suntan or sunburn?

Do you want a suntan or sunburn?

When you go away on holiday - do you want to come back with a suntan or sunburn?

You want the tan, right?

Well the same principle can be applied to your training in the gym!

If you’re a bodybuilder, you’ve traditionally trained 5 or 6 times a week and dedicated body parts on each day, meaning you train that muscle group just the once per week, at pretty high volume.

Even if you’re not and you train for health, for strength and for weight management (although as we explore in another of my articles, exercise is not actually very effective for fat loss), you may have adopted this training split, or you may just overtrain with WAY too much volume in any given week, and very little consideration given to rest & recovery.

I’m going to level up with you. For those of us that aren’t bodybuilders or physique athletes, this approach is likely to be holding you back from making good progress.

Rest and recovery, along with sufficient protein consumption and resistance training, are vital to your progress.

🛑 More is not always better!

Excessive volume & intensity creates the potential for overtraining and consequently this is the equivalent of the “sunburn effect”.

It’s like going out in the sun with no protection for 10 hours and getting burnt to a crisp, preventing you from going back to the sun lounger for the rest of the holiday. You feel awful, maybe even with a touch of sunstroke, you’re in pain, you struggle to sit comfortably, let alone lay down. Your holiday: Ruined 😡

If you go out in the sun for a few hours less and wear protection, you’ll be able to go to that sun lounger the next day. And the next day. And so on for the remainder of the holiday. You’re coming home with a nice suntan. You feel on top of the world, you’re golden brown, everyone compliments you 😍

Spreading out your training across the week, providing enough stimulus in a session to elicit a positive training effect, but not too much so as to overtrain, is the training equivalent of the “suntan effect”.

So what type of training are you doing - the Suntan Effect or Sunburn Effect?

Need some help working out what excessive volume & overtraining looks like for you? Drop me a message on socials, or by email to info@farrell-fitness.co.uk and I will get back to you…