Crazy stuff done by the young and obsessed; how ideas morph over time
20 June 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Back when I was young the mission was to get as big, strong and muscular as possible in the shortest amount of time. That made things simple: lift heavy, eat a lot, eat often and eat whatever you likesleep a lot and nap periodically. This approach was (as is) effective as hell if the mission statement is strictly to grow large powerful muscles without regard to anything else. The way to grow muscle tissue is to get bull strong at a few key exercises. In the martial arts they have a saying, Better to learn one tactic well than dozens superficially.
To add muscle practice the compound multi-joint exercises such as squat, bench press, incline press, standing and seated overhead presses, cleans, rows, deadliftsperform the big sweeping exercises that require groups of muscle to work together in a synchronized fashion to complete the assigned muscular task. Muscles lift more working together than they do working in an isolated fashion. This fact can be put to good use: always start off by performing a compound multi-joint exercise and then finish off with an isolation exercise or two that attack the individual muscle component parts.
Think of the compound exercises as the entre and the isolation exercises as desert: never eat desert before the main course. Translation: first squat then do leg extensions, always hit the benches before flyes or pec dec, overhead press before lateral raises. Structure the workout around basic compound exercises and seek to become stronger within each exercise. Seek to add either more repetitions or poundage. Technique should never be sacrificed in order to hoist more weight. Seek to equal or exceed some strength benchmark on a periodic basis and always work up to your capacity on a given day in some manner or fashion. Otherwise you tread water and when an athlete treads water the most they can hope for is to hang onto whatever level they currently are at. If you are able to generate real gut-busting gym effort on regular basis, you need back the effort up with lots of calories. And lots and lots of quality physical rest. Again, the goal is to grow significant amounts of muscle.
After beating your self up in the gym, strength athletes counteract self-inflicted training trauma by consuming lots of calories from whatever source is handy, food volume above all else. The combination of continually extending limits in the gym using core exercises, eating heavy and resting a lot causes the lifter to become anabolic and anabolism is a prerequisite for growing muscle. Indiscriminate eating adds body fat. Professional bodybuilders expropriated the hard, heavy power-training, the kind that builds large muscles. They expropriated the rest and nap strategy of their strength athlete brethren. The bodybuilders expropriated the big calorie theory and began consuming 5,000 to 10,000 calories a day in order to support the intense weight training. Bodybuilders made two significant additions to the basic power-training template: calories were not derived indiscriminately rather were derived from specifically approved food sources.
Bodybuilders added cardiovascular exercise into the training regimen. These two changes kept body weight gains as lean and fat free as possible. Training hard and heavy like strength athletes made bodybuilders much larger than they had been in the past. Eating lots of calories ensured they achieved and stayed anabolic. Rest accelerates the recovery process. As Satchel Paige once said, The social ramble aint restful. By deriving calories from clean sources (low fat, no refined carbs, no sugar or alcohol) and performing cardio exercise on a regular basis, body fat accumulation is kept to a minimum. This narrative demonstrates how physical renovation strategies have evolved since the sixties. I am convinced that the average person can make their own physical renovation efforts light-years more effective by using the same template the champion athlete uses to whip themselves into top shape. We will smooth away the sharp edges, tone down, dilute and make user friendly the methods of the athletic elite for our own more modest efforts.
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