PLEASE read this article

[tinyman5000]

totally awesome

http://www.t-nation.com/article/body...rength_january

best line

The forgotten element of hypertrophy training is the principle of overload. People don't try to lift heavier, they just double their drug dosage

[AMillane7]

reading now, hope its good

[Bon]

I'm not even going to bother opening the link to it.
T-Nation takes forever to load. So many fuking advertisements and redirecting links, it's ridiculous.

Someone put cliffs.

EDIT:
So i decided to click on the link anyway, and after 5 minutes it still was not fucking loaded.
Lol...

[AMillane7]

cliffs

front squat good -proper form back squat ftw
fullbody < split routine
cardio in AM w/o eating is ok, not great


SPIKE SHOOTER HAS A NEW 16 OZ! ahhh i cant wait (or theyve had it but i just saw an ad)

[tinyman5000]

cliffs

front squat good -proper form back squat ftw
fullbody < split routine
cardio in AM w/o eating is ok, not great


SPIKE SHOOTER HAS A NEW 16 OZ! ahhh i cant wait (or theyve had it but i just saw an ad)

lol are we reading the same article

[xuerebx]

Well I copied/pasted it here for anyone who hates advertisments

When it comes to muscle and performance, Charles Poliquin is so far ahead of most of the non-Testosterone pack it's scary. He's not only on the cutting edge, he's the guy who sharpens it. We're glad to be reviving his famous Q & A column here at T-Nation.
Abandon the Back Squat?
Q: I've read that some strength coaches have practically abandoned the back squat in favor of the front squat, citing that the front squat almost can't be screwed up and poses less risk to the athlete. What do you think about that? And what do you think is a top front squat?
A: Well, the front squat is more highly correlated with performance in lower body extremity sports than the back squat. In bobsledding, alpine skiing, and speed skating, the front squat can help predict times. So, the front squat is a better predictor lift when it comes to testing.
Why? Because if you cheat in the front squat you'll kill yourself. For example, you can lift more weight in the back squat with some forward leaning. You can't do that in the front squat without hurting yourself.
That said, you can't throw away all your tools. I partly agree with these coaches, but I'll keep the back squat in my toolbox. I use a lot of split squats too. There are over seventy ways to squat; saying you need only one is like saying you only need a hammer to build a house.
The best front squat I've ever seen was by a 165-pound weightlifter who front squatted 534 pounds. This wasn't an American college football version either; this guy was ass down, left a stain on the carpet. The strongest front squatters I've seen are guys doing around 3.3 times body weight.
As for the style of front squat, I prefer the Olympic version rather than arms-crossed style. Now, if the lifter's arms are too big or he lacks flexibility, then he can use straps.
One thing to remember when using front squats is to never do more than six reps per set. This is because your rhomboids tire out isometrically before your squads tire concentrically. You don't want to get to a point where you're squatting with a kyphotic posture. That's when accidents happen.
So if you're going to do sets of six, you're going to do usually between five and ten sets. The guy I mentioned above who front squats 534 (an Olympic silver medalist) would do ten sets of six of front squats in the morning and ten sets of ten of back squats at night!

Total Body vs. Body Part Splits... Again
Q: Some T-Nation coaches advocate training the whole body in one session; others usually use a body part split of some sort. The debate is endless, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it!
A: I'm the first one to want to improve on any training system, but I do not know anyone successful in the strength coaching business who uses full body routines exclusively.
I've trained Olympic medalists in sixteen different sports, from energy system sports such as swimming to short-term explosive power sports such as shot put. For almost every single one of them, 70% of the time, I've used split routines and switched to whole body routines as their competition was nearing. Whether it's Adam Nelson who won the World Championship in the shot put or Dwight Phillips who won it in the long jump, they all trained with split routines.
Workouts have to be short and effective, and when you train for relative strength you have to do a lot of sets. If you do a lot of sets, you can't do a lot of exercises. Athletes need split training to get adequate recovery.
Adam Nelson's split looked like this:
Day 1: Chest/back
Day 2: Legs
Day 3: Off
Day 4: Rotator cuff and arms
Day 5: Off
Adam, by the way, incline benches 525 pounds using a fat, three inch bar.
In bodybuilding, I don't think Ronnie Coleman trains whole body three days a week. I've never known a successful bodybuilder, even the low set guys like Dorian Yates, to do whole body training.
The key is to recruit as many motor units as possible, and you have to think about the law of exercise order. There have been a few good studies done on this, but here's the Reader's Digest version:
If you have a group of lifters who do exercises A, B, C, and D in a workout, and you have a group do the same exercises in the reverse order (D, C, B, and A), what you find is that the first group makes the most progress on exercise A and the second group makes the most progress on exercise D. Basically, you'll make the most progress on whatever you do first.
I've always found that when you get to the elite level, most athletes do best just doing two primary exercises per workout using multiple sets (like ten), and then training again six hours later.
Every single Olympian I've trained used split routines. I've been in this profession for 26 years and no one has ever convinced me, by their results, that full body routines are the only way to go.
Having coached at three different Olympics, I've had the opportunity to talk shop with many successful colleagues. Whether they were from Norway, Germany, or Finland, they all came to the conclusion that split routines were far more advantageous than total body routines.

