How To Measure Fatigue?

A big part of consistent progression according to a lot of people is the ability to recover from the fatigue and damage of your workouts,but how do you actually measure that? Is it soreness? There are many people who say to just work through soreness so im not sure its that. A lot of ppl also say overtraining almost never happens,so why exactly should we worry about recovering?
NOTE: protein and getting enough calories is not what im talking about,i know that that helps with recovery.

overtraining almost never happens. But that means it does happen from time to time. The effects can be serious, severe lethargy, injury, and rhabdomyolysis being some indicators/results of overtraining. So, that woud be the reason why we should worry about recovering. Recovering is also necessary to perform at our best. It’s why I take an entire week off from the gym prior to every strongman contest I enter. During this week, I eat well, I get massages, chiropractic work, whatever I need done to properly recover, so I can perform my best in competition.

I would say the best way to measure recovery would be by measuring how well you perform on a given day vs what you can do at your best. It’s not an exact science, but that’s essentially how I look at it. Like, if I have a stone loading session on Saturday, and I load a 340 lbs stone, there’s a good chance I won’t be able to load it the next day, and I might even struggle with 300. So there is a measurable difference there.

Soreness is not relevant to me. Only performance.

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As far as performance goes,would you say strengh particularly is more relevant or endurance(as in being able to do a big amount of volume in a given workout)?

how is this even a question you have to ask? Have you never tried working out the same muscles 2 days in a row? this is so damn tedious, but I’ll answer before i bail.

both are affected, of course. I can’t hit the same max 2 days in a row. I can’t hit the same volume 2 days in a row. I don’t have a way to quantify which is affected more. And I also know you can train yourself to recover faster, because I know how well crossfitters perform in competition and how they train.

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Just asked because my strengh is the same but i my heart rate goes thru the roof and im out of breath from the volume in my workouts after 1 week holiday.

well you’re talking about something different then, that’s what happens when you take time off. What you’re talking about is conditioning. High volume, frequent workouts build conditioning, without question. And when you take time off, it doesn’t take long to get out of that sort of conditioning. But fortunately, it also takes very little time to build it back up.

Strength moves slower, in both directions. I could take an entire month off from the gym, and if I eat well, I won’t lose any strength. BUT my conditioning would go to absolute shit. And in the other direction, after I take that month off, I can get my conditioning back to where it was in a week or 2 of hard work.

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Pretty basic stuff dude. Gains work through SRA - stimulus recovery adaption.

When you train you are getting fatigue/stress on your body which is the stimulus for gains. Fatigue can accumulate over time from training hard and programs are at times structured to do this on purpose.

Workout to workout recovery is different but still important e.g. if you’re too sore somewhere to lift properly or concentrate by the next DL session then that fucks your next workout. It’s more about the stimulus over time then any single workout that is the key to gains in the long run.

Recovery from fatigue/stress is how we get adaptions e.g. strength gains.

Why exactly we should worry about recovery? Without recovery there’s no adaption and no gains. With better recovery we can successful recover from greater stimuli and get bigger better adaption for longer. Like I was saying many programs are structured to exceed our recovery capacity at times and hence end up accumulating fatigue…

The kitchen sink analogy is pretty good for this. Water going in is stress/fatigue and the size of your drain is your recovery. Overflow is fatigue being accumulated. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

High levels of fatigue will result in decreased performance. Overtraining is a state that we can get to when we chronically exceed our body’s ability to recover. Performance tanks among other things also going to shit. It’s pretty hard to get overtrained tho because you have to ignore all the suffering and every sign your body is giving you that things aren’t ok.

Like flip was saying a good indicator of your current fatigue levels is your readiness and how well you handle big weights or handle volume/work.

One needs to train hard(er) in some way or form i.e. an overloading stimulus over time to continually drive adaptions.

Being in a constantly overreached or overtrained state means that we can’t create as big a stimulus. So we have to manage fatigue well enough e.g. through deloads to allow us to continue to train hard and strike a good balance between stimulus and recovery.

Overtraining is on one end of a spectrum when it comes to exceeding your recovery. Just because you aren’t overtrained doesn’t mean you aren’t missing out on potential gains.

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If you go to lift 60% of your 1RM and it feels like a tough lift and it moves slowly (assuming sleep, stress are not off the chart) then something is up.

This is different from you can’t be arsed… something I think is difficult to differentiate from.

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I have 2 cues that can show up that tells me I’m due for a deload/program change. The 1st is motivation to go to the gym. I’m normally keen as but if 2 or 3 sessions in a row I’m not, than I know something is up. The 2nd is my grip strength deteriorates dramatically.

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The grip strength factor is very relevant. I think it was Charles Poliquin who wrote that he’d do a test of crushing grip strength before every training session with his athletes, and modify the session’s volume/intensity as based on their comparative performance.

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I also find grip strength or lack thereof to be a good indicator FWIW

Absolutely. I find that I can gauge my upcoming performance somewhat by tightly clenching my fists before I start training. This misses the nuances, but on my really ‘off’ days, I can never manage to really tighten my fist. Hard to describe, but you can tell the difference between a tightly clenched fist and a ‘closed’ fist.

I find my sleep and mood is negatively affected when I either train too hard or much or too easy or not enough.