I commented on a blog this morning by a fellow blogger that found that he got stronger after not working out for a few days. This is pretty common and I have found this myself in the past.

There are two reasons that you would be stronger after not working out after a few days. First you could be overtraining, which I believe is much more prevelent than we realize, or it could be that after a few days the glycogen levels in your muscles are really back up to a good level.

Overtraining

Overtraining can happen quite easily if you are working a muscle group too often, as you probably realize if you work a muscle group more than a couple of times a week you get really sore because your muscle fibers have not had a chance to heal. Make sure that your rest is good and that you do not directly or even indirectly stress your muscles too often! Also be aware that your muscles really do not increase in strenght durin your workout but instead in the days after as your muscles heal completely.

Glycogen levels

One of the things that you will notice after a few days between workouts is that your muscles get stronger and stronger. At the same time when you workout your muscles seem to get weaker and weaker during your workout. The reason for both of these effects is caused by your glycogen levels in your blood and muscles. As you workout your muscles use glycogen for energy and as it depletes so does your strength. Glycogen is just a derivative of sugar that is found in your muscles. Very soon after your workout it is important to take in a lot of liquid carbs. I used to drink sugar and water mixed together but really it is probably better to drink some kind of a post workout energy drink (not Gatorade) and this will help you quickly raise blood glycogen although it really takes a few days to really bring the level back up to the point where you are stronger.

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A split schedule is a way to change up your workout so that instead of working your body all in one day you work your body over two or three days. There are a few rules that people tend to use to do these workouts and I will try to list the muscle groups that you will work on which days. The real advantage to doing a split schedule is that you get a chance to really push the muscles, do more exercises and hopefully rest them more in between workouts.

When you first start working out you probably work your whole body on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The idea of a split schedule is that you will work your whole body once or twice in a week. On a two day split you will work your whole body on Monday and Tuesday and again on Thursday and Friday.

Here are the major muscle groups:
Quadriceps, hamstrings, chest, back, shoulders, biceps, and triceps

Here is a list of the minor muscle groups
Abdominals, calves, forearms, lower back and traps. Usually you only do specific exercises for you calves and abdominals until you become an advanced weightlifter or bodybuilder.

First the rules
You don’t want to work a muscle group directly on consecutive days as you do not want to overtrain it.
You want to only do one or two big muscle group in a workout
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