Importance of rest.

So I just got a lesson (again) on the importance of rest. During my summer holiday I took two weeks off my training, and suddenly my strength made a jump. Thinking back to christmas the same thing happened then.

I have been working out 4 times a week, and for my 38 years old body this appears to not be the optimal schedule (or my home-made program is not very good for me on volume/intensity). I used to believe that we ordinary people simply could not train too often but I am beginning to reconsider. Even if I enjoy working out a lot, I do want to spend my time intelligently

Do you gurus here have any tips as to how to determine if you get enough rest and sleep. What should I look for?

I have been doing sports competitively all my life but since I found this forum I have really learnt a lot. Thanks to Coach Sommer (Blairbob, Ido and all others) for going through the efforts of setting up and maintaining this high quality forum.

PS: Coach Sommer, looking forward to your next book!

Logging your sleep sounds like a good idea. Being aware of how you feel during the day. I can feel my body just lagging when I'm low on sleep and sometimes my body doesn't feel too rested ( more sore than usual ).

Sometimes I can get through the warmup but I know I'm mentally not there for any skill work ( yesterday as I was trying to tumble I just felt not in the game mentally ). I can generally condition these days but anything requiring mental faculties just suck.

When performance is decreasing... you see plateaus/stagnancy in your training you will generally have:

1. recovery problems (nutrition, sleep, stress, etc.)

2. Poor training (too much volume, intensity, poor quality exercises, whatever).

Could be both.... probably need to reevalutate if that's the case. Too tough to give a general answer.

Thanks to you both.

What I am left with is the need to document and measure both what I do and any progress. That is, do tests on my improvements and look for stagnation.

one technique that i've taken from strength coach Dan John is once per week i do only my DROM (dynamic range of motion) warmup, then go home. this is in addition to at least one day off completely, and one day of "active rest".

What is your training volume like? I have not got Coach Sommer's book yet so I have no idea. But a good idea is to split up your sessions to AM and PM. Training for longs hour does not have to be in linear time line. Just the total workout time/volume. That way you can rest and build up your energy and nutritional needs throughout your day to get the recovery you need from your last workout. If you work out 5 minutes right now and do 5 more minutes tonight you will have a total of 10 minutes of workout from today! But ideally it is not recommended to only workout for 10 minutes if you want results LOL. But anyway just a thought. And sleep and rest vary from person to person. Some people can get 6 hours of sleep and have energy all day to run all around the world. Others might need the average time of sleep or some needs 10+. Some just jumps like sometimes it maybe only 6 hours to keep you running and sometimes you'll need 9 hours to keep you running. Hope I helped ya.

I have written about drop off volume planning in this forum before. Search through my posts, especialy the advanced training methods to get a better grasp of this essential idea.

Ido Portal said:

I have written about drop off volume planning in this forum before. Search through my posts, especialy the advanced training methods to get a better grasp of this essential idea.

I do I don't know if I searched wrong but the only thing that came up under "drop off volume" is this post:

Hello.

I do not have the time to design a complete program for you, but I will make a couple of recommendations:

1. With your numbers in the basic exercises, I suggest concentrating on your new goals. any endurance work will take adaptation elsewhere. YOU ARE WHAT YOU DO, FREQUENTLY. It is also a bad time to improve your 10 Km run. Dont spread your goals too wide.

2. Pair planche and f-lever, they are great antagonistic pair.

3. Achieve muscle up before working the one arm chin, again, minimizing the number of goals and also, you have no buisness to work the one arm chin before you can do a couple of mups. Its basic stuff.

4. Use the flag, planche and f-lever progressions suggested by coach sommer as a guide. Read them again and again, the devil is in the details. Many fail to implement these and their progress suffers.

5. Alternate frequent (daily) training with low volume and less-frequent training with higher volume, change back and fourth between them, each 2-4 weeks. You want to avoid stagnation.

I see a lot of programming mistakes around this forum and people are not advancing as rapidly as they should. (If they advance at all)

Ask yourselfs: are you practicing the same positions without a visible improvement for a long time? Many are stuck because of badly planned training programs and many also think it is just a question of practicing the skills again and again. Is it so?? If it was true this forum was full of straddle planche videos and full front levers. It shouldnt take so long to move from progression to progression in a carefully planned program. Consider what I wrote above as guidlines, dont repeat the same things over and over again and expect a different result - this is the definition of madness.

Good luck,

Ido Portal

Hacasa Performance Center,

Haifa, Israel.