Body Building or Body Breaking?

When we look at training programs of powerlifters, bodybuilders, strongmen/strongwomen and many other kinds of strength sport athletes what you see is a wildly diverse amount of training. Some people approach their training from a higher intensity, lower volume perspective. Others have a training program that revolves around greater volumes of work with less intensity baked in week after week. Ultimately what matters most is the reality that the training and recovery processes must meet in the middle. The less they meet and the greater the training stressors are the more over reaching and eventually over training will occur. If you are over reaching then more often than not an overtraining stimulus will occur.

Why all of this matters is because when you are training you are creating adaptations to stress in your body. If you want to build it and not break it then the pacing of progressive overload matters, the type of training stress matters as well as the blend of the exercise/training specific stressors. If you are training so hard that more often than not you feel like you are experiencing dings in joints or you feel like range of motion is restricted then this will lead to significant problems sooner rather than later. With a significant injury history already on board the training stressors need to be managed even more strictly in order to remedy the problems with motion and compensations. The goal should be to create a training program that allows a certain amount of stress that is recoverable instead of constantly reaching for greater amounts of stress that may not be possible to recover from at all.

The progress that should be seen is that you are able to adapt to small increases in training stress. You aren't as sore from doing specific exercises and your joint function improves because the training stressors that are being applied help you to remove weakness instead of compound training stress on stronger attributes. What eventually compiles with a good training program is more joint freedom from a force/velocity perpsective as well as a joint ROM perspective. If you are going to build a body that is more resilient to stress then this is the path to walk. The path full of high risk strategies may work occasionally but then you are forced to take lay off for periods of time or deload weeks. In the worst case scenario you will be laid up with an injury severe enough that you detrain and have to work on rehabilitation instead of continuing to make smoother progress.

Whether you are training with higer loads relative to bodyweight or lighter loads relative to bodyweight is a factor that most people don't consider as well. If you weigh 175lbs and you are squatting 350 for sets of 3. That is a very different stressor than squatting 175lbs for sets of 10. Now the tonnage won't make a ton sense in that equation because 175X10=1,750lbs and 350X3=1,050lbs but understand that the double bodyweight stressor is very different than the single bodyweight stressor or less stressor. The challenges on the bones, ligaments, tendons and fascia are different when the loads approach 2XBW or above and require longer periods of time to recover. The challenge to recovery on BW or lighter loads are significantly less and require much less recovery time for the passive structures.

If you are intending to build a body then the amount of stress you are handling on the regular should be intentionally recoverable. It's really easy to do an extra set, extra reps and or extra work that eventually piles up in recovery debts. What you want to avoid is junk volume and extra sets and reps of movements that take away more than they add to your progress. Over the long course of time you are either setting yourself up for success or failure. When the project is your body what you don't want to experience is that your training is leading you closer and closer to a hospitilization or a rehabilitative programming context. If you can save some reps and train to be faster, sharper and execute better mechanics under stress then you get to the end of your life without pain with excellent movement quality and limited issues with injuries. If you are truly building a body that is going to last then that is the way forward.