ok I feel that my other thread wasn’t specific enough, because I couldn’t explain myself well enough but Triskadecamus’s expirience seemed to hit spot on to what phenomenon I was referring to.
so what happened to him, happened to me, a loss of creativity in speech and wit, like before I was extremely verbose but then during heavy weight lifting and sports training, I didn’t even care for starting conversation, and on the message boards that I usually posted, I became more argumentative and philosophical and less of a creative writer
Anywho, I started lifting weights in June last year and worked at it hard for the following seven months, and have kept at it in periods since (a few illnesses and periods of hospitalization have made it impossible to keep up without breaks). I didn’t notice a difference (except that I was more inclined to talk about lifting weights). Feel free to examine my posts from before, during and after that period, but I know of no difference.
hmm how intense was your training routine? I did 5 days of cadio 1.2 hour sessions and weight lifting 4-5 times a week 1.5 hour sessions. Thats like 14 hours of intense exercise per week.
During most of those seven months, I did one hour of weight training every other day and 30-45 minutes of cardio every day that I didn’t do weight training.
I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but this is definitely at least borderline too much.
The brain requires a lot of energy and idle to ‘full-throttle’ so to speak is a significant difference. You might not feel tired but your body might be trying to conserve every bit of energy because of your particular catabolic/anabolic cycling. I’ve personally noticed that intense physical exertion will trigger a very peculiar mental state that feels very much like sleep deprivation, but maybe a little more pleasant. The thought pattern might not change because you’re building muscle or exercising, the thought pattern might change because your brain goes into power-save to save energy you need to exercise - which is probably why you don’t feel that tired.
Could it just be that you were spending less time reading, socializing, and generally trying to keep up with the world? If it becomes an “addiction” it would certainly consume your thoughts and prevent you from focusing on anything else. Just like being in love, or facing bankruptcy, or a diseased loved one. Just my WAG
The body is an incredibly complex system and everyone is different, so it is very difficult to make definitive statements about what is going on without actual numbers but I do see a couple of issues here.
First off, you were overtraining. Not feeling tired is more about blood sugar and certain specific hormones than anything else. It is definitely not a measure of overtraining. If you had been monitoring your morning resting heart rate and waking grip strength, then I would believe what you say about overtraining, but monitoring tiredness is definitely not a measure of overtraining.
I think the real issues here are the questions of neurotransmitter and hormone recovery. Your muscular system is really your neuromuscular system. Intense exercise depletes not only glycogen stores, it depletes the stores of neurotransmitters used to fire muscular contraction. Complete muscle recovery can happen in eight hours, but complete neurotransmitter recovery takes 24 hours or more. Most training experts agree that the rapid increases in strength experienced by beginning weight trainers are mostly due to increased Central Nervous System (CNS) response and are not due to any increase of muscle mass. You can’t ignore your CNS if you want to understand exercise physiology.
Intense exercise also affects hormone levels to a large degree and not just the big boys of testosterone and insulin. Hormone recovery is an area generally not recognized by people who haven’t studied exercise physiology.
You can’t just look at weight training as if it is a stand alone deal. You have to look at training, recovery and nutrition as an integrated system. I haven’t really touched on nutrition, but unless you have studied nutrition seriously, there are good chances that you were overestimating how good your nutrition was in the same way you were overestimating your recovery ability. Post-exercise nutrition in particular plays a very important role in recovery.
Does lifting weights affect brain function? Not if you do it right. Does overtraining affect brain function? No doubt about it. In fact, I’d say the effects you experienced are directly attributable to overtraining and are primary evidence that you were, indeed, overtraining.
Any kind of a hobby can give you tunnel vision when you are deeply into it. I’m sure we all know the feeling of enjoying something to the point where we eat, sleep, and drink it.
This is especially true when there isn’t much else in your life to balance it. My son went through a period of heavy weight-lifting a few years ago. I don’t remember his specific schedule but it was quite heavy – heavy enough that he worried a bit about overtraining. This was right after he graduated from high school, while he was waiting to go to Navy boot camp. He didn’t have a job and had just broken up with his girl friend. Overall, he was in a bit of a holding pattern and body building was the biggest thing in his life.
He didn’t ‘dumb down,’ I don’t believe, but his conversation got pretty limited. He was all about body building, all the time. He loves to read; but 80% of what he read during that period was about weight training & body builders. By the time he left for boot camp, weight lifting was consuming him to the point that, if he could have gotten out of his contract, I think he might have considered it – he was very worried that he would lose size while at boot camp. Which he did, as most of the physical fitness at basic training is cardio, with no opportunity to lift weights. However, by the time he got out of basic he wasn’t worried about it – by then his life had more things in it than personal training.
He’s been in the Navy now for 2 years and, while he still lift weights and is very fit, it is now just a hobby and one of several. It’s not the only thing in his life, but has to share space with his job, his studies, his friends & family, and his other hobbies. He is a much more well rounded person now and his conversation reflects that.
Finally, I’d like to say that I have known other people consumed by other hobbies to the point of tedium. I have an aunt who became so into geneology that almost all her conversation concerned people who had been dead for a generation or two. The difference between her and Nick, though, was that tedious and endless conversation about dead people will make you seem smart (it’s history, right?), while tedious and endless conversation about weight training will make you seem like a stupid muscle-head.
WAG. The conversation of anyone who goes overboard for a particular activity is quite likely to be restricted to that subject. This might lead to disinterest in other subjects and talking about only that when you do talk. Doesn’t = dumber but rather = monomaniacal.
According to my shrink, doing at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise (that is, enough to make you breath hard) will cause your body to release dopamine into the blood. Dopamine, she says, fights depression and gives the capacity to feel joy and happiness.