In one of my thread, I received several recommendations to make my sessions shorter, which is to cut the 3 hours sessions into just 1 hour if possible. Personally, I've been hearing/reading that one hour of resistance training is optimal. I'm not sure what the reason is but I think that's nice if we can keep the sessions efficient while at the same time sufficient for our needs. But I'm wondering why shouldn't we train longer than 1 hour? Afterall, a training session in majority of sports (or other things) usually lasts for about 2 hours, why should resistance training be different?
A thread that I just read on Glenn Pendlay's forum was actually the reason I decided to post my question. Some quotes:
kirksman wrote:One thing is the same though, intensity is the same. Workload is huge. Another way we learn is, if it takes you 3 1/2 hours to complete your whole workout, and suddenly it drops to 2 1/2 hours, you'll see your worksets increase suddenly from 6 sets of triples at 90%, to 6x3 @ 90%, then 2x3 @ 80% then up to 95% for another 4-5x2 or singles. They use time as a gauge rather than just sets and reps done.
If the Chinese (Singaporean) weightlifters have training sessions that last for 3 hours, why can't we? That sounds like I recommend training up to 3 hours, but it's more like "How important is it for us to keep our training sessions to just 1 hour long or less?". I definitely agree that we should keep our sessions as efficient as possible.kirksman wrote:An elite and a newbie session can both last 3 hours, but the newbie is spending much of the 3 hours with an empty bar. As much as 2 hours. I remember having to do 150 snatch pulls, then high snatch pulls with knee rebend, then snatch balances for 2 months before I was allow to even consider snatching. This didn't include the 1 month that was spent with just the bamboo stick doing 300 pulls. And squats. Yes with the bamboo stick. Even after that, I'd still have to spend many hours snatching in front of a mirror.