The supercompensation
What is supercompensation?
This is the phase that results from heavy training and intensive recovery — the period when you are stronger and larger than you were originally (that is, compared to your original functionality). In fact, this means gaining serious muscle mass in a few weeks.
At each training session, the destruction of muscle fibers, depletion of key nutrients and, of course, fatigue occurs. This leads to a drop in functionality. From this starting point, your body will recover by increasing the synthesis of muscle protein to rebuild muscle tissue, pulling you up to your starting level as quickly as possible. If the recovery goes well, there is a period of supercompensation, during which your functionality exceeds the original level. This means that your muscles are growing faster than before.
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All this happens from training to training, but to achieve maximum hypertrophy, you need to break the supercompensation into separate phases — microcycles.
The use of microcycles for the supercompensation
As a rule, microcycles are used to bring you closer to a certain goal: in our case, to hypertrophy. Usually for this purpose, a 3-4 week period is taken, during which the training is repeated from three to six times. Famous examples of microcycles are The German volume training and the Smolov Jr. training. Each of these microcycles lasts 4 weeks and has a clear goal.
For maximum supercompensation, you need to train for wear and tear so that your functionality is temporarily reduced. This is called overloading. With the right approach, you will feel tired, weakened, and perhaps even feel smaller at the end of the microcycle. The key point is to train hard. The pain and suffering in the gym will soon pay off.
The simplest way to achieve overloading when working on hypertrophy is to raise the training volume week after week. This is easy to do by adding one approach to each exercise once a week. In this way, you will push your body beyond its limits, forcing it to do more work. However, eventually you will reach the limit, the body will not be able to cope with a greater load, and you will feel weak. It's good. This is the overload. If you did everything correctly, it will take from three to six weeks.
Many people confuse overloading with overtraining. There is little in common here. If you overtrained, you constantly feel weak and tired, and it takes months to fully recover. During overload, you are separated from overtraining by a very thin line.
Supercompensation unloading
As soon as you get to the overload, the magic begins. The training volume is automatically reduced by 50-70%, and the intensity is increased by 5%. For example, if you squat with 100 kg and did 5 sets of 10 in the last week of the overload phase, you should reduce the volume to 2 sets of 10 and increase the working weight to 105 kg (or even more). This unloading lasts a week or less.
The goal of increasing intensity is to continue generating training incentives, despite the drastic reduction in volume required for recovery. The graph above shows that recovery is the first step towards supercompensation. In fact, it is absolutely necessary if you want to quickly pump up your muscles and harvest a rich harvest in every muscle-building microcycle. And since recovery is so important in the phase of supercompensation unloading, it is not superfluous to remind you of some recovery techniques-sleep and nutrition.
Sleep and nutrition are the Yin and Yang of your training program. You've heard about it a million times, so it won't hurt to remind you again. Here's what you need to know about recovery in the supercompensation offload phase:
Sleep at least 7 hours every night.
Continue to eat the same way as during the surge phase. For example, if you were getting 3,500 calories in the form of 40% carbohydrates, 30% protein, and 30% fat, you need to get the same 3,500 calories with the same macronutrient ratio in the supercompensation offload phase.
Take fish oil every day and BCAA between meals.
Conclusion
Gaining muscle mass is a careful planning, and only then action. Train to the limit of your ability, use the supercompensation offload phase, and your efforts will be rewarded. Here's your game plan:
Increase the volume until you reach overstrain
Reduce your volume by 50-70% for one week
Use recovery techniques
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