Delayed Muscle Growth/Muscle Tone Increase

I’m just wondering if other members have experienced this phenomenon that I often se happen with myself, and I’m curious what it says about my training in terms of overtraining or recovery

often, when I want to develop a muscle, it doesnt really grow as I exercise it hard, though it will get stronger. as I take the workload off the muscle, or sometimes when I stop exercising it completely, is when it’ll start looking more muscular

recently, my biceps and shoulders have never been very developed so I worked them hard all through june. in july I worked them lightly and so far in august I’ve barely worked them at all. all june they were still small, in july i started noticing some growth, and now I actually have some size/deifnition!

any idea what this could mean? or maybe its all in my head, though I don’t think so, as others have commented on my muscualr development in those areas lately, but not while I was hitting them hard

Maybe you were overworking them.

That was my first thought. If you don’t allow enough time to fully recover from your efforts you can actually break tissue down. When you stopped or reduced your training you allowed the body to adapt and grow…

I’ve thought of overtraining as well, but I’ve NEVER seen muscle growth except in very low work load situations. do you really think that I’ve always been overtraining, I’ve put myself under all sorts of volumes and never can really notice muscle growth except when I’m going super easy

Sounds like for the volume you do, you dont eat enough to grow?
Basic maths, approx
At rest, 1800 callories
Work, 500 calories
Training hard, 1hr, 800-1000 calories
Train half hr, 400 calories
Then add calories to grow.

So, thats a lot of calories, esp if you’re not gaining.
So, training less = less consumed calories = better chance to grow.

i’m actually surprised I haven’t thought of this. because its only when i’m at total rest, even just running seems to prevent my muscle growth. though my bodyfat doesnt really seem to go down even when i’m exercising more (maybe as a result of it being pretty low in the first place)

good thought!

Yow! When I first read that I thought ‘bf’ stood for boyfriend…

haha, agreed - i had to re-read a few times…

hahaha, whoops, didnt even see that. fixed!