How To Know If You Are Still in Recovery?

This is when you start feeling lethargic, unwilling to go to the gym, tired, in constant pain and now, even if you try to now go to the gym and, let’s say hit, biceps again, you won’t be able to feel the reps. People who have experience with weights can understand this very well. When you train too much, sometimes you cannot even feel the muscle you are working, no matter what you do.

The main causes of that is that you have not recovered yet or are overtraining to the point that your whole body is compensating and helping you do that movement as your bicep has not recovered since the last time you trained it. Despite you training other muscles in between. That just pushed your body’s recovery time further. The body recovers over all. Not based on what you trained on what day.

High Intensity Low Volume

Now that the fundamentals of recovery are out of the way, and if you know about time under tension (Click Tut if you don’t). The eccentric part of the motion where the muscle lengthens is where you should slow down your reps. In the case of your biceps curls. When you lower the weight, that is when your muscle lengthen. The negative. This is where you affect the muscle the most. The peak of the bicep curl (the top) is where there is the least resistance, as the muscle shortens to meet the resistance. Hence, there is lesser impact on the muscle.

Based on this principle, a single rep of bicep curls should be lifting the weight up to below your chest with your thumbs pointing opposite to each other in a parallel line. Now, instead of holding the dumbbells in that position, lower the weights slower. As slow as possible, and now you can feel the muscle being worked while it lengthens.

In the case of a shoulder press. Where the peak of the movement does matter. You need to hold the weight at the top and bring it down as slowly as possible. You go up slowly, hold for 3–4 seconds until you feel your shoulders being worked. Now you bring it back down. In this case, The Eccentric, the concentric as well as the hold at the top of the movement impact your shoulder.

This single rep is more effective than the 5-6 reps that you would do fast or by just swinging the weights. This is all there is to it. However, in high intensity, low volume training. You do 2 or 3 warm-up sets of such reps. Each set can have as many reps as you can physically do but with lighter weights.

Now, when you have warmed up with these weights. Now you pick the weight that you think is heavy and you can only do 6–7 reps with but without swinging. Proper form is pre-requisite for high intensity training to prevent injury. Do the same set in the exact same way as above and push to failure. Once, you can no longer do a single rep (which ideally should be your 6th or 7th rep). You are done. No need to do that exercise any further.

You do not need sets of 3 at your heaviest. You have triggered muscle growth as you have gone completely to failure in that one set. Now you can move on to the next exercise. Doing so, you will realize you do not need to do 5–6 exercises per muscle group. Just 2 can be more than enough. It’s all about intensity.

Here is a graphical chart as an example of when to train and how much to rest. (It varies per individual but should provide you with a rough estimate.)