Yesterday, I talked about not providing your muscles enough of a challenge in your workouts. The other end of the spectrum is when you provide too high a volume of stimulus and challenge to the body, and do not allow it to recover. The positive adaptations made by your body occur through the rest and repair of the muscle groups that are being trained. Exercise actually causes some damage to the muscle fibers, and through the repair of this damage, the muscles become stronger and able to handle the demand you are placing on them. They need adequate time to rest in order to accomplish this.
When you push your muscles too frequently, or with extremely heavy weights for long periods of time, they are unable to recover sufficiently between exercise sessions. The damage begins to compound, your gains will slow and then stop. In severe cases of overtraining, you can even see exercise performance and the associated gains begin to backslide.
It is critical to understand that more is not necessarily always better when it comes to exercise.
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