Can Extremely Long Weight Training Workouts be Effective?

Can Extremely Long Weight Training Workouts be Effective

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While the motto "more is better" applies to most things in life, it also gets often implemented in training by adding extra number of sets and therefore increasing the duration of training sessions. You can often see people performing 40 or more sets per training session spending 2 or more hours in the gym. Unfortunately, this is not the good way to overcome stagnation in muscle growth.

In order to keep improving in strength gains and muscle size one has to concentrate on the major factors that prompt growth and strength increase.

Three major factors responsible for that are:

Intensity

Form of exercising

Nutrition

While perfect form of exercising and right nutrition are essential for causing muscle brake down and subsequently allowing muscle repair and therefore growth, they are not directly linked to the duration of the workout. What is directly linked and suffers from long workouts is the factor number 1: intensity.

Intensity in training is the factor that creates constant microscopic muscle damage (breakdown) which results in muscle repair and growth (hypertrophy). If the intensity of training is not high enough, the muscle damage remains constant over time and muscle growth stagnates. If intensity level drops down, less damage will be inflicted upon muscles and therefore muscles will start shrinking.

One of the best ways to lower the intensity of your training is to make it last longer! Intensity and duration are not compatible.

What is intense cannot last long. What lasts long is not intense. Take for example 100 metre sprint. It only lasts around 10 seconds, it is extremely intense and therefore sprinters are very muscular. When the intensity decreases and the duration increases, e.g. 800 metres runners, the athletes are smaller, their muscles are not as big and defined. To prove this physiological rule, look at the long distance runners of 5000 or 10 000 metres. They are even smaller and the best proof that long duration exercise will shrink you to the point of complete muscle wastage are the marathon runners (42 000 metres, over the period of 2 hours).

So, it is obvious that in order to improve your results, you should be looking at the shorter and more intense workouts. Any workout that is high in intensity will never last longer than 45 to 60 minutes. High intensity means lower number of sets per muscle group; they would rather be 12 to 16 sets for the big muscle groups like legs, back and chest, while smaller muscle groups will be completely trained in 6 to 12 sets (biceps maximum 6 sets, triceps maximum 6 sets, shoulders maximum 12 sets). For the best results train all muscles groups once per week on their own. That will mean that you will train 5 times per week, one muscle group per session. Abdominals can be added to chest or shoulders workout with no more than 6 sets. Effectively that means that you will do not more than 16 sets per workout. If you rest not more than 2 minutes between the sets which lasts 30 second each, you will complete your training session in around 40 minutes. This is all that you need to do in order to keep your intensity of training high.

If you spend 2 or more hours in the gym your training will be more like marathon running session. You will only be able to do that if the intensity level of your training is low and you also rest too long between the sets.

Long workouts can easily over train you. The reasons for that are many, but the major ones which are caused by long training session are: glycogen depletion from the muscles and liver; muscles being unable to recover between workouts; drop in the testosterone production and increased production of cortisol, a hormone that creates highly catabolic environment (muscle wastage).

Extremely long workouts are not just waste of time but also very counter productive for muscle growth and increase in strength.

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