You see online or you hear through the grapevine that the top lifter in your weight class is training 6 times a week and doing way more volume and intensity than you are. No wonder he is out lifting you!! You say, hey, that must be the answer – more volume and more intensity and more training sessions!! You are only training 4 sessions per week so you need to bump it up so you can catch up! You change your program to match what your competition is doing. In fact, you decide to go with 7 sessions to be one up on him. It works for about a week and you are feeling really good! But then, you hit the wall! Little injuries popping up, fatigue setting in, you have trouble sleeping, you are dropping weight – all the signs of overtraining!! What you forgot to consider is that your life and all the stresses in it (work, family issues, etc) directly affects how you recover from training. Trying to bump up the volume and intensity isn’t necessarily the answer to catching up to your competition. Be smart about it – sometimes “less is more”!
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