6 ms·

Link (for lazy people like me): http://overtrainer.com/ http://overtrainer.com/

by ejs 18y ago

dcurtis 18y ago
Interestingly, I wasn't going to go to the site until I saw your link and clicked it.
- daniel-cussen 18y ago
  Same here.
Alex3917 18y ago
Why would you call a site for athletes overtrainer? That's like naming your dating site herpesSpace.
- kingkongrevenge 18y ago
  Most people I've seen taking a logbook approach to working out over-train... First of all, if you have time to take notes or carry a water bottle while working out, as far as I'm concerned you're doing it wrong. Pick up the pace. It's almost always just porky nerds who have notebooks. A structured planned mentality to lifting is counter-productive. In terms of how much and how hard to go, you really need to listen to your body on any given day. Some times your immune system really is telling you to take it light and easy and wrap it up in fifteen minutes. Also, it's most effective to dramatically vary routines and volume/intensity quite randomly from a large repertoire of exercises to prevent habituation. This simply doesn't produce useful time series, so notes are pointless. Perhaps the biggest problem with a structured and planned approach to exercise is that it's not playful. It's of the wrong mentality to enjoy yourself.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 18y ago
    There's structure and then there's rigidity. I always took a structured approach (today I'm going to do legs & lower back), but modulated the intensity according to how I was feeling, my energy level, etc. By using that structure, I knew what my plan was and I could avoid overtraining a bodypart. And my notes are useful 10 years later. I can see progression, and the comment "allergies bad today" will explain why I cut sets short, etc. That said, I wouldn't use software to do this. My clipboard served me well for years.
    - Alex3917 18y ago
      Excel is useful though because it makes it easy to extrapolate how fast you will be in the future. Just being able to know whether your cardio is improving linearly or logarithmically is huge, along with various muscle groups. It's very hard to identify your sticking points without being able to turn the data into graphs.
  - pkaler 18y ago
    "It's almost always just porky nerds who have notebooks." I've logged every workout I've done over the last 14 years. I squat over 300 lbs and deadlift 450 lbs. My roommate in university was an olympic lifter. The entire team logged their workouts. Serious athletes log workouts.
    - kingkongrevenge 18y ago
      I think it's a bad idea to model a personal fitness regimen on competitive athletes. They are typically over trained. Really, they're typically damaging their health somewhat. And again, metric driven discipline is just not the right mentality to bring to exercise for 99% of the population. Also, you should read about high weight dead lifts and spine stress fractures. You are probably damaging your back.
      - swombat 18y ago
        I think it's a bad idea to model a personal fitness regimen on competitive athletes Agreed, but logbooks are not a fitness regimen, they're a simple, useful technique for maintaining control of whatever fitness regimen you pick.
      - jrockway 18y ago
        How do you know you're over-training if you don't keep logs? If you want to be able to think intelligently about your workout (or anything, for that matter), you need data. For me, this amounts to a spreadsheet where I track a few variables. Maintaining it takes 5 minutes a day.
        kingkongrevenge 18y ago
        Logs won't really help keep you from excess training. You are not a machine; your physiological response to exercise is poorly modelable. You just have to be in tune with your body. There are all kinds of homeostatic forces when it comes to exercise that dynamically push back on increased volume. For example, high volume aerobic exercise can increase your ability to build fat reserves, leading to strongly diminishing returns from running for purposes of the average Joe trying to lose weight. I alluded to this above: your body responds best to randomly varying exercise. Both frequency and type. Take a few weeks off. Then work out three days in a row, a completely different form each day. Then twice a week, and so on. Don't work out on a predictable schedule. It pretty much happens if you listen to your body. This just isn't amenable to logs, but it has proven benefits to making fitness durable and affecting lean body mass. You want enough variety in what you're doing that exact volume and weight for a previous given lift isn't clearly relevant anymore. My point is that the data is just really not going to be all that useful. It's not going to give you any meaningful linear projections. It's not going to tell you whether your body is stressed at a given time. If once a month you want to record your 100m time and how many pushups you can do that's one thing, but tracking each workout is almost surely a waste of time. Just mix it up a lot and go hard when you really feel like it.
