The 10000 kettlebell swing challenge.

[FBeyer]

Have any of you tried it?
It looks nasty as all....

https://www.t-nation.com/workouts/10000 ... ll-workout

[jacob]

I used to calculate workload and intensity by multiplying reps with weight and adjusting for how far it travelled from the ground to overhead:

Snatch: 1
Clean: 1/2
Press: 1/2
Obviously then: C&P = 1/2+1/2
Swing: 1/2
Squat: 1/4
Bench: 1/2

With 53lbs, that's a 500x53/2 = 13250 length pounds of work + all the loose stuff per workout. That's twice the volume I used to do and it's repeated every day on top of that. Probably needs to train to get in sufficient shape to just start on this program.

[BRUTE]

yea seems pretty prone to overtraining.

[FBeyer]

Although I might be nitpicking compared to the volume of work; its 4 training days per week, basic arithmetic gives me 3 rest days per week then.

Does overtraining set in after 5 weeks? I always thought, and perhaps erroneously I might add, that overtraining was a consequence of long term mistraining, sort of like stress. Once you've got it, you're very prone to setbacks, but it takes a while to set in to begin with.

[jacob]

Wouldn't even worry about overtraining. If the workload is much higher than one is used to, recovery suffers and performance just gets worse and worse until exercising starts feeling ridiculous.

[The Old Man]

Overtraining results when the recovery is not sufficient to repair the damage done by training. Beginners are especially prone to overtraining. Professional athletes have to walk a tight-rope between peak performance and overtraining. They frequently cross-over to overtraining, due to the will to win.

[BRUTE]

Wouldn't even worry about overtraining. If the workload is much higher than one is used to, recovery suffers and performance just gets worse and worse until exercising starts feeling ridiculous.

brute would say that's a symptom of overtraining

[jacob]

Nah, that's just over-reaching. Compare to someone who's not used to running but start out on a 5k/day program. That'll work fine for a week, but then the pain on the joints start building up. Speed decreases, etc. That person is probably going to stop or get injured before they get overtrained. Standard progression is something like not more than 10% increase per week.

Overtraining takes months to develop and has a wider range of symptoms. That happens to someone who's been going at 110% of sustainable capacity for months. Increasing resting pulse and depressed immune function are very common. A more subtle one is not only in not being able to achieve new high level but plateauing and decreasing.

[BRUTE]

seems like it's only a difference in scale. the newb will get joint failure from not being able to recover as well, just at a much lower level. is the difference in definition that over-reaching is when trying to increase performance, and overtraining when trying to maintain an already established level of performance?

anyway. 10k KB swings either work if there is enough base fitness, or it won't if there isn't. unless one is exactly in that margin where this type of volume is the next step in training, it's either too much or not enough. these types of fixed number things aren't super useful brute finds.

brute once won a t-shirt by doing 1000 KB swings in one workout (not one set, obviously). if he remembers correctly, it was 16kg weight. after that, brute's lower back was shot for days. clearly, the last 300 swings did more bad than good. but it sounded cool to do 1000 swings. took forever, too, once the back was gone it was basically 1 at a time.

[Dragline]

Yeah, I overtrained with kettlebells last year and had only joint (knee) pain to show for it. I didn't need 10000 in a month to get there either. A few hundred per day for a couple months did the trick. After that, not much exercise for a couple months. So I learned "that was dumb."

[jacob]

@brute - They're different things.

Over-reach: damage>repair_rate*(t-t_last) # no waiting long enough between exercises for the workload
Over-training: new_repair_rate = k*old_repair_rate (where k<1) # having to wait longer and longer even for the same workload

So with over-reach you simply train too hard. With over-training, you're no longer capable of train as hard as you once could---you need longer breaks, sometimes much longer breaks recover from the same workouts, etc. It can take months to years to recover from the later. It's especially serious because you can't even train as hard as before.

The mental equivalent is that with over-reach you're simply zonked, whereas over-training corresponds to burn-out. The car equivalent is that with over-reach you don't have enough time to refuel the entire tank. Whith over-training the tank is getting smaller.

[BRUTE]

brute still doesn't get the difference.

in over-training, damage is still > repair rate, it's just that the modified variable was a decline in repair rate rather than an increase in damage?

[jacob]

Yes!

Alternative example ... it's like a first person shooter game. If you keep engagements light, you can autorepair fast enough to keep health above 80% or whatever. Then as you play, you gain more armour or whatever and can fight more enemies at a time taking less damage from each enemy. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. However, if you take on too many enemies (above your capacity) for too long, you drive your health down to 20%. Here the recovery back up to 100% goes much slower. Not only is the distance greater but the rate is slower too. This also means that you actually have to lower your fighting effort quite a bit down from where you just were even if you are better armoured at that point.

In particular, you have some capital to draw on but overdrawing leads to overshoot and a long slow recovery. Overdrawing capital is like overtraining, because you not only have to "pay" to recover from regular training "expenses" but also pay to build your capital back up again. If you don't the capital situation is going to implode faster and faster.

