Bodybuilding is about workouts and training hard in the gym. Bodybuilders normally believe that more hard you train your body often in the gym, better results you are going to see. Well, folks, this is not the case. Training harder no doubt is good for getting muscles but training hard on regular basis without providing proper recovery time to the muscles and body leads to bad effects and negative results.
Let us first define over-training. Over-training means that you are training a particular muscle or muscle group more times a week than actually it should be. Over-training also means that you are not allowing your body to have certain amount of rest before you re-train it.
Next question which comes to our mind is that how do we know that we are over-training our muscles? I will explain here a few symptoms which can guide you and let you know that you are actually over-training your body. First symptom could be that you feel that your number of sets or reps is decreasing even when you are doing your exercise with a steady weight. If you feel that it is happening from quite a few days, this indicates that you are over-training your muscles. Second symptom is when you have the ability to perform exercise but still you do not want to do it. Or, you feel that you get fatigued earlier. This indicates fatigue of your central nervous system and you need to take rest for a couple of days to get out of it. Similarly, you may find muscles fatigues when you can still workout but your muscles do not let you do it.
Question arises, how to make sure that we do not fall victim to over-training. Answer is very simple; do not train your muscles 6-7 days a week. You should be training muscles only 3-4 times a week and must focus on compound exercises rather than individual muscle exercises. Compound exercises make sure that you train more muscles per session and as a result, get time for proper rest. So make sure to avoid high frequency of training muscles in the week and allow body to repair muscles by having 7-8 hours of rest per day.