  - swombat 18y ago
    It's almost always just porky nerds who have notebooks. Sorry, I don't find that to be true at all.
  - aaroniba 18y ago
    Without some kind of logbook, how do you even evaluate how well you're doing? In my experience, most successful bodybuilders take a scientific approach to their training. The main variables that affect physique are genetics, diet, and routine. Different diets and routines work for different people, so to achieve the best results it's important to experiment. A log book gives you data to learn how to improve your routine. Even your point on the importance of varying routines is best achieved by using a log book. Try a steady routine for 3 months and measure your gains. Then try "dramatically varying" your routine for 3 months and measure your gains. Now you have data to support your own optimal workout plan. Finally, to your point about picking up the pace: most routines involve rest between sets, so if you log while resting then it doesn't slow you down.
    - kingkongrevenge 18y ago
      > most routines involve rest between sets Body building and power lifting routines involve rest between sets. The rest is needed to achieve the volume which induces sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. Those guys look puffed up and ridiculous, in my opinion. They're also slow and have diminished hand speed and explosive power. High volume bench pressing, for example, will actually weaken your punch. Capillary density is also reduced and endurance is weakened. Brief and intense routines with very little rest give you endurance, make you fast, lean, and not puffed up. You routinely see chubby guys lumbering around, resting, and then moving some heavy weights. Every time I see some one going for brief intensity they're ripped, and usually among the strongest anyway.
      - mrtron 18y ago
        I really disagree with things you state as facts. Firstly, the different between appearing ripped and appearing 'puffy' or bigger is far more about diet and cardio than anaerobic activity. The guys with abs at the gym are far less about practical strength and more about a strict diet and large amounts of aerobic exercise to put them at an unnaturally low body fat percentage. High volume bench press will weaken your punch? I call bullshit. Tell that to someone like Houston Alexander. Or Rashad Evans tonite, knocking out the best puncher in MMA (and clearly a weightlifter). Brief and intense exercise doesn't give you very little endurance. Instead, it works your muscles, primarily recruiting fast twitch muscles and improving anaerobic efficiency. Lastly, if body building/power lifting routines are making you slower and less explosive, why when I was training as a competitive gymnast were we training with large weight/low reps and weighted pylometrics to gain speed and explosiveness? I always hear talk about 'overtraining' but really I think the huge issue is under nutrition. I trained 20+ hours a week when I was younger as a competitive gymnast and didn't come close to overtraining. Overtraining occurs when serious bodybuilders workout 4+ hours a day, not when you workout twice a week for 30 minutes. Finally, I find your 'ripped is the strongest' statement ridiculous.
  - seano 18y ago
    You start by saying people using log books over-train and go on to say that they should put away the log book and pick up the pace. That makes no sense. Your other points are equally useless personal opinion.
    - kingkongrevenge 18y ago
      It makes perfect sense. You just don't understand. There are two separate issues here: 1) Logs aren't very useful; 2) Strength training with substantial rest between sets is inferior to intense routines without rest in many ways. My other points lack citations, but they aren't useless opinion.
- josefresco 18y ago
  Herpes dating site's are actually quite popular (1 in 5 Americans are infected) so your example pretty much sucks. If you have herpes, joining a "positive" dating site means you can date without having to worry.
  - jamesbritt 18y ago
    These seems like a variation on Internet Rule 34. No matter what you think is a down-side or turn-off, someone has or will soon make a Web business off of it.
- bootload 18y ago
  "... Why would you call a site for athletes overtrainer? ..." Maybe because there is an optimal point in training. Working with weights is about repetition. Too much and you overtire or worse, injure yourself. Too little and you miss out on the benefits. The thing I would want to know is what benefit I'd get from logging this on a site (with all the associated hassles) compared to noting it in a log book with pencil & paper? Being able to see the results is a good motivational point.
  - ejs 18y ago
    You do bring up a good point. I have logged workouts for years into paper, and its easy to do, damn easy. I have done this in the impromptu way of writing what I am going to do next on the fly, or plan it out in a spreadsheet, print it and fill it in from there. The problem I have always had with these methods is after some time I have a big stack of rumpled papers, too much data really. To evaluate progress I just read through and try to grasp some qualitative comparison. By that point it would be far too much work to sit and enter all of the data into a spreadsheet. The point I am trying to address is to make a data entry method as easy as paper, but with results you can easily look back on and really compare. The results can also be generated to an image, and then embedded into websites, forums, what have you, to share with friends or to make an ongoing training log. I am also trying to address the annoyances with planning workouts with spreadsheets. I have done this plenty of times and don't care for it. Usually it involves digging up some template you made for the purpose and manually typing the exercises in, its annoying. So overtrainer.com will also allow you to plan your workout and print a form that you can just fill out, making the process more streamlined. So if you dont care for anything but paper thats fine! You can still plan your workouts and print the form. Thanks to everyone for all the feedback, its been really helpful.
    - bootload 18y ago
      "... The problem I have always had with these methods is after some time I have a big stack of rumpled papers, too much data really. To evaluate progress I just read through and try to grasp some qualitative comparison. By that point it would be far too much work to sit and enter all of the data into a spreadsheet. ..." Agreed. Doing this by paper is probably dead, spreadsheets so, so. Having a web based alternative is something that compelling if you continue using it. Is there a social side of this? Like working out a gym and comparing weights?
- randomwalker 18y ago
  totally agree. i lift regularly. i'm just not going to use a site with that name. even to test it. it's just a huge mental block. sorry.
- ejs 18y ago
  The name is a funny thing, this app has been a hobby of mine I have been working on here and there for a bit. It has always been geared towards the serious lifting crowd. I thought the name was easy to remember, easy to tell someone that they can spell again, and was slightly controversial (as seen in this thread!) But since I am gearing this towards serious folks I don't think they will act like noobs do and fear overtraining like its some kind of infection one suddenly contracts with after doing one extra set. In fact most of the people I talked to (standing around between sets), mostly people that compete in bodybuilding and power lifting, thought that the name was funny as most people would call what they do 'overtraining'. Since there are a lot of obviously knowledgeable people here let me ask, do you think you will remember the name now? do you think if it was named some random jumble of letters you would remember it more or less? Anyway thanks for all the feedback!
  - Alex3917 18y ago
    "most people would call what they do 'overtraining'." No, they wouldn't. Overtraining is a specific thing -- chronic glycogen depletion. It's only tangentially related to how much you work out. It's extremely serious too. One of my friends wasn't allowed to use his legs for several months, so he had to sit on the couch and watch cartoons all day.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- symptic 18y ago
  Over-training is term used in weight lifting for those who are looking to build muscle mass by overloading their muscles during their working, forcing it to go into a greater "repair mode" than from your average person lifting regimen. Another term would be 'lifting to failure', which obviously doesn't sound as good/simple as overtraining. It's understandable you're not within his target demographic and can't relate to the idea, but your comment is rude regardless.
vlam 18y ago
Out of curiosity, why do URLs turn into links in comments but not Ask YC posts?
- DabAsteroid 18y ago
  http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Link (for lazy people like me): http://overtrainer.com/ http://overtrainer.com/

