A lot of truth in this!

[Resurrected]

On the Anabolic Mind's forums, a powerlifters take on getting big and why some people who are always over ****yzing things never grow

Virtually everything you’ve ever read from a bodybuilding magazine is heresy and should be regarded as not worth the paper it was printed on. The programs written by the so called “superstars” of the bodybuilding world were actually ghost written by some guy in a cubicle who doesn’t know a thing about proper training, programming, exercise phys, or periodization. If, by chance the program was actually written by the “superstar” you can rest easy as long as you are one of the most genetically gifted people in history AND you are on such a ridiculous amount of drugs that you have to tan to hide the yellowing of your skin due to liver failure.

The fact is that big, strong guys are a dime a dozen, and many of them get that way in spite of their training knowledge than because of it.

I know what I’m talking about in the world of training not because I’m the biggest or the strongest (although, at 270lbs and an 800 squat, 600 bench, and 700 deadlift I can hold my own), and not because I know the most about exercise phys (though I can hold my own there too), but because I have trained with and become friends with best. I have trained at Westside Barbell Club, with the Metal Militia, talk on a continual basis with the best strength coaches in the nation and world-wide, and the training methods I prescribe have been tested in the gym on literally hundreds and hundreds of regular, everyday athletes and shown to work. Period.

So here’s what I can stand before you today and say with great conviction what I know to be true about training:

1) I believe in general that the majority of people don’t work hard enough. If there’s one thing we can learn from the old Eastern Bloc countries, it’s that they worked harder than us, and that primarily, is why they always beat us in the Olympics. Work hard in the gym (even if your program sucks) and you will be rewarded.

2) I also believe that most people don’t put near enough emphasis on lower body and core work. The key to getting big is full squats and deadlifts. If you are looking at your routine and you see that you are training upper body 3 or 4 days per week and lower body once, you have a serious problem. The majority of athletes should live and die in the squat rack.

3) And for that matter, EVERYONE’S program should be centered around these exercises: Full Squat, Deadlifts (or cleans or both), heavy barbell rows, bench press, and Standing Barbell Military/Push Presses. Add pull ups, barbell curls, dips, heavy abdominal work, and some core work (back extensions, reverse hypers, or glute hams) and that should make up 95-100% of the total number of exercises you do. The most effective training is simple and hard.

4) Training a bodypart once per week (and one bodypart per day) is one of the worst ways to train. It will create a rut in your training that you can’t dig out of.

Training a bodypart twice per week has always been shown to be superior to once per week training of a muscle. The problem is with the influx of "Weider Principles" and other bodybuilding trash that's posted in the magazines, the masses have been stuck in the one-bodypart-per-day-per-week rut for years.

No strength athletes train a bodypart once per week. Most olympic lifters, powerlifters, and strongman train their backs at least four times per week, and last time I checked, they weren't lacking in back width.

The simple fact is that training using an upper/lower split or a push/pull split or 3 full body days will provide double or triple the training stimulus than training a muscle once per week and thus, if done correctly will lead to much, much greater growth and strength gains.


5) Training to near muscular failure has shown to induce identical hypertrophy gains than training to all out muscular failure. The reason you guys can’t train a muscle more than once per week is because you are destroying it when you do train it. Learn to hit or miss that last rep and then call it done. Don’t do ridiculous amounts of forced reps, negatives, etc. until you literally can’t move the muscle. Take it to near failure and then your muscles will recover enough so that you can train them again in 3-4 days.

Understand that there is a huge difference in training to near failure and not training hard. I would never advocate to not train hard. Actually, quite the opposite – try to squat for 5 sets of 5 reps using only 10lbs less than your five rep max. That’s absolutely brutal. But when you get done, don’t go to the leg press machine and keep pounding out sets and stripping off weight until you literal can’t do a single leg press with only the sled. That’s absurd, and you can’t recover from it in 3 days.

6) Squat at least below parallel every time. Are you kidding me? I can’t believe some people are still quarter squatting and saying that riding a squat all the way to the ground is bad for your knees. Learn the facts. Stopping at or above parallel puts much more strain on your knees than going ass to grass. Plus going all the way down in an Olympic style back squat will put more mass on you than any other exercise. Period.

