Can you overtrain biceps

Habit is one of the biggest enemies of progress, right up with laziness and overtraining , so smash that comfortable routine of yours with a vengeance. Hate forearm rolls, cable hammer curls and dips? Tough luck, you're doing them now!

After a month or so you can bring back your old favorites, rotating them through your workout like you would any other exercise. It's a classic mistake to focus primarily on biceps for arm growth. Sure, they look impressive once you get a nice peak worked up, but they're literally the tip of the iceberg.

To get the kind of biceps you want you must train the brachialis, which is located UNDER the biceps and pushes it up. In addition, triceps make up almost two-thirds of the total arm thickness, and let's not forget the importance of the forearms to avoid "reverse-Popeye"-syndrome beefy upper arms and twig-like forearms.

Furthermore, biceps is a relatively small muscle that grows best with a hit-hard-and-brief approach, so avoid the 16 set bicep workouts and spread the time and efforts appropriately.

For example, 6 sets for biceps making sure 2 of them hit brachialis , 8 sets for triceps and 4 sets for forearms is a reasonable split. See the sample workout for how such a setup could work. Overtraining arms is easily done. You often involve biceps and forearms during back training, with triceps getting a beating on chest day.

If you're on a split that has you train through the entire body twice per week you could be hitting the same muscles almost every day, directly or indirectly.

If you've read my articles in the past you know that I advocate a less-is-more approach of training each muscle group once per week as soon as you're past the beginner-stage. That should decrease the risk of overtraining considerably. As for timing, keep your workouts short and brief: mins is ideal, anything over 60 mins is borderline counterproductive. Click here to read more about periodization. With a min window not counting warmup and stretching you have to move pretty fast between exercises.

You shouldn't have to walk around with a stopwatch, but aim for about a minute of rest between sets. Compound exercises like squats and deadlifts require a few minutes to catch your breath, but small muscles like those found in the arms recover relatively quickly - hit'em hard, then hit'em again to keep the intensity up. The biggest culprits of the misinformation that causes overtraining are body building magazines, and poor advice given out in gyms. You're about to learn how easy it is to overtrain, and what you can do about it to get the gains you're after, and avoid reversing your progress.

Bodybuilding magazines are purchased by millions of fitness fanatics every week who are looking for the next workout that is going to cause their muscles to grow more than the last workout routine they tried from the same magazine. Ninety nine percent of the time the readers of these magazines will experience the same results.

The problem is the workout will just be the same, but the exercises will be in a different order. These workouts usually consist of about 20 sets for biceps training. Your biceps are small muscles compared to your back or your thighs, and even they don't need 20 sets between them. Also, to perform 20 sets using proper form, and having a proper rest period between each set would take over an hour. By the time you would have finished your bicep workout you're efforts will be causing your progress to go backwards.

As you train over a period of time a stress hormone is produced in your body called Cortisol. This hormone will begin to breakdown your muscles, and as you train for longer periods this hormone increases so it can cause your muscles to get smaller instead of bigger. Shorter workouts are much more beneficial for your success in stimulating growth, and an hour is what you need to do at the most.

This hour of training will include training more than just your biceps so it's still too much training to try and crank out 20 sets in the shortest time possible.

When you train other parts of your body, for example, your back, you will be stimulating your biceps with the pulling exercises that you use such as chin ups and lateral pull-downs. This will already have given your biceps a small workout so if you follow a back routine that you are using from a magazine this will probably be around 20 to 25 sets of back exercises. Overall calorie intake, protein, carbohydrate and water intake are major factors to consider.

When your body lacks water, protein, calories and carbohydrates, it will experience problems recovering and repairing your muscle tissue after a workout. If the deficiency of these crucial nutrients is great enough, you may even notice a decrease in overall muscle mass. When your body becomes overtrained, a common issue is hitting a plateau. This means you fail to make any gains in muscle size or strength despite continuous training sessions.

Most often, when a person hits a plateau, he or she will actually start working out more because they think they are not working hard enough. This is a huge mistake and is among the major causes of making overtraining issues even worse.

It is never too late to reverse the effects of overtraining. Consider aspects of your life such as your free time, your training goals, your level of fitness and the type of job you do.

The type of job you perform may either be office based or manual, and this will determine the amount of energy available for workout sessions. For instance, a person working at a construction site for 8 hours a day and also lifting weights for 5 days a week will have a much higher chance of overtraining which ends up with little or no results.

Since you are currently not growing or getting any bigger, its probably smart to take some time off since it sounds like you are severely overtrained.

Take 2 weeks off of training and take a break. This means absolutely no exercise at all! You need to let your body fully recover and get itself out of this condition. Cut your overall sets down for per workout for your biceps and take a few additional weeks just to make sure you do not trigger any further overtraining issues.

The bottom line to avoid overtraining is to simply rest and let your body recover. Train each muscle group only once per week and focus on a maximum of 60 minutes per workout. A great way to structure your workouts is by using a split routine where you train only muscle groups per workout.