Recovery Week - lost more weight than workout week - why?

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  • tnqnt
    tnqnt Posts: 397 Member
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    Just to clarify, I was mainly talking about the cardio portion such as for people training for performance. I'll leave the advice for intense weight training to someone more knowledgable than me.

    But for endurance training the total oonsistent workload is of primary importance. If someone has to start taking extended or repeated time off then that points to a training error, usually too high or intense a training load for a person's current fitness level. That also points to the fact that the training is harder than it needs to be and is overloading the body's ability to recover from training sessions making much of the training time less productive than it otherwise could be.

    I do both Cardio and Weight/Resistance training. I had been going 8 months straight 6 days a week, intense workouts without any true recovery week. I feel better so I am guessing it is a good thing to do :) I will go back Monday and am thinking of reducing my workout time as I am very close to my goal weight. I do want to tone my core, so will try to focus on resistance to accomplish this for the next 8 weeks ... I think I need to reduce my cardio a bit as I was doing LOTS of it.
  • Azdak
    Azdak Posts: 8,281 Member
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    The weight loss is almost certainly due to fluid shifts. There are some short-term training adaptations that start to reverse fairly quickly.

    I also agree that, unless you have symptoms of overtraining, there is no need to automatically take a week off at set intervals. You can build "active recovery" into a routine without actually stopping your program.

    As someone said, both training stimulus and results are not linear--they follow more of a sawtooth pattern.
  • ken_ferry77
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    To be honest from my research over the past 5 years on different forms of training from cardio, interval, body resistance, weight training, power lifting ect.... I think you are working out way too much. Working out any more than an 1 hour a day for 2-3 days a week should be your max, anything else you are just causing way too much inflammation and muscle damage in your body. I think cardio is a waste because it is not efficient enough. Once you get into those higher level zones of cardio your body stops burning fat and starts burning glucose to fuel your muscles. Your muscles and liver together only hold 500-600 grams of glycogen at any given time. Doing 6 days straight of cardio\weight training would mean that you should be eating at least 500-600 grams of carbs a day which I would be curious if you are actually doing. This kind of training (and diet) raises cortisol levels, increases oxidative damage, systemic inflammation, depresses the immune system and decreases fat metabolism. So if you are even eating that much to recover the glycogen your really not doing your body good at all. For optimal workout efficiency you body needs at least a day to recover, taking a whole week for recovery doesn't make that much sense to me. I do agree with the rest on the water suggestion however. I do mean this as constructive criticism, I would offer you a few names of people that has studied the research of what I am talking about above in further detail but I think that would be considered advertising.
  • oeagleo
    oeagleo Posts: 70 Member
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    Thank you for that link, within it, I found what I believe is the answer to a question I posed in another forum, "Why does my body fat percentage increase after a workout, when my weight may stay the same, or even go up or down a tad?", The answer is given in that link:

    "Somewhat circumstantially, people using Bioimpedance body fat scales (which use hydration to estimate body fat levels) have noted that body fat appears to go up right before a big drop. This implicates water balance as the issue here."

    I'm using a Withings (Biometric) scale, and this apparently explains it all, (with the supporting discussion found in the article itself)
    Thanks!
  • tnqnt
    tnqnt Posts: 397 Member
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    Ha! First day back at the gym today in a week and I weigh more than I did on my week off.....