Can overtraining + skipping leg day increase my bench press?

jofjltncb6

If you neglect to train your legs all of your lifts will go down; bench press included, due to the hormonal influx experienced after a maximal compound exercise is performed. Bench presses are rarely heavy enough to induce this phenomena and you would therefore lose quite a bit of endogenous hormones.

there is no evidence the short term hormonal changes from exercise have any effect on long term muscle growth/strength.

The whole 'you need to squat as it makes your arms grow bigger' thing has been shown to be false.

Are you implying that there is nothing magical about leg day?!?

*GASP!*


What part of never *ever* skipping leg day do you not understand???

JoRocka

If you neglect to train your legs all of your lifts will go down; bench press included, due to the hormonal influx experienced after a maximal compound exercise is performed. Bench presses are rarely heavy enough to induce this phenomena and you would therefore lose quite a bit of endogenous hormones.

there is no evidence the short term hormonal changes from exercise have any effect on long term muscle growth/strength.

The whole 'you need to squat as it makes your arms grow bigger' thing has been shown to be false.

Are you implying that there is nothing magical about leg day?!?

*GASP!*


What part of never *ever* skipping leg day do you not understand???

clearly he has never seen the squat fairies.

Which means- yes- leg day IS magical.

LiftAllThePizzas

I've done this same experiment (but with 5 years of lifting experience or so). I had to drop leg stuff because of an injury. I ran smolov Jnr (but didn't neglect back work). My bench stayed the same at a pathetic 105kg (235lbs)

Sometimes, you really can't explain how or why a lift stalls or even increases e.g. I had another injury and could only squat twice in 3 months leading up to a comp. (I was still able to deadlift). Squat increased from 190 to 200kg. Dunno.

BTW I like your graphs

Interesting. Thanks.

LiftAllThePizzas

You have really not been into lifting for all that long and may benefit by just returning to a beginning type of program instead of HST. With your graphs and all, you really seem to be over thinking this when really you should just keep it simple. Maybe do Starting Strength or SL 5x5 and ensure you are eating enough and resting enough. You are not a special little snow flake. These programs work for anyone who is not truly injured to a point of keeping them from doing each lift.

My goal is not raw strength. Why would I want to do a beginner strength program and risk injury for no benefit, when the thing I'm doing is getting exactly the results I want and expect?

Well, but I thought the point of this thread was that you're NOT getting the results you want, so you're looking to change your method. Thanks for explaining HST up-thread. If I were on a plateau trying to increase the weight I can bench, I'd probably try benching more weight... Like, I don't know, maybe 80-90% 1RM for two reps, and then try for three reps the next time, and so on. It just seems to me that benching more weight would probably help increase the weight one could bench, more than ceasing exercise of other muscles or adding accessory lifts.

Also, I'm not sure what connection you're making here between doing a beginner program and risking injury.

I was getting results I like doing a program I enjoy, but wanted to experiment to see if I could break my plateau on benching. And also to see if increasing volume/underrecovering would produce an adaptation. (The latter has been impossible to measure so I can't really say what happened there.)

The connection I'm making is that all of the injuries I've had (including the inguinal hernia) were at low rep ranges. This was why I decided to cut out the heavy end of things. An injury for me doesn't just mean I have to stop that lift or all lifting, it means I have to stop diving, even if it's a little thing.

LifterDave

Now you are making more sense in your thought process. Good luck with the healing of your hernia. I had an inguinal hernia repaired several years ago and then blew it out 1 year and 3 months later. Blowing out a hernia repair was much more painful than the original hernia.

LiftAllThePizzas

As far as overtraining, I tried finding if the capacity for volume can be increased and didn't find much to support or refute this idea. I think "under-recovering" may be a more accurate description, although I am definitely challenging my CNS with this amount of volume, because it has effected my ability to sleep. (Which was one of the goals, to see if it will adapt.) I mean, this is how we make strength gains, by progressive overload. Same concept.

Thanks for this. Am I reading it correctly, that around day 146 you were doing something like 15-20 reps/set at around 50-60% of 1RM and now you're doing about 10 reps at about 70-75% of 1RM? I could be getting that completely wrong; I'm not real well versed on calculating 1RM. But if that's accurate... Have you considered doing fewer reps/set at a higher weight?

