general. But Bagget also recognizes the reality of the situation. That is that we are all using dual factor training in some sense. Just not in a organized planned way. If over reaching after a while and then backing off (what smart people who listen to their bodies do) to allow for a periold of recovery increases your fitness blah blah blah then it does and that's it. The difference is what is necessary for a neophyte to progress and what constitutes the kind of workload that will lead to over-reaching in a time frame that accumulates enough fatique to result in a realistic gain. You give someone Rippletoes 3x5 and they have a good run with it they will eventually plateau and there will be some recovery debt at the end of all that. There will be some build up of fatigue if they ran the program to specs. But the program was still succesful.

You can't embrace dual factor on one hand and then preach full recovery on the other. You can't have your cake and eat it too. So yeah for a begnner you want the volume low enough to allow for a good stretch but that doesn't mean you can't use as high a frequency as possible cuz you're trying to completely do away with fatigue. The idea is to make the fatigue MANAGEABLE not nonexistant.

Got this from another board:

Originally Posted by IA

Now back to Rippetoe/Madcow 5 x 5's. These are totally different animals [than the old 3 day full body like what Arnold suggested] and can be done effectively by a LOT larger spectrum of lifters. Extreme hardgainers need something with a LOT less volume and frequency, but average lifters can make a lot of progress and add a ton of muscle doing them.

Average lifters, i.e. regular hardgainers is most everybody. In other words normal average people. So maybe this article was aimed at those "extreme hard gainers" he's talking about. He admits that the problem with people failing on fullbodies is lack of programming like I've alluded to above and the "old" fullbodies being way too much.