In the last post, I talked about how there could be a positive relationship between muscularity and recovery ability. For those with moderate potential for muscularity and therefore moderate recovery ability (which is the majority of the population), I think Body By Science is a great model. It's hard for many people to wrap their head around the idea that working out once per week can be effective. BBS does a great service in pointing out that this model can and will work for many, many people.
Looking back through my own training records, I've found that my body responds best to once-a-week training. If I increase training to twice per week, I can usually go a few months before overtraining sets in. If I try 3 times per week, it's only a matter of weeks until I get overtrained or ill. On the other hand, I have trained once-a-week for at least 12 months straight with no signs of overtraining or any other problems. Also, my heaviest all-time lifts on the bench press and squat were from training once every 7 to 10 days.
Here's one issue with BBS that I have and probably others have as well: I would like to be able to train more often. I would like to but my body just doesn't tolerate it. This has nothing to do with eating more, protein intake, or pre- and post-workout meals. Different people heal at different rates. In BBS, Doug talks about the Dose-Response model and shows that for the majority of people the rate of recovery from weights is 7 days. Now this can be slightly accelerated with better sleep, hydration, food, etc., but there are limits. Honestly, it would be great if I could show up at the gym every morning and blast some heavy weight like Arnold. But that's not reality for myself and most of the population.
All in all, I think Body By Science is a great read. Doug has put forward a simple, logical model that can be used by the majority of the population. If this concept goes more mainstream, I think it could help a lot of people. For all those people who show up January 1st at the gym and are gone by February 15th, they would probably be much better off following a BBS model. Intense, progressive, once-a-week training works.
