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Avoiding injury and burnout is a really complex question and it basically comes down to building experience. If you're training hard, you ARE going to get tweaks, niggles and dings. Knowing what's an injury and what's just sore is important. Don't be afraid to deviate from the plan if something is actively hurting but do make sure you do something, you'll come back much quicker. If you've got knee pain from squatting what happens if you drop the weight? Still hurts, what about leg press? Ok, knee extensions or hamstring curls?
With burnout, it's almost always mental before its physical (although physical overuse/overtraining is a real thing, it's usually more like under-recovery). One technique is to rotate exercises. If you're stalling on bench press and driving into a brick wall, consistently feeling little tweaks or tightness as form breaks down, reset with close grip bench press, or low incline bench, and keep going until you reach 'burnout' then swap back to standard bench press where you'll have room to grow again.
Hope that helps.
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Ptown
Newbie question if I may;
Since early October I've been doing a 3 day/week split (usually) of push, pull and core/legs. Originally I based this off a plan I found online and added in a few exercises to target the muscles I felt were underrepresented in the plan. Having done that for a few months, I've found some definite gains and have not yet started to plateau as far as I can tell.
The plan I started on was 3x 8-12 of each exercise with a few specific movements maxing at 6-8 reps. I quite quickly changed this to be 4 sets instead of 3 and found that was more bang for my buck.
I'm not so fussed about outright strength or competing etc, but am keen to build some more muscle as I've always been 'skinny'. My plan for the next few months is to drop the sets and reps to 3x 6-8, and lift commensurately heavier, all using the same exercises.
I understand that form is crucial when substantially jumping in weight, but what else should I be looking out for or doing to avoid injury/burnout?