November 16, 2015

glycogen and olympic style weightlifting

Great news! I'm relatively certain I've figured out what caused the fatigue during my workouts the last week. I thought it was caused by one or a combination of the following: dieting, to many hours at work, lack of sleep, or because my new intensive training program was to difficult for me. Turns out it has to do with my glycogen levels. I'd  been doing a bench program after weightlifting. Doing both was causing REALLY long training days and was burning me out.  A couple weeks ago I started weightlifting on Mondays, Wednesday's, and Fridays and doing the bench program with pull ups and abs on Tuesdays and Thursdays. My muscles glycogen levels were able to fully replenish because the muscles used on each day were different, but an athletes liver glycogen levels takes 48 hours to fully replenish from strength training days. Since I was strength training 5 days consecutively my livers glycogen levels were getting lower everyday and never recovering. I'll be going back to doing bench press after my olympic weightlifting. Olympic style weightlifting is such a mental game. I'm always learning something new.

No comments: