A bunch of questions.

[Gavin]

Routines - How long should a person follow a routine for, before they change it? I mean, staying in the same routine won't get you very far; eventually you'll have to do something more challenging, right? What's a good amount of time to follow one routine; like, a month?

Losing what you gained - Doing pushups gives you certain benefits, just like doing dips give you certain benefits. I like to do both pushups and dips for variety, even though they are somewhat redundant. I don't like to do them on the same day, however, so Monday I do my pushups, and Thursday I do my dips. By the time Monday rolls around, it's been a week since I've done any pushups! The same with my dips on Thursday. I remember reading somewhere that muscle regeneration takes between 24 and 48 hours (the standard 2 days rest) and by 7 days you've "lost" what you gained from the workout. Well, if this is true, then I'm just going to go nowhere with pushups on Monday and dips on Thursday, right?
My question is basically: After you do a workout, how long before you lose all the benefits of that workout? Say I do a bunch of squats on Tuesday... for two days my muscles repair, and then I have some improvement to my muscle I did not have on Tuesday... how long before that improvement "atrophies" or goes away?

Overtraining - What does it actually take to overtrain? How much do I really have to tax my body before it becomes "overtrained"? I've been trying not to work out "too much" for fear of overtraining, but I think that fear is making me work out TOO LITTLE.

Compound Training - Should I skip doing my pushups and squats and just focus on doing Burpees instead, since they combine pushups and squats? Is compound training a good "replacement" for standard routines? But don't they say never to work upper body and lower body in the same day... doesn't Burpees do that?

Thanks guys. Sorry for all the questions. I just have a lot of things I want to work on my body (shoulders, biceps, hands, forearms, chest, upper/middle/lower back, thighs, calves, neck, abdomen) but it doesn't seem like I have enough days in a week to do all this, so I might have to split my routine up into "programs" like an upper/lower body month, back/core month, etc...

[koltz]

1. according to your goals and abilities.

2.pushups and dips are almost the same , the only differance is the ressistance ( unless you mean chair dips )
how long it takes before you loose the adaptation you made form your last workout is depending entirly on your genetics , I didn't work out for half a year and retained 95% of my strength without any injuries liftign heavy and dubled it very fast , some people loose it in a matter of monthes.

3.doing too much too soon , it's not a big deal theres no red line you cross , if you do one set of pushups you overtrain in oen way or another , that's why you have to up your volume and do a deloding week so your body adapts to new recovery capabilities , I once did planche holds all day long ( really all day long , every 20 min or less) and wen't to workout in a gym later , I cought some serious cold right after the workout , another time I got overtrained was when I did 6 days a week HIT for 3 hrs a day , It wasn't as bad as when I got sick but that's when I first got to know the subject of overtraining and stopped doing it.

some people might overtrain from working a makor muscle group twice in two days though.

[Drunken Panda]

I'm afraid a lot of answers to these questions start with 'It depends on the individual...' Having said that, here are some thoughts.

1. Routines do need to be changed in order to force the body to adapt to new stimuli and thereby promote growth. However, the growth will not come if you change to frequently.

Rather than making large scale changes all the time (scrapping an entire routine and wholely repacling it with another), try making small changes along the way (Ross Enamait recommends every 3-6 weeks, but that's not law, it just works for him - adapt as suits your needs/body). Add sets, increase reps, lower rest time, increase resistance, swap out one exercise for another one (that trains the same area, for example, pushups for dips) etc.

Keeping a log is useful in this regard to see what is working, what needs changing, and what needs to be made more hardcore!

2. Different people recover at different rates. I can miss a week and come back feeling even stronger, presumably because my body has had time to heal. On the other hand, while I tend not to lose strength when forced to rest for longer periods (such as illness), I certainly do not like to do so - it's more a mental thing.

Don't worry about losing too much strength: as long as you are doing something you should maintain a general level of health that will increase over time (and in doing so every element of your strength will rise to, assuming you are training the different areas).

Incidentally, Verkhoshanksy (1986, Programming and Organization of Training) suggests muscles can (note, 'can') lose up t0 30 percent of their strength after a seven-day period of total rest. Make of that what you will.

3. Personally, I think people worry too much about overtraining. Mind you, I'm fairly young, so I probably heal quite quickly. Most times it's a mental block thing - people feel a little sore and think they have to rest up for weeks at a time. That's soft in my opinion. Pain is a temporary thing. Just start doing something again and your body will warm up and forget the (usually barely present) pain very quickly. That's just me though - I'm a sadist when it comes to training! - things may be different for you.

4. I wouldn't advise skipping squats and pushups completely in favour of burpees. As I mentioned in 1., change it round every so often, so that you incorporate all elements of training.

I hope that is helpful. Remember, I'm not saying any of this is absolute, or utterly right and-can-not-be-altered-or-disputed-in-any-way - these are just my thoughts on the questions you posed.

Good luck!