It’s time for the second Under-Over-Rated blog, this time focused on workout hypes. If you haven’t read the first one (nutrition focused), you can do that here . These blogs are simply here to appropriately rate fitness and nutrition related topics (in my opinion), to give you an idea of what is actually real or not.
I am sure a lot of you have heard the term ”going to failure” before, but what does it mean exactly and is it worth doing? It might not seem like a big deal to some but, how about drinking water in the middle of your workout? Or the big controversy in fitness, should you be working out 7 days per week? These are the 3 topics that we’ll be covering today, starting with going to failure.
Going to failure every set, Underrated
If you workout in a gym but have no clue what this means, a simple explanation is: pushing your muscles to a point where you can’t perform the reps on your own strength.
I feel like there is a bad stigma around the phrase ”going to failure”. It’s looked at like this way of training should only be used by professional athletes and bodybuilders. What is wrong with pushing your body to its limits every once in a while? Keeping in mind that you should be aware of the positions that your body is in during these sets and what your body is capable of doing.
Some people go to failure on every single set, which is not something I would recommend for regular people, but some people never look for that point of failure. In my opinion, we need both. We need both sets going to failure to push limits, but we also need sets where we push about 70-90% effort to give the muscles a stimulus but at the same time keeping the reps sharp and strong.
Final thoughts: If you’re a more experienced lifter and have general body-awareness, you will be totally fine pushing your limits a couple of times a week. If you don’t know how to program this or if you’re unsure how to go about it, ask for help. Should you be going to failure Every Single set? If you’re training like most people, probably not, but you can never rule it out for every single person. I still think going to failure is generally underrated.
Drinking water during a workout – Overrated
This might be one of my biggest Pet-peeves when it comes to CrossFit style workouts, so get ready for a quick rant.
Let me ask you a question. Do you think that you’re going to be de-hydrated after doing a 15-minute workout? No? Then why drink water during a high intensity workout, when all you’re doing there is making sure that the water you’re consuming is swirling around in your stomach.
If you feel dehydrated during a workout, you should start looking at your water/salt consumption during the remaining 23 hours and 45 minutes of the day, rather than the workout you’re currently doing.
Final thoughts: All jokes aside. There’s no reason for anyone to be drinking water during a high intensity workout that lasts up to 20 minutes. Once you go past that point and you sweat a decent amount, you definitely want to think about drinking water with electrolytes in there to keep yourself from cramping up (think about zone 2 runs, triathlons etc.)
Working out 7 days a week – overrated
Some of you might be thinking: 7 days a week, are you crazy? I am glad if I can make it 3 times a week. Whereas some people might look at this like: What do you mean 7 days a week is wrong, this works for me?
First, let’s define what working out means here. By working out I mean high intensity training sessions, that either leave you sore or at least damage the muscles. I am not talking about active recovery or zone 2 training sessions.
If you’re training hard 7 days a week, when does your body have the time to actually adapt and grow from the stimulus? It can’t, because you don’t give it time.
Sure, some people do train 7 days a week and make great progress, but 99.99% of those people don’t workout hard 7 days a week. They have active recovery days, that are looked at as training days. And some people might see the benefits of 7 days week for the first couple weeks/months but I guarantee that will start to dwindle down once your body stops recovering like it needs to, to keep up the intensity.
Final thoughts: I think 7 days a week of hard training isn’t the way to go for 99.99% of the people, at least if we’re talking about hard training sessions. If you include active recovery or zone 2 training sessions, it becomes a different story because the stimulus and muscle breakdown isn’t as significant.
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