7) Isolation exercises are absolute crap. 90% of your routine should be made up of full squats, deadlifts or cleans, bench press, standing overhead press, heavy barbell rows, pull-ups, dips, and core work (abs, glute ham raises, back extensions, reverse hypers). Isolation exercises and machines are the worst thing that ever happened to the weight training world.

8) Quit using pyramid rep schemes like 10,8,6,4,2 – Instead, your time would be better served doing boring (but effective) gut busting sets of 5x5 or 4x8-10 using the SAME WEIGHT for each set. They WILL produce better results than the pyramid scheme. BTW, check your ego at the door when you do these.

9) I’ll quote my good friend, Glenn Pendlay (the best S&C coach in the nation) for the next one:

"Most athletes do too many exercises. Many times they look over other peoples programs like they are at a buffet. They pick a little of this and a little of that from a variety of programs, and end up with something useless. People think you have to train each muscle with a different specific exercise. Many guys in college athletics would do better if they would just randomly slash off half of what they are doing, and then work twice as hard on the half that is left."

10) Another of my favorites from Glenn:

"im so sick and tired of hearing people who just started training who say they cant gain weight. jeez ive heard this crap so often. every day it seems i have some stupid kid ask me about how to gain weight... in resturants, at the grocery store, yo uname it. for some reason there seems to be a sign on my back or something. usually i know its worthless to talk to them, sometimes i actually waste my time. talked to a kid at the golden corral a couple of days ago. took almost an hour when i should have been enjoying my all you can eat steak night... 3 days later i see him in the gym when i just happened to go in to talk to a friend who i knew was there... kid was there doing preacher curls. said hi to me, then said well i talked to my friend about what you said and he said he tried it once and overtrained so i decided to do this thing i read about... on the other hand about 6 months ago i talked to this 6' tall, 150lb kid who wanted to know about getting stronger. kid had done well in judo, won some titles, also after that had done cycling, turned pro then quit a year later, quite a good road racer. he actually did what i told him i guess, about 3 months after i saw him the first time i saw hiim again, he weighed about 185... he wanted to try olympic weightlifting so i let him train with the team i coach. now hes weighing 204 and clean and jerking about 300lbs, 54lbs gained in 6 months. no drugs. olympic squat from 175lbs to 385lbs, front squat from 150lbs to 330lbs. hell be a good lifter, has a good work ethic. needs to be 240 and fairly lean, will compete eventually in the 231 pound class. will take about another 12-15 months i suppose. why is a kid like this the exception and not the rule? why will kids do the same old thing for years in the abscense of results, and not try anything new? what the hell is wrong with people. there is a gym in town, i know the owner so i go and talk to him sometimes, there are all these kids in there, skinny little ****s, doing curls. they never progress, you see the same faces one year to the next, same bodies too."

11) Ultra slow reps or TUT is, for the most part completely worthless. Will it work? Yes. But the total amount of work that one can complete is much lower when utilizing slow reps. Just go natural. Don’t try to be super fast, and bouncy, and don’t try to go ultra slow. Just do it naturally and controlled.

12) “The burn”, “the pump” and “the feel” have nothing to do with the effectiveness of an exercise. Yes, even I have been caught on upper body days looking at myself in the mirror when I’m all blown up, but that has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the last exercise. You do hammer strength bench presses and flyes for sets of 20 and I’ll do heavy barbell bench presses and deep dips. One of us will “feel the pump” more and the other one will grow.

13) Likewise, delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) also gives no clue as to the effectiveness of a workout. It just means A) you have a ton of microtrauma in a muscle or a lot of lactic acid/ waste products. Congratulations.

14) “Core stability training” is not done on a swiss ball or a stability board. It’s done by pulling heavy deadlifts, standing overhead presses, full squats, heavy barbell rows, heavy farmer’s walks, Atlas stones, tire flipping, reverse hypers, heavy back extensions, glute ham raises, and heavy abdominal work.

