Basic Principles of Multiple Sessions

[John Sapinoso]

My joints are precognitively telling me I should periodically skip 1 AM workout per week.

[Alvaro Antolinez]

That is not a lot of volume for such a small muscle? I´m just asking as I don´t know how proper rehab should look like! :?:

I mean the outer rotator cuff

[Razz]

Brendan: thanks a lot I thought I read that article, but seems like there was some stuff in there I forgot. I want to try this some time, just to see if it benefits me or not. Will be a while before I try it though.

[Joshua Naterman]

Not once you work up to it. At first you'll be alternating between light and heavier weights, but eventually you'll be able to lift heavy most of the time for the rotators. I'm already experiencing this after less than a month. I'm just doing 3x a week for now, but at this point I'm making progress every session. Ts00nami is doing far less volume per session and total work than I am on the external rotators, I can't possibly imagine it's getting in his way.

[Razz]

Same I'm doing 12 sets 3x weekly and they are quite 'heavy'; all I feel is improvement

[Joshua Naterman]

Excellent!

For the rest of the forum members: Concentrate on rehab, not strength training, until your rotators are completely pain free for at least a month or two. That's really important. It takes time for inflammation to die down once it becomes chronic, even after strength balance has been achieved sometimes. Be patient.

[John Sapinoso]

videos will and other posts non related to multiple sessions will be over in my workout log thread

[liegelord]

I read this thread last night, I had already been doing 2x a day for the past 2 weeks after reading something on another site. I had experience with 2x day with HST, though it was only MWF and not using any gymnastics training. I have been doing mainly gymnastics training for the past 1.5 years though and was going 5-6 days a week.

Last 2 weeks doing 6x a week, 2x a day, no session lasting more than about 35 minutes (Sundays I still do HS's). Wow, what a difference. I finally hit a straddle planche on my parallettes this morning, held it for 1-2 seconds. Strength in everything has been inproving, but the planche is the most satisfying because I have struggled for so long, took me 1.5 years to get a straddle planche.

I've also had the most improvement in my iron cross work, worked it 5-6x a week the last 2 weeks and gained more strength than the previous 2 months. I am using bands, I do a few sets of cross-pulls and then static holds.

I highly recommend multiple sessions a day if your schedule allows it and you avoid training to failure or exhaustion.

[Guest Ido Portal]

Every serious athlete I met over the last 15 years train multiple times a day. It is more common to find hard workers that train their ass off and develop huge work capacity than freaks who can get away with less and still be up there with the elite. (Shawn Johnson style)

Ido.

[Razz]

By reading logs on different forums I have also noticed the guys who train with the largest volume are usually the guys with the best results.

[Hivoyer]

I've actualy been trying to do acheive a better work capacity too,but it just doesnt work for me,I always get extremely sore if I do 2 sessions a day and on the next couple of days i feel weakened,It's weird cause i feel energetic right after the workout,I don't push myself too hard and I do the exercises in 3x3 or 3x5 sets/reps and i eat a lot of clean food(no junk food).Could it be cause of my height?(6 feet 3 inches)

[Guest Ido Portal]

And you are from.... Bulgaria... How ironic...

You need to pass through the 'Dark Times' my friend. Keep pushing frequently but with low volume at first.

Ido.

[Joshua Naterman]

Your best strategy is to get one session a day first, and alternate between heavy and light days. Do that until you don't feel an issues. You PROBABLY WILL get tired and perhaps lose progress temporarily, but that will pass. The most important thing is to get in there and work! Try to remember that you aren't working everything every day. The only reason John Broz's athletes do the same thing so often is that they have a very, very specific goal: Get good at the Snatch and Clean and Jerk. That's it.

As a gymnastics enthusiast you will have wider-ranging goals and will be working a wider variety of skills out of necessity. As it so happens, this tends to be more fun as well. You'll be working your upper and lower body several times per week each, along with certain important basic skills every day. The big difference between us and elite gymnasts is that we have the liberty of being more balanced in our training, because in elite gymnastics a lot of the highest scoring stuff is anterior chain specific, and this often leads to muscle imbalances that negatively affect shoulder health.

This transition is a slow process by necessity, and it works wonders. Having a rest day or two per week, during which you just stretch, do your warm up routine (a proper gymnastic warm up) and do some moderate sprints or a short jog(20-30 minutes) and maybe a few jumps if you're feeling extra froggy. It's a very light day, so at first perhaps you'll just warm up and take a short jog. Eventually what I've described will really not feel like much of anything. A true rest day every now and again never hurts either, but more than one or two a week even in the beginning is just too much after the first month or two if your goal is to make serious progress. 4 days of real workouts a week, two active rest days(somewhat like I describe above) and one true rest day a week is what it takes to make really good progress. In that sense, it's like anything else... if you don't spend the time you won't get the rewards.

[Quick Start Test Smith]

I like the idea of multiple sessions per day. Sometimes it is hard to arrange for a 3-4 hour long session, but two 2 hour long sessions would be easy.

One question, though. I've been told that regardless of whether you're doing a lower body or upper body workout, a full body warm up is always best. If this is true, should I be doing Ido's squat routine, scapula routine, twice daily? Workout specific warm ups would definitely be less time consuming.

[Cole Dano]

Those are more mobility exercises, so if time is short do the one that is most relevant to the workout you are about to do.

A quick run though of all the joints is never a bad idea, ankle / torso / neck rotations, knee / hip / elbow flexion extensions This takes just a minute or two.

Warm up is getting the muscles warm, and the more muscles you use to do this the more efficient it will be.

One of my favorites right now is a couple of circuits of Indian club swinging, Hindu pushups, Jump rope, Hindu squats.

Followed by Cherry Pickers, Windmills, light Strand Pulling (similar to Ido's scap mob).

From there, you can get more workout specific, doing exercises that have similar (or complementary) movements to the ones you will do in the workout.

[Quick Start Test Smith]

Thanks, Mr Brady. That helps a lot!