Can You Work Out Too Much? Muscle Hypertrophy

I see the way people look at me the first time they walk into my fitness classes. I don’t fit the fitness mold. I’m solidly built. I’m over 140 lbs. So when I get that ‘how good can you be’ look I chuckle to myself. I’ll see you in six minutes when you’re licking the floor and I’m still counting!

My background is powerlifting, martial arts, competitive fighting, US women’s bobsled team, and (briefly) women’s professional football. While on the bobsled team, it was my lifting that made the history books because I was pregnant at the time. Upon retirement, my goal was to lean out but it proved impossible. Couldn’t do it. No diet, no shake, no training could transform my body back to what it once was. So I did what any other sane person would do. I tripled the work. It worked for bobsled, why not real life? One example: While training for a marathon and teaching fitness classes, I was logging more than 30-40 miles of running per week with 10 hours of fitness classes (kickbox, boxing, bootcamp, cardio, and Pilates), and weightlifting yet the scale never budged. People would openly ask how it was I wasn’t a size 0 or why I wasn’t “skinny.” My diet was critiqued. My thyroid was pondered. My dedication was questioned. It sucked.

While pregnant on the bobsled team, researchers at Case Western documented my workouts and so I returned almost two decades later to ask why I was stuck in my present state. I have studied and know all about plateaus. Would I die in a perpetual state of bobsled plateau or was something else going on? That was when I learned about muscular hypertrophy and it all made sense. In essence, my workloads exceeded pre-existing capacity of the muscle fiber.

My what exceeded what? It goes like this: When you work out there is cell/muscle injury causing cell swelling. It is the recovery that then helps the muscle mend and, in response, swell but with hypertrophy the enlarged muscle cells perform at a far greater level of activity. The muscle breakdown does not occur (or certainly, not as much), each muscle fiber manages the workload more easily and, to the frustrated athlete working harder and harder and harder, physical results are fewer and fewer and fewer. The good news was my body was handling the workload like a champ. The bad news was my champ body resembled a Russian wrestler on steroids.

The diagnosis is in. I have muscular hypertrophy. For the first time in almost two decades of being the hardest working woman in a gym (or trying to be), I am redesigning my workouts for less intensity, more stretching, and muscle confusion.

Please be on the lookout for what’s next: Is Muscle Confusion Even a Thing?