Adequate Rest?

[firehand]

Hi,

I've been shugging for almost three month and I must say that its really working for me. Its a great system!
However, I do have one question. Sometimes I have the feeling that I'm not giving my muscles enough time to recover/rebuild. As far as I know, the muscle needs at least 24-48 hours of recovery time between exercises.
If that is so, how do you explain the rational for practicing every weekday? Why not practice on a day on day off basis?

[reinhard]

The main problem most people have with exercise is behavioral compliance, not muscular efficiency. The rationale of exercising every N-day is that it's easier to make yourself do, you're leveraging this powerful pre-existing structure of the calendar, you associate your workout with your other weekday routines, it's less likely to conflict with weekend trips and social events and the well earned desired to finally take it easy at the end of a week of (at least mentally) hard work.

Even just physiologically speaking, I think the "muscle recovery" issue is vastly overblown. Maybe if you're doing hard core body building it makes sense, but I don't think it's much of an issue for more moderate routines like this. Besides being just 14 minutes, shovelglove imitates manual labor. Manual laborers didn't take every second day off -- until relatively recently, they didn't even get two days a week off. And they worked more like 12 hours than 14 minutes.

If you find that you're feeling tired on a given morning, make it a more relaxed 14 minutes. But keep the basic behavioral framework in place. You don't want to risk that for some dubious fine tuning for muscular efficiency. Would I be a tad stronger if I'd worked out every other day rather than every N-day? Maybe. Maybe not (3.5 days a week vs. 5, after all). Who knows. But I'm pretty happy with how strong I am now and I doubt I would have been able to stick with it otherwise.

Reinhard

[Old Juicy]

I really like shovelglove just because it mentally fits so well with my crap schedule.

I sure as hell go easy some days or skip a couple of the movements if my body tells me to. Everyone should listen to their body, and if something hurts, don't let it become an injury that blocks your ability to exercise.

Shovelglove seems to be best for folks who otherwise aren't getting motivated to exercise regularly. If I could get myself to the gym every other day and use those machines to muscle exhaustion, I'm sure I would need a recovery system, but I really am more interested in not quitting instead of building muscle fast.

You know, if wouldn't be too hard to have two shovelgloves, one 8 pound and one 16 pound, and alternate between hard and precise days against quick and vigorous days.

[Midwestern Ranger]

I just got thru with my first week of shugging and while I can say that I didn't feel any burn the following day for the first couple of times, I do feel the burn from yesterday, the last day in a 5 day set.

I lifted conventional weights for a couple of years but I believe that shovelglove more accurately mimics the kind of conditioning that our ancestors endured. Somehow I doubt the average Spartan warrior was doing a bench press, but he was marching, and practicing with a heavy spear and shield; and most likely could send the average gym rat home with his tail between his legs.

Since I'm already motivated to do physical exercise I may split the 2 days a week off and see how that works for me. Nonetheless, it is far better to shugg at 80% efficiency than to not shugg at all for want of 100%.

[samoscratch]

I've been doing the exercises for only a week now, but I've decided to alternate the movement set every other day. In other words one day I will do:

50 shovels
butter churn
wood chop
curls

and the next day:

tuck bales
hoist sack
stoke the oven
pick the onions

I think it will help to motivate since it changes up the routine