Yep. HST goes in cycles where you do sets of 15, then work your way down through rep ranges to 3/1/negatives. After the first two cycles I altered that to 20-8 reps, because the chance of injuries increases drastically in the lower rep ranges and my priority is adding mass (and avoiding injuries which at my age could easily become permanent) rather than pure strength gains. I've been able to continue increasing the weight used for each rep range, which is the metric I am using to determine whether or not I am making progress.

"... at my age..." Hee hee, you're not THAT old, kiddo. :bigsmile:

Ok, so you changed the program, adding 5 reps to both sides of the cycle. 20 reps/set is a LOT, isn't it? Well beyond what I see typically cited as within the hypertrophy range - more like somewhere in the endurance range, and that's where you're beginning the cycle? Maybe doing that many reps just fatigues you too much to bump the weight up significantly at the start of the cycle. If you don't want to do the program, what about going from 15 to 6-8 and then starting a new cycle? It would be a shorter cycle, but who cares - you're already not doing the program, so no need for the length of the program to be sacred. What do you think?

I've seen a few posts up-thread that indicate maybe you're not actually concerned over this so much as you're interested in testing a hypothes is. In which case, I guess why not try it and see, but be careful not to obscure the effect by making other changes at the same time.

The thing with rep ranges is that they are not exclusive in their effect/benefit. It's just that one rep range has more focus on a particular aspect than another. I've been able to make strength gains doing sets of 15. The higher rep ranges also produce more lactic acid, which is involved in production of HGH. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18184755 because someone will ask) And they also exhaust your muscles and CNS in a different way. (Even the recovery the next day feels different.)

So the thing is, if I do higher rep ranges, I may gain strength more slowly (which is fine by me because I'm not in a hurry) but will also (hopefully) stimulate growth of connective tissue and help prevent injuries by giving them time to keep up with any strength gains I make.

In the end, the only thing that matters is lifting progressively, and often enough (which requires liking what you are doing and not being prevented by injury), and to deload/stop periodically. Anyone who does those things will make progress. The rest is trying to squeeze the last few drops of performance out of something, which is not important to me. I prefer to experiment and see what happens, that's half of the fun.

whitebalance

Ok, so you changed the program, adding 5 reps to both sides of the cycle. 20 reps/set is a LOT, isn't it? Well beyond what I see typically cited as within the hypertrophy range - more like somewhere in the endurance range, and that's where you're beginning the cycle? Maybe doing that many reps just fatigues you too much to bump the weight up significantly at the start of the cycle. If you don't want to do the program, what about going from 15 to 6-8 and then starting a new cycle? It would be a shorter cycle, but who cares - you're already not doing the program, so no need for the length of the program to be sacred. What do you think?

I've seen a few posts up-thread that indicate maybe you're not actually concerned over this so much as you're interested in testing a hypothes is. In which case, I guess why not try it and see, but be careful not to obscure the effect by making other changes at the same time.

The thing with rep ranges is that they are not exclusive in their effect/benefit. It's just that one rep range has more focus on a particular aspect than another. I've been able to make strength gains doing sets of 15. The higher rep ranges also produce more lactic acid, which is involved in production of HGH. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18184755 because someone will ask) And they also exhaust your muscles and CNS in a different way. (Even the recovery the next day feels different.)

So the thing is, if I do higher rep ranges, I may gain strength more slowly (which is fine by me because I'm not in a hurry) but will also (hopefully) stimulate growth of connective tissue and help prevent injuries by giving them time to keep up with any strength gains I make.

In the end, the only thing that matters is lifting progressively, and often enough (which requires liking what you are doing and not being prevented by injury), and to deload/stop periodically. Anyone who does those things will make progress. The rest is trying to squeeze the last few drops of performance out of something, which is not important to me. I prefer to experiment and see what happens, that's half of the fun.

I was reading your original post differently... It sounded like you were stalled and looking for a way to add plates to your bench. Reading that you just want to experiment - cool, have fun and the pretty graphs will be interesting, but if you're making two interventions at once (e.g., reducing recovery time and not training other body parts), how will you know that both interventions were necessary to produce any interesting outcomes you get?

I do higher rep ranges too, for the same reason... but to me, "higher rep ranges" is 8-12. And reducing recovery time (at my age only results in major DOMS and flare-ups of my previous injury.