by ejs 18y ago

Link (for lazy people like me): http://overtrainer.com/ http://overtrainer.com/

dcurtis 18y ago

Interestingly, I wasn't going to go to the site until I saw your link and clicked it.

daniel-cussen 18y ago
Same here.

Alex3917 18y ago

Why would you call a site for athletes overtrainer? That's like naming your dating site herpesSpace.

kingkongrevenge 18y ago
Most people I've seen taking a logbook approach to working out over-train... First of all, if you have time to take notes or carry a water bottle while working out, as far as I'm concerned you're doing it wrong. Pick up the pace. It's almost always just porky nerds who have notebooks. A structured planned mentality to lifting is counter-productive. In terms of how much and how hard to go, you really need to listen to your body on any given day. Some times your immune system really is telling you to take it light and easy and wrap it up in fifteen minutes. Also, it's most effective to dramatically vary routines and volume/intensity quite randomly from a large repertoire of exercises to prevent habituation. This simply doesn't produce useful time series, so notes are pointless. Perhaps the biggest problem with a structured and planned approach to exercise is that it's not playful. It's of the wrong mentality to enjoy yourself.
- HeyLaughingBoy 18y ago
  There's structure and then there's rigidity. I always took a structured approach (today I'm going to do legs & lower back), but modulated the intensity according to how I was feeling, my energy level, etc. By using that structure, I knew what my plan was and I could avoid overtraining a bodypart. And my notes are useful 10 years later. I can see progression, and the comment "allergies bad today" will explain why I cut sets short, etc. That said, I wouldn't use software to do this. My clipboard served me well for years.
  - Alex3917 18y ago
    Excel is useful though because it makes it easy to extrapolate how fast you will be in the future. Just being able to know whether your cardio is improving linearly or logarithmically is huge, along with various muscle groups. It's very hard to identify your sticking points without being able to turn the data into graphs.
- pkaler 18y ago
  "It's almost always just porky nerds who have notebooks." I've logged every workout I've done over the last 14 years. I squat over 300 lbs and deadlift 450 lbs. My roommate in university was an olympic lifter. The entire team logged their workouts. Serious athletes log workouts.
  - kingkongrevenge 18y ago
    I think it's a bad idea to model a personal fitness regimen on competitive athletes. They are typically over trained. Really, they're typically damaging their health somewhat. And again, metric driven discipline is just not the right mentality to bring to exercise for 99% of the population. Also, you should read about high weight dead lifts and spine stress fractures. You are probably damaging your back.
    - swombat 18y ago
      I think it's a bad idea to model a personal fitness regimen on competitive athletes Agreed, but logbooks are not a fitness regimen, they're a simple, useful technique for maintaining control of whatever fitness regimen you pick.
    - jrockway 18y ago
      How do you know you're over-training if you don't keep logs? If you want to be able to think intelligently about your workout (or anything, for that matter), you need data. For me, this amounts to a spreadsheet where I track a few variables. Maintaining it takes 5 minutes a day.
      - kingkongrevenge 18y ago
        Logs won't really help keep you from excess training. You are not a machine; your physiological response to exercise is poorly modelable. You just have to be in tune with your body. There are all kinds of homeostatic forces when it comes to exercise that dynamically push back on increased volume. For example, high volume aerobic exercise can increase your ability to build fat reserves, leading to strongly diminishing returns from running for purposes of the average Joe trying to lose weight. I alluded to this above: your body responds best to randomly varying exercise. Both frequency and type. Take a few weeks off. Then work out three days in a row, a completely different form each day. Then twice a week, and so on. Don't work out on a predictable schedule. It pretty much happens if you listen to your body. This just isn't amenable to logs, but it has proven benefits to making fitness durable and affecting lean body mass. You want enough variety in what you're doing that exact volume and weight for a previous given lift isn't clearly relevant anymore. My point is that the data is just really not going to be all that useful. It's not going to give you any meaningful linear projections. It's not going to tell you whether your body is stressed at a given time. If once a month you want to record your 100m time and how many pushups you can do that's one thing, but tracking each workout is almost surely a waste of time. Just mix it up a lot and go hard when you really feel like it.
- swombat 18y ago
  It's almost always just porky nerds who have notebooks. Sorry, I don't find that to be true at all.
- aaroniba 18y ago
  Without some kind of logbook, how do you even evaluate how well you're doing? In my experience, most successful bodybuilders take a scientific approach to their training. The main variables that affect physique are genetics, diet, and routine. Different diets and routines work for different people, so to achieve the best results it's important to experiment. A log book gives you data to learn how to improve your routine. Even your point on the importance of varying routines is best achieved by using a log book. Try a steady routine for 3 months and measure your gains. Then try "dramatically varying" your routine for 3 months and measure your gains. Now you have data to support your own optimal workout plan. Finally, to your point about picking up the pace: most routines involve rest between sets, so if you log while resting then it doesn't slow you down.
  - kingkongrevenge 18y ago
    > most routines involve rest between sets Body building and power lifting routines involve rest between sets. The rest is needed to achieve the volume which induces sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. Those guys look puffed up and ridiculous, in my opinion. They're also slow and have diminished hand speed and explosive power. High volume bench pressing, for example, will actually weaken your punch. Capillary density is also reduced and endurance is weakened. Brief and intense routines with very little rest give you endurance, make you fast, lean, and not puffed up. You routinely see chubby guys lumbering around, resting, and then moving some heavy weights. Every time I see some one going for brief intensity they're ripped, and usually among the strongest anyway.
    - mrtron 18y ago