[finlee]

It quotes in the article

"4) Training a bodypart once per week (and one bodypart per day) is one of the worst ways to train. It will create a rut in your training that you can’t dig out of."

Yet i've been informed off nearly everyone that you should only train each body part once a week to let it recover and grow etc?!

What's best?

good article btw 43aso

[GALTONATOR]

Good post old chap i agree with some point disagree with others but hey thats what its all about!! You got to do what you belive work for you

[Billy the Fish]

Very interesting and a good read !

[Resurrected]

Quote

It quotes in the article

"4) Training a bodypart once per week (and one bodypart per day) is one of the worst ways to train. It will create a rut in your training that you can’t dig out of."

Yet i've been informed off nearly everyone that you should only train each body part once a week to let it recover and grow etc?!

What's best?

good article btw 43aso

There is really no such thing as 'best'

Since I have started back training in January of this year I have noticed that the once a week method has become 'the in method' and to be honest I've found it very good personally since starting back.

However it is not the 'best' method.

The 'best' way to train is the way that you find gives you the greatest results. You'll only find that be experimentation and lots of thought.

IMO this is one of the reasons it is imperative to keep a training diary. You can look back and see what was and what was not working for you.

I posted the above article as there are some very valid points in there and to give yet another persective on bodybuilding.

[PeeJ]

Some very good points above, a lot of the info I only came across recently and since I was advised to go along the 5x5 route (only about a month ago) I have been enjoying it a lot more, lifting so much more weight than previously and feeling far more pain the next day. I personally love to feel the DOMS as it reassures me I worked hard on those muscles the day before. Whether it has any link to muscle growth I wouldn't know.

I would say the main fault of the article is the distinct lack of diet reference. Diet is such a great big part of bodybuilding and strength training that without it it wouldn't matter how you trained you would make no gain. Cue MyProtein advertisement...

[finlee]

Yeah i totally agree 43aso,

It's only through this forum that i've started taking a journal into the gym and writing down what i did, how much i did etc. Working a treat so far.

[MartinM]

Quote

Some very good points above, a lot of the info I only came across recently and since I was advised to go along the 5x5 route (only about a month ago) I have been enjoying it a lot more, lifting so much more weight than previously and feeling far more pain the next day. I personally love to feel the DOMS as it reassures me I worked hard on those muscles the day before. Whether it has any link to muscle growth I wouldn't know.

It doesnt...... now you know.

The thing about training a bodypart once a week is pretty much true but i think saying it is the 'worst' way to train is a bit drastic. Many people succeed this way. Just recently a study was published 'proving' muscle is recovered in 48-72 hours so leaving it longer than that and you are essentially 'de-training'. I can find the article if anyone wants it...not overly interesting read, lots of scientific mumbo jumbo

[Aren_Tyr]

Quote

6) Squat at least below parallel every time. Are you kidding me? I can’t believe some people are still quarter squatting and saying that riding a squat all the way to the ground is bad for your knees. Learn the facts. Stopping at or above parallel puts much more strain on your knees than going ass to grass.

I have great difficulty with this statement. As I understand it, taking the squat such that it subjects the knee joint to an acute (i.e. less than 90 degree) angle puts a vastly increased strain on the knee joint (as opposed to a greatly increased muscular load). I never take my squats lower than parallel because on the occasions I have done, I got some serious warning signs from my knee[s]. It just didn't feel right. Thinking about it intuitively, it is not a natural position for your body to be under load! You do not normally operate with your legs bent double completely over.

Haven't quite a lot of people seriously damaged their knee joint from squatting excessively low? It does not seem biomechanically advisable, long-term, to subject the knee joint to this stress. And it is worth pointing out that a lot of the Olympic powerlifters who do massive snatches, effectively going into a super-low squat during the lift, have also experienced serious knee injuries. Not good. On a similar vein, I heard that it is also not advisable to do military presses behind-the-neck, as it can effectively force the shoulder joint to pull out.

Opinions/experiences?

Aren.

[finlee]

MartinM,

I wouldn't mind having a read of that, can you post the link etc?