[massive member]

PART 4

An overlooked but very important part of a successful training program is rest. Your body needs time to rest after a workout so that your muscles can recuperate and grow. If you are not allowing enough time between
workouts to let your body fully recover, workouts will suffer and muscle growth will not occur. Exercise recovery, healing, tissue repair, anabolic hormone production and muscle growth are all maximized during sleep. Initial effects of sleep deprivation are sleepiness, but in the long term its
consequences can include an interference with the release of growth hormone.

A common mistake many Ectomorphs make is training too often. Just because some people train three or four times a week does not mean that you have to do the same. If you ignore the recovery process and workout
again before your muscles are fully recovered, you will be consistently tearing down muscle tissue and never allowing it to rebuild.

You have to look forward to your workouts. If you dread working out, you won’t get results. Also, if you just go through the motions, you won’t grow. Don’t believe that you have to workout everyday or if you don’t workout for a few days your muscles will lose size. That’s just not true. Your body grows during sleep, not when you workout. The more an Ectomorph works out each week, the less he’ll grow.

If you engage in too much extracurricular activity, kiss gains goodbye. Leave till later after acquired muscle mass. I knew of one guy would who get off work, go home, lift, then go to softball practice. He never made the kind of progress he should have.

More training does not equal more muscle growth. Understand that the purpose of weight training is to stimulate muscle growth. That takes very little time. Once that has been done, the muscle needs to be repaired and new muscle needs to be built. That only happens when you are resting. You do not build muscle in the gym, you build muscle when resting. If you never give your body any essential non-active time, when will it have a chance to build muscle.

Even more practical is to avoid constant striving to prolong indefinitely those wonderful times when you're on a roll of PRs. Most of us can peak for about four to eight weeks. At some point you need to recognize that it can't last. It makes sense to regroup and recover for a while before planning new goals. This is the way to avoid overtraining altogether.

Some of this is my own words and some is from other sources.