Anyone interested in a group fitness challenge?

[Vutulaki]

You touched on sleep, sleep is king. After a good few nights sleep my lifts go up, I get a massive pump and feel like im on juice in and out of the gym

We should discuss sleep

[Diet Butcher]

You touched on sleep, sleep is king. After a good few nights sleep my lifts go up, I get a massive pump and feel like im on juice in and out of the gym

We should discuss sleep

Sleep is probably the one thing most of us fuck up on the most. It's 2.30 am and I'm fucking responding to this post, LOL
Yeah, all your gains occur during sleep. Also, not getting enough sleep increases cortisol, the stress hormone, which kinda fucks shit up.
I try to get 7 hours... not tonight, lol... here are some rules (which I don't always follow)...

No food 3 hours before bed.
No liquids 2 hours before bed.
No screen (computer/phone) 1 hour before bed.

Try to read a book to try to fall asleep. Remember back in school, you always fall asleep while studying for exams? Yeah, reading books will knock you out fast.

[Luigi]

Ive been getting 5-6 hours of sleep on weekdays for at least 15 years now, its been a big problem in many aspects of my life. My mind is overactive and in certain instances its a blessing, but the flip side of that is I will never sleep like a normal person and will have to deal with the consequences of that. People have tried to push me to use meds but I'm not down. I will just be dependant on them and sleep even worse if I cant access them for whatever reason.

[Vutulaki]

Good points raised, you really dont want to take meds for sleep, addressing the underlying issue or just living with less of it is better. I dont think your sleep quality while on sleep meds or weed is the best either

For me screen time does not keep me awake in fact the way I sleep most nights is to put a podcast on youtube on my phone, close the case so theres very little light being emitted. I know im about to fall asleep when I start thinking aboutr random shit not related to the vid im listening to, then its a battle not to sleep. I estimate 5-10 mins max

Anyway I remember some athlete once saying that if sleep wasnt a normal bodily function it would be banned at the olympics cause it iss that good for your performance

[Vutulaki]

rookie question, does the optimal sets per week/cycle per body part include indirect work or just direct work?

Ive been planning it based on direct only but then it dawned on me today that on deadlift day ive already done 12 or so sets of heavy indirect bicep work via various types of pulling before I started bis which was 9 sets of direct bicep work.

[Canuckster]

That would depend on how advanced your training and your bodies ability to recuperate from it is. The thing about biceps is they are a relatively small muscle group and don't require the ridiculous amount of workload that a lot of people put on them in their workouts. Hence why so many people tear biceps. You'll have to listen to your body telling you what it needs.

If you're doing significant heavy indirect bicep work on one day, I'd separate those days from your direct workout to avoid injury and overtraining by at least 2-3 days minimum. This of course applies to pretty much any muscle group you're training in this way

[Vutulaki]

Thanks but the question is when they prescribe say 15-20 sets per body part per week are they including your indirect work within that figure? the set range is static

Also I totally agree that smaller muscles like biceps dont require as much stimulus or volume but its a double edged swords imo in that they dont need as much time to recover

Early days but im not seeing much progress in terms of aesthetics, only been a few weeks though lol

[Canuckster]

Ah, ok, guess who's it depends on who "they" are and what their intent is within their advice.

If you're simply following general guidelines, like I said you're the only one the knows what your body can take so you have to structure your workouts accordingly, for me, I would leave the indirect exercises out of the total amount of # Training simply because there are so many exercises that would fall into the indirect category for you wouldn't need to address direct exercises lol. But that's just for me, of course everyone's mileage may vary

To me

[Luigi]

Smolov week 2 complete. This was the first day that was legitimately hard. I had to use 6-9 min breaks between sets. Kinda surprised I did it without issue, but now that I have I have a lot of confidence for being able to complete the whole program without failure. I did however have a lot of pain in small muscles in my arms. The left delt pain in there, and when I tried to scratch my back in the hours after the work out it would be very painful in my left arm, so I could only use the right arm which made getting the itchy spot often challenging.

[Som-Pong]

Good!

Just listened to Nippard talking about powerbuilding.
https://youtu.be/OPEDjl88P-4?si=63Eg_36ASswAQ3Rr
Makes a lot of sense.