by: Sean Callahan
White Lie #7- “I should work (insert muscle name here) multiple times a week to change it,” WRONG! Muscles for the most part all work on the same premise, stimulus and response. The workout being the stimulus, rest and recovery the response. Too much stimulus and not enough response and you get nothing, too much response and not enough stimulus and you get, you guessed it nothing as well. Let me ask you a simple question…..when you work a muscle are you breaking that breaking that muscle down or building it up (if you keep up with the weekly white lies you should have this answer already)? For those that are just getting here let me fill you in on the answer. When you are working a muscle you are breaking it down. In fact when you are working a muscle effectively you are creating tiny microscopic tears in the muscle. As we discussed before, we break the muscle down during the workout and then it builds back up during the rest and recovery phase. If we look at the link below taking ab training for example (I chose this specifically because it is not uncommon at all to see people train the abdominals everyday of the week).
Looking at this chart at what point do we ever allow the muscle to go through the most important part of the equation, recovery and rebuild? This is not just the case with abs, this is the same for any muscle and so like most anything else in life too much of a good thing often is not such a good thing at all.
Callahan Strong 