OVERTRAINING

You need to be mindful of overtraining. This can come in a number of forms. Firstly, you can push your sets too far, if you’re doing 14 sets of biceps all to complete fail – you can be damn sure they’re not going to recover in a week. If you’re doing 12 sets and only the last of each exercise includes cheat reps and absolute fail, you’re probably on the right track.

 You can also overtrain by not having enough rest time. Once every few weeks, try having 2 rest days in a row. This might feel un-natural, and you’ll feel like you’re shrinking, but sometimes your body needs time to recover. The other way of overtraining is by accidentally hitting one muscle group too hard. This can happen for example by splitting up deadlifts and squats onto separate days, with lats in the middle.

 You could be putting stress on your lower back 3 days in a row – and this area gets sore very quickly. If this happens and you feel as though it’s not recovering, make sure you take a week off from anything related to your lower back, and it’ll recover in no time.