Maximum Overload Training By Paul Roberts
The History Behind Why 5x Gold Medalist Paul Roberts Decreased His Training Frequency To Just 2x Per Week For 5 Years! (The Results Explained)
KR: How long have you been in the natural bodybuilding circuit?
PR: I competed in my first show in 2010, so that was nearly 14 years ago and I've been training for about five or six years prior to that so more or less 20 years of training and about 14 years competing.
KR: How old are you now?
PR: I'm 38. I've had two different chapters in my bodybuilding career with two slightly different approaches as well, the early part was 2010 to 2014 and then I had a 5 year break where I just sort of forgot about bodybuilding for a while and then I came back in 2019.
KR: What drove you to step away from competing?
PR: I competed in 2010 and 2011 and in 2012 I did a few shows and then it wasn’t until 2014 when I won a European title, a British title and I came fourth at the Worlds but it was just getting to be a bit too much, so essentially that five year period where I took a break, I just had too much going on so I forgot about it for a while. I still trained, but not really consistently. I was probably training each muscle group every other week just to keep ticking along, so I wasn't shrinking, but I wasn't progressing or anything like that. I came back to it in 2019 when I got the itch again.
KR: In that 5-year period, were you consistently training in that fashion that you described where you were hitting every body part every other week?
PR: Yeah, pretty much. It was just a convenience thing, my mind was on other things. I didn't want to commit to what I was doing in my previous bodybuilding routine, so I thought I would just experiment. I was training every muscle every 10 days or so. I did a three day split, but the way it was spaced out would mean that one muscle group would get tailed onto the next week. That when I got the idea of just training two days per week so I could spread out my workouts even further. I did that and I just carried on doing that for 5 years. It just suited my lifestyle at the time. I maybe didn't look as full but I didn't really notice any atrophy or anything like that and then obviously when I came back in 2019 I increased the frequency again.
KR: I don't hear a lot of people training with that sort of frequency, it's usually either once a week or multiple times a week per muscle group, so the fact that you were doing that for 5 years and you didn't really notice any sort of negative effects is interesting. Would you say in some cases the strength progressed because of the additional recovery?