      I really disagree with things you state as facts. Firstly, the different between appearing ripped and appearing 'puffy' or bigger is far more about diet and cardio than anaerobic activity. The guys with abs at the gym are far less about practical strength and more about a strict diet and large amounts of aerobic exercise to put them at an unnaturally low body fat percentage. High volume bench press will weaken your punch? I call bullshit. Tell that to someone like Houston Alexander. Or Rashad Evans tonite, knocking out the best puncher in MMA (and clearly a weightlifter). Brief and intense exercise doesn't give you very little endurance. Instead, it works your muscles, primarily recruiting fast twitch muscles and improving anaerobic efficiency. Lastly, if body building/power lifting routines are making you slower and less explosive, why when I was training as a competitive gymnast were we training with large weight/low reps and weighted pylometrics to gain speed and explosiveness? I always hear talk about 'overtraining' but really I think the huge issue is under nutrition. I trained 20+ hours a week when I was younger as a competitive gymnast and didn't come close to overtraining. Overtraining occurs when serious bodybuilders workout 4+ hours a day, not when you workout twice a week for 30 minutes. Finally, I find your 'ripped is the strongest' statement ridiculous.
- seano 18y ago
  You start by saying people using log books over-train and go on to say that they should put away the log book and pick up the pace. That makes no sense. Your other points are equally useless personal opinion.
  - kingkongrevenge 18y ago
    It makes perfect sense. You just don't understand. There are two separate issues here: 1) Logs aren't very useful; 2) Strength training with substantial rest between sets is inferior to intense routines without rest in many ways. My other points lack citations, but they aren't useless opinion.
josefresco 18y ago
Herpes dating site's are actually quite popular (1 in 5 Americans are infected) so your example pretty much sucks. If you have herpes, joining a "positive" dating site means you can date without having to worry.
- jamesbritt 18y ago
  These seems like a variation on Internet Rule 34. No matter what you think is a down-side or turn-off, someone has or will soon make a Web business off of it.
bootload 18y ago
"... Why would you call a site for athletes overtrainer? ..." Maybe because there is an optimal point in training. Working with weights is about repetition. Too much and you overtire or worse, injure yourself. Too little and you miss out on the benefits. The thing I would want to know is what benefit I'd get from logging this on a site (with all the associated hassles) compared to noting it in a log book with pencil & paper? Being able to see the results is a good motivational point.
- ejs 18y ago
  You do bring up a good point. I have logged workouts for years into paper, and its easy to do, damn easy. I have done this in the impromptu way of writing what I am going to do next on the fly, or plan it out in a spreadsheet, print it and fill it in from there. The problem I have always had with these methods is after some time I have a big stack of rumpled papers, too much data really. To evaluate progress I just read through and try to grasp some qualitative comparison. By that point it would be far too much work to sit and enter all of the data into a spreadsheet. The point I am trying to address is to make a data entry method as easy as paper, but with results you can easily look back on and really compare. The results can also be generated to an image, and then embedded into websites, forums, what have you, to share with friends or to make an ongoing training log. I am also trying to address the annoyances with planning workouts with spreadsheets. I have done this plenty of times and don't care for it. Usually it involves digging up some template you made for the purpose and manually typing the exercises in, its annoying. So overtrainer.com will also allow you to plan your workout and print a form that you can just fill out, making the process more streamlined. So if you dont care for anything but paper thats fine! You can still plan your workouts and print the form. Thanks to everyone for all the feedback, its been really helpful.
  - bootload 18y ago
    "... The problem I have always had with these methods is after some time I have a big stack of rumpled papers, too much data really. To evaluate progress I just read through and try to grasp some qualitative comparison. By that point it would be far too much work to sit and enter all of the data into a spreadsheet. ..." Agreed. Doing this by paper is probably dead, spreadsheets so, so. Having a web based alternative is something that compelling if you continue using it. Is there a social side of this? Like working out a gym and comparing weights?
randomwalker 18y ago
totally agree. i lift regularly. i'm just not going to use a site with that name. even to test it. it's just a huge mental block. sorry.
ejs 18y ago
The name is a funny thing, this app has been a hobby of mine I have been working on here and there for a bit. It has always been geared towards the serious lifting crowd. I thought the name was easy to remember, easy to tell someone that they can spell again, and was slightly controversial (as seen in this thread!) But since I am gearing this towards serious folks I don't think they will act like noobs do and fear overtraining like its some kind of infection one suddenly contracts with after doing one extra set. In fact most of the people I talked to (standing around between sets), mostly people that compete in bodybuilding and power lifting, thought that the name was funny as most people would call what they do 'overtraining'. Since there are a lot of obviously knowledgeable people here let me ask, do you think you will remember the name now? do you think if it was named some random jumble of letters you would remember it more or less? Anyway thanks for all the feedback!
- Alex3917 18y ago
  "most people would call what they do 'overtraining'." No, they wouldn't. Overtraining is a specific thing -- chronic glycogen depletion. It's only tangentially related to how much you work out. It's extremely serious too. One of my friends wasn't allowed to use his legs for several months, so he had to sit on the couch and watch cartoons all day.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
symptic 18y ago
Over-training is term used in weight lifting for those who are looking to build muscle mass by overloading their muscles during their working, forcing it to go into a greater "repair mode" than from your average person lifting regimen. Another term would be 'lifting to failure', which obviously doesn't sound as good/simple as overtraining. It's understandable you're not within his target demographic and can't relate to the idea, but your comment is rude regardless.

vlam 18y ago

Out of curiosity, why do URLs turn into links in comments but not Ask YC posts?

DabAsteroid 18y ago
http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html