Hi,

I never quite understood the prolonged recovery times of 4 to 6 weeks
so many HIT users are claiming or advocate.
It makes perfect sense to me to wait longer than 1-2 days between
training sessions as in classic training - but what doesn't make sense
for me is that the recovery period will be gradually increasing with
increased level of strength and muscle mass from 4-7 days till 4 to 6
weeks. That doesn't make any logical sense in my opinion and I will
explain why in a minute. The reason we need the recovery is to have
time for a) healing the damage from training and b) overcompensate
with more strength and muscle to be able to withstand the same or
higher level of stress. When we recover enough for both a) and b) to
occur - we progressively grow muscle and strength which results in
objectively higher levels of strength and/or muscle from 1 training
session to another. If we recover enough only for a) to happen - we
don't progress but hit the platoe. If we don't recover enough for even
a) to occur we overtrain.
Now the whole point of objectively growing stronger and more muscular
is that your muscles/tendons/ligaments and bones are able to take the
much higher stress they've been progressively trained for with THE
SAME or LOWER amount of tissue damage occurred.
It means that when I was at my first workout with hypotetic 100 cells
involved with the lift I damaged 10 of them which required 5 days to
heal and then another 2 days to overcompensate with new cell growth so
I had 20 new stronger cells for my next workout instead of old weak 10
cells that got damaged and/or destroyed. Now, 2 years later following
this protocol I would end-up with hypothetic 2000 much stronger cells
involved with the lift of much higher weight but since the cells are
much stronger now it doesn't mean that I had to damage significantly
more cells to perform the lift - there will definitely more cells that
got involved in the lift (2000 vs 100) but not so many more cells that
got damaged and needed the recovery. So if with 2000 stronger cells we
have performed the much heavier lift we probably damaged 20-40 cells
but definitely not 200. Then to recover (heal) those damaged cells and
overcompensate we might need more time but NOT 6 times longer (from 1
week to 6 week). Just so to illustrate my point more - in 6 weeks our
body can perform a full (or almost complete) repair of a major bone
break or muscle injury and it's comparatively as effective in that
when we are many decades older (not that recovery ability doesn't
decline with years BUT it doesn't decline that significantly
especially if you maintain healthy lifestyle and take care of good
overall blood circulation). So it doesn't make any sense that as we
grow stronger we incur more damage to our STRONGER cells with
progressively heavier load than what we do when we just start our
training and lift much lighter weight with our much WEAKIER cells. If
that was making any sense there would be no point in ANY training
besides fulfilling our personal ambition (getting stronger or more
muscular) let alone that fulfillment of personal ambitions would ever
occur!
The adaptive response of our body is to produce stronger cells when
the tissue is damaged. That's the reason body creates much stronger
bone bond in the place of bone break or a cut and the larger the
initial injury the more scarring tissue is produced on the healing
site ( as body's first concern is to get you up and running ASAP
rather than take some additional time for a PERFECT recovery).
So if you take all those facts in consideration there is NO WAY
anybody needs 4 to 6 weeks for a recovery with overcompensation from a
training session no matter how intense it was (unless you produced a
serious injury) - the whole reason you were able to produce a much
more intense workout was in that your tissues were trained to
withstand a much higher load and stress. Again the much higher load
doesn't automatically translate into proportionally more cell damaged
- the cell damage will remain relatively the same.

How do you measure your progress. If you notice that you can lift
higher numbers when you recover for 6 weeks and make no progress on
your next session if you train every 2 weeks try to see if you
persevere through 3 workouts with no strength increase you might reach
some new heights on your third one.

I was very suspicious with this topic of constant increase of number
of recovery days if one doesn't see improvements in three exercises or
more on one training day but nobody defined any limit to that
increase.
Again for the reasons above I think that it doesn't make sense to go
with 4-6 weeks of recovery between training sessions - I think that no
more 2 weeks should be more that enough for as long as we stay on HIT
training. And the strength increases can't be expected each and every
workout as you go to the maximum genetic potential you have - it will
stop at some point which doesn't mean that you have to start an
indefinitely long recovery period once you reach your maximum peak and
will stay in top shape with no exercise for the rest of your mighty
life.

Unfortunately Shawn's MIT doesn't touch this subject.

Regarding the MIT overall - I'm on it training on Mike's 1repgym for a
few months now and have noticed great results. There was a lot of
INVALUABLE information in Pete's and Shawn's publications on SCT and
MIT training for the ones who tried to look between the lines and it
was of a GREAT help in my overall understanding of HIT training and
why it has a potential to be the best strength training protocol in a
long-term.

Best,
Alex

On 1/9/09, sct765 <sct765@...> wrote:
> I never ceased to amazed (or constantly reminded) that a comparitively
> P-R-O-L-O-N-G-E-D recovery time is necessary when training w/ the high
> intensity level which is possible w/ PFT/SCT w/outs. It is SOOO easy
> to overtrain w/ Sisco's methods for me that my overzealousness to get
> larger/stronger seems to always end me up in an overtrained condition
> (such as today's w/out). I've reached a point in my training that
> currently a PFT w/out requires 4-6 weeks before I can lift again and
> expect to progress. Does anyone else have this problem?
>
>