Or in yet another way. Over-reaching often leads to injuries. Over-training often ends athletic careers. You can overtrain without overreaching and vice versa.

[BRUTE]

as an avid FPS player, let brute tell Jacob that the FPS analogy is extremely flawed. most shooter games have the player regenerate health faster at lower levels, and even stop once a certain point is reached.

trying the financial analogy, is over-reaching buying a Ferrari on a $45,000 salary? whereas maybe overtraining is consistently spending $100,000 per year while making less than that in returns, thereby drawing down the principal? at one point, the $100,000/year lifestyle becomes impossible, because capital has been reduced by too much.

[Scott 2]

At the end of a program like this, you'd either be really good at swings, or injured.

I personally would prefer a lot more variety.

[jacob]

Ha, okay, let jacob tell brute that eating quiche and tossing pool ball traps in Pokemon Go(&) is not nearly the same FPS experience as bleeding real pixels in Wolfenstein or Doom like back in 1995 when gamer dorks were real men and 3D engines were still so bad and dark (always in the effing dark---everybody played with extreme constrast settings just to get a minor edge) that nobody had a clue who they were aiming their virtual nailguns of BFG 9000s at(+). I'm talking resolutions of 320x200. Back then, if you got below 50% health, you better run and hide. Anyhoo ... analogy failed

(&) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-RerthVB54 ... I went to grad school here. Much before Pokemon Go. It was a different time back then.
(+) There are about a gazillion Wheaton levels between pokemon traps coupled with elevator music game themes and nailguns + NIN theme songs.

In the financial analogy, yes, if you're FIRE (just to simplify things) overtraining is like that: It's setting your WR above SWR for an extended period of time. Eventually, it reduces your WR and if you want your old WR back, it's going to take time and you probably have to backtrack/start over.

In the same analogy, if you're FIRE, overreaching is like taking short-term loan and cutting down on the rest of your budget to meet the payments until the loan is paid back. You can use it to temporarily boost consumption but there's no free lunch.

Overreaching: Repeatedly doing 1 rep max attempts every single day. (The futility of this approach should be obvious within a week.)
Overtraining: Pick whatever workout program you're doing now and double the volume. Do this for 6 or 12 months no matter what. Even if you go slower, keep completing the program. Then tell me how you feel.

BTW, at this point I think either brute gets it or he doesn't because we're already stretching the analogies quite a bit. Suffice to say, or maybe not, the recovery rate matters(*) and it can be decreased over time if pushed too hard. Maybe better just to look it up in the sports physiology litt. I've personally been dabbling with the beginnings of overtraining and it's not a place I'd want to touch again. It's the bodily equivalent of mental burnout.

(*) This rate also tends to decrease with age. This is why we see fewer senior (over 40+ if not 30+ age) athletes. They just have a harder time training and recovering at the same workload. As a consequence, they can sustain less volume. And so where volume matters, they're not as competitive.

[BRUTE]

is Jacob implying that brute hasn't finished the first Doom dozens of times, speedrunning? or punched mecha Hitler to death? according to brute's perfectly objective measure, video games peaked circa 1998-2000 with Q3, the most perfect shooter there could ever be. everything beyond CPMA or ProMode Q3 was downhill. the Wheaton levels are probably the reason. to be playing FPS back then required one to be a proper nerd. nowadays, the entry level to video games is so low that all the casual gamers are ruining games for the few left from the good old days. but brute is sentimental.

brute now gets the difference, he believes. the financial analogy is quite apt. personally brute doesn't think he's ever had a serious bout of overtraining (or mental burnout). he's only really injured himself working out once, and that was a minor brain aneurism doing high-volume clean & jerks. put brute out for 2 weeks or so. this might've prevented the overtraining, because it made brute slow down and drastically reduce volume.

[IlliniDave]

I didn't need 10000 in a month to get there either. A few hundred per day for a couple months did the trick. ...

A few hundred per day sounds about the same, or more than, 10,000 per month! A few hundred of anything per day is a helluva lot!

[enigmaT120]

Please don't lure me back into first person shooters. I still have the disk for Unreal, which I never finished.

[jacob]

Yeah, jacob implies that brute is an eater-of-quiche because, as everyone knows already, QI or the year 1996(*) is clearly the peak of fps from which real gaming fell and declined forever since, until eventually reaching the levels of "Ow my Balls!" in 2017 shortly after President Camacho was inaugerated. Also jacob suspects that the minor brain aneurisms that brute refers to are likely mere teenage skin conditions popularly known as zits. These can or could cleared with clearisil or popped with .. popasil (free, but patent pending). If only brute had asked ...

(*) Coincidentally, it was shortly thereafter that jacob decided to stop gaming having been introduced to QII at a random LAN party and quickly realized that keyboard playing with its automatic Y-axis aiming had been replaced by the cheating, unfair, and ALLEGEDLY slightly more skill-based mouse-aiming that only a 12 year old could possibly master. The fact that jacob was completely crushed at that event is purely coincidental and therefore no reasonable quiche-eating player could ever draw an serious conclusions as to who is the tougher or the less quiche-eating player from that.