Thread: Somebody HELP!

You need to listen to your body. There is nothing wrong with taking a week off especially after 14 weeks on. You are not a machine you body need a break somtimes. You'll probably be stronger when you come back. Don't even thing your going to lose muscle it's not going to happen in a weeks time. Now if you take of a month and eat no protien yea you'll loose muscle. The only thing you'll lose in a week is muscle fullness which will come back after a couple of workouts. Take a break

i hate taking off, i am taking a week of right now because i injured my shoulder bad, (hurts like a bitch, never happened before) but im not worried about loosig muscle..... as for protein i try to eat as much protein as possible but i layed of protein shaked for 3 weeks now, i just cant take them anymore, i threw up the last time i had my protein shake i just got so sick of them, but ill be starting next week again.......

you should take a rest off.. i ve done that before and it sure increases what i can lift for my bench.. and yep listen to what your body tells you..

You may not necessarily need a week off of training, but a few weeks off of bench pressing. When you begin losing strength in an exercise it usually means you need a break from it, or you may keep getting weaker, or worse, experience an "overuse" injury.

When my numbers go down like that, its either too much volume or too frequently training heavy. I have lost 1/2 rep every session before from going heavy too frequently.

Even powerlifters cycle their training, and intensity.

What you have done, essentially, is "peaked" in your benchpress. Now i don't mean you won't get any stronger than this, what I mean is in this training cycle you have peaked.

You need to drop the weight back and start increasing it all over again in a new training cycle.

What many people do is keep plugging away at a certian weight and never seem to go anywhere. This is called accommodation. Accommodation is the decrease in response of a biological object to a continued stimulus. The biological object being you, and the stimulus being the benchpress (using the same weight, sets and reps).

So let's say you are getting 1 rep with 225. You might want to drop back and do something like this for your next workout:
160 5sets x 5reps

Every week add weight to all of the sets. This keeps increasing the "stimulus" so your body will be forced to get stronger.

I hope this made some sense to you.

Stop maxing out so often.Too heavy,too often is overkill.Cycle your training for best results!

Thanks for everyone's responses.. I did take last week off, and came back yesterday... feeling great. I think I actually over-trained my triceps, not my chest. I think I do go too heavy too often, too. Oh well, live and learn.