just a few sets of curls, will delay your recovery. Stop exercising other than
doing some stretching and leisurely walking. Sleep early and get up late
whenever possible, eat well but not excessively, and get thoroughly rested.
As you restore yourself, your training zeal will start to return.. Let this feeling of anticipation and vigor build up. Do not get back in the
gym as soon as possible and risk having the fledgling zest extinguished. Let
your enthusiasm build up until you are almost rabidly keen to train.. Now get back in the gym on a new program—one that is more abbrevi-
ated than your former one, and with reduced poundages. Take it easy, use
immaculate exercise technique, and build back to your best working pound-
ages over six weeks. Gradually let your body adapt to the reintroduction of
increasing training poundages, without experiencing severe systemic fatigue
and local soreness, or any of the warning signs of overtraining. While avoid-
ing overtraining you will build up the conditioning needed to forge into new
poundage territory in the final stage of the cycle. If you rush back you will
return to the overtrained state.. And be sure to rest, sleep and eat better than you did when you got over-
trained in your previous program. So long as your training program is rea-
sonable, the major factor determining whether or not you gain from it is
how well you satisfy the recovery component—rest, sleep and nutrition.. Taking a couple of weeks layoff as a response to chronic overtraining, and
then returning to the same training program that got you overtrained in the
first place, is not the way to go. You have to take action to ensure that you do
not repeat the scenario that got you into a mess of overtraining in the first
place. And even if you thought that what you were doing in the gym prior to
the layoff was modest relative to what some people can grow on, if it over-
trained you, then you must still cut back.. Forget about what others can gain on. What matters most to you and your
training is what you can gain on. Always remember that reducing training
volume and frequency nearly always produces more gains, both for hard
gainers and for not-so-hard gainers.. Never continue with a training program that produces symptoms of over-
training, no matter how little you may be training relative to elite body-
builders. What matters in your personal training is what works for you.
Overtraining will not make your muscles grow!