Daily full body -how important is variety?

[phdresearcher]

@chris1975 I did push pull leg 6x a week and my body wasn't handling it very well past 3 months. Joints would always be sore and mentally I was just thinking about working out all the time.

I switched to full body 3 times and week and everything feels much better mentally and physically. Sometimes you gotta listen to your body

 

[nonebutjesus]

@chris1975 Add some legs too. Convicts do stuff like these with high frequency and high volume and its still enough to make them jacked, granted some of them probably smuggled roids.

 

[chris1975]

@nonebutjesus Yeah if I were to focus on 2 primary keg exercises what would everyone recommend?

 

[nonebutjesus]

@chris1975 Well its hard to train legs just by bodyweight after quite some time, you have to invest on some weights because you can be doing hundreds of air squats but with no progress.

 

[vatty]

@chris1975 Pattern overload (doing the same thing so often you might get injured) can definitely happen with 5 to 6 sessions per week with minimal variety. More important than adding more variety is deloading every 4 to 6 weeks. This means for 1 week you do 50% volume or 50% effort. This allows your body to catch up on healing any minor tears and to shed accumulated fatigue.

 

[rjg21]

@chris1975 You're good don't overthink it. Workout and if you feel something bothers you change the exercise.

 

[keab]

@chris1975 First thing I see is that your reps are a bit higher than what’s in the recommended routine, which lists dips and pull-ups as 3x5-8 before moving on to the next progression.
I think they recommend this progression partly to avoid overuse like what you’re describing.

Are you switching to the next progression of the exercises? Or are you upping reps on the same exercise? That’s my best guess based on the info provided.

 

[chris1975]

@keab Not exactly following progression, just increasing reps weekly. I know this is not the norm, but just following info I found on YouTube from K Boges -if I have understood it correctly.
But if lowering reps through intensity is a solution I would be willing to try it!

 

[ggg17]

@chris1975 You need to keep increasing load to maintain high intensity. High intensity stimulates growth in muscle mass and strength. Training with the load that you can rep only 5-8 times is considered optimal and relatively high intensity.

Whenever you can finish 8 reps in all your sets, progress to more difficult exercise so your reps drop to 5. Just progressing through exercises this way it provides enough variety for most people.

I maybe stating the obvious but I have a feeling you didn't understand the meaning of rep range e.g. 5-8 reps.

 

[chris1975]

@ggg17 I was just doing higher rep ranges. I wasn't taking this directly from the RR. Thanks for the advice tho

 

[dawn16]

@keab just so you know its not because of overuse. Its because the 1-8 range is the most efficient (time wise) in building strength/power.

Arnold at his peak was working out 6-8h 6d/week without any overuse injuries. I imagine most top athletes are similar. So these aches and pains we usually call overuse injury are more like overload injury. Where we jump from doing a little activity to a lot of activity so quickly that our body either gets injured or thinks it gets injured.

 

[keab]

@dawn16 That’s very good to know, thanks!

 

[torin]

@dawn16 Arnold was using steroids, recovery was covered that way for him.

 

[dawn16]

@torin Steroids make your muscles bigger and stronger faster which maybe increases your risk of injury because the tendons and ligaments don't keep up with the muscle growth.

 

[dawn16]

@chris1975 I tried both a lot of variety and repeating the same exercises every day. Both failed for me. Repeating the same exercises every day led to elbow/shoulder pain. Having a lot of variety led to loss of motivation as there were always something I didn't feel like doing which killed my motivation for everything else.

I have been doing a 3 day split with little variety for a while now, but I am doing consistent progress and enjoy every exercise in it which makes it very easy to sustain over time and I haven't felt pain in months.

Day A: 6x superset Weighted pull-ups into bodyweight chin-up

Day B: 6x superset Weighted ring dips into ring pppu

Day C: 6x superset HSPU into lateral raises with dumbells

15-30 minute pauses between supersets, no pause between exercises in the same superset

60 minutes low impact cardio every day.

I also sprinkle whatever skill I feel like doing that day if any.

I got ring/bar muscle-ups, rto dips, FL/BL, HSPU, atg pistol squat.. basically most basic skills out of it. I am sure it's not optimal, but I progress, I don't get hurt and I have fun.

TLR don't overthink things.. try something out, if it works for you keep it up, if it doesn't feel right or fun, change it up.

 

[lastservant]

@dawn16

15-30 minute pauses between supersets, no pause between exercises in the same superset

Don't you mean 15-30 second pauses?

 

[dawn16]

@lastservant Nope, I really mean minutes. 6sets = 2-3hours. I know that many people think you should only workout non-stop, but spacing my sets really makes it easier for me. I can give my 100% to every sets, I don't have to allocate a timeframe to do just that as I can do the sets in between other things. I've been able to stay very consistent since I started doing that months ago.

Like I said; it's likely not optimal, but having fun and progressing is more relevant to me than trying to emulate what the meta is.

 

[dawn16]

@chris1975 I don't see the point of working the same muscles each day if I'm honest.

Surely your chest and tris must be at least somewhat fatigued the day after dips - how are you meant to progress with pushups like that? I feel like it's just accumulating fatigue with no progress.

 

[jimmatt]

@dawn16 Depends on how much volume you did. Fatigue is not binary, but proportional to the amount of work you did. Training more frequently serves as a means of distributing weekly volume in a way that generates less fatigue per unit of volume.

 

[ayeesha]

@chris1975 Variety is def something to be considered.

If you want to work breadth of movement, yes train variety.

If you want specific strength & hypertrophy gains, then you send the strongest message to your body that you want to build strength & muscle in this movement, in this range, by doing those specific exercises. That's why a lot of strength/hypertrophy programs can be pretty repetitive.

Plus some movements are so fundamental that they're embedded in practically everything, so in that sense, there isn't that much variety. Like.. we actually do some form of squatting all the time throughout the day.

As for overuse-- everyone has a different tolerance level. You'd have to monitor yourself. It's usually form/technique, program, and/or lack of recovery so make sure you're on top of all of that to maximize how far you can push yourself before running into issues.