Fasted Morning Cardio: The Final Word?
Q: At one time we were told that fasted cardio upon waking was best if your main goal was fat loss. Then we were told that it was a bad idea because it could be catabolic. Now we hear about semi-fasted morning cardio. Which one is really best?
A: I don't agree with any of them. We're made to throw a rock at the rabbit, not to chase it. We're basically anaerobic animals. The quickest way to get lean is through diet.
If you look in the world of sports, triathletes and marathon runners have body fat percentages ranging from between 11 and 14%. Four-hundred to 800 meter runners have body fat between 4 and 6%. Exercise intensity is the key, not duration. Take a picture of all the fat cows on the bikes at Gold's or World Gym. Go back next year and compare: they're all still fat or more likely: fatter!
The problem with exercise physiology is that many people look at the world through a straw. If you look at the fuel burned during exercise that's one thing, but you also have to look at the fuel burned to recover from exercise. That's where most people screw up. All morning cardio does is fatigue the adrenal glands.
Many people are now starting to agree with my German Body Comp principles: the best protocols for fat loss are the ones that increase the amount of lactate you produce. People from all over the world have told me that it's the best program they've used for their fat athletes or personal training clients. In fact, German Body Comp is still the best selling book I've ever written.
According to the latest research, GH production is directly correlated with a drop in blood PH. So when you produce lactic acid, as with German Body Comp, your blood PH goes down so your GH goes up. If people need to lose a lot of fat quickly and don't have much time to train, this is how we train them, four hours a week.
British researchers have noted the importance of the caloric cost to recover from that exercise. It has as much to do with the hours following the workout as it does with the actual workout itself.
And by the way, morning weight training isn't ideal either. Basically, the nervous system doesn't fully "wake up" until three to four hours after you do. But the good news is that the body will get used to anything, so you will eventually adapt to early morning training.

The Burn and Size Gains
Q: For hypertrophy, is the "burn" or the "pump" necessary?
A: There's a lot of ways people increase hypertrophy. Look at an Olympic weightlifter who never gets a pump. Look at a strongman competitor. They still hypertrophy.
The best studies on hypertrophy were done in Finland. They found that wrestlers, bodybuilders, powerlifters, and weightlifters all hypertrophy... but for different reasons. So the most important thing for hypertrophy training is to actually do varied training. Look at Ronnie Coleman. He used to train as a powerlifter then he trained as a bodybuilder: varied training.
Look at pre-1980's bodybuilders, back when the steroid usage was fairly light compared to today. Back then they trained as part of a subculture with weightlifters and powerlifters. By society's standards, people who lifted weights were weirdoes. So all these people lifted in the same gyms and shared training methodologies.
I saw Robbie Robinson train in Norway with a Norwegian powerlifting and bodybuilding champion. Robbie, especially for his age, is a strong dude. He was kicking this young guy's ass. You could tell these guys came up in a culture where you learned to lift more to get bigger. These days I've seen pro-bodybuilders curling with 35 pound dumbbells, but they still have high levels of hypertrophy.
The forgotten element of hypertrophy training is the principle of overload. People don't try to lift heavier, they just double their drug dosage.
So, "going for the burn" is one way to hypertrophy, but not the only way. For example, if I make you do eccentric squats and eccentric chins, you're going to put some weight on, but you don't have a burn.
Hypertrophy is a function of load vs. time under tension. Since it's a product, you can work at one end or the other, or both. Let's say you can squat 135 pounds for ten. Well, if you squat 135 for 30, then your legs will grow. But if you squat 225 for ten then your legs will grow too, but for a different reason. And if you can then do 225 for 50, then you're legs will really get big!
Both systems work.

Managing Insulin
Q: You've written that 68% of Americans are pre-diabetic. Insulin is the hormone of aging and inflammation, you said, and "managing insulin is one of the best ways to promote health and longevity." Okay, so what's the single best thing a person can do daily to do that?
A: Take fish oil. Research has shown that if you take three grams of fish oil with a high sugar meal, your insulin response is much smaller.
Now, I've heard some people suggest that you take all your fish oil for the day at one time. But anyone who knows what they're doing when it comes to functional medicine will tell you to spread it out. Would you eat all your protein for the day at once?

The Single Best Exercise?
Q: Looking around most gyms, what's the most beneficial but neglected exercise you can think of?
A: The snatch-grip deadlift, specifically a snatch deadlift on a four inch platform. The idea here is to get a large range of motion by standing on the platform and using the wide grip.
If you told me you were going to jail and only had a barbell and didn't want to get raped in the showers and could only do one exercise to put mass and strength on, then I'd tell you to do the snatch deadlift on a platform.

[xuerebx]

Continued

(Incidentally, at the last Biotest Christmas party, TC told me that 72% of the men from his native village have sex in the shower. That 's because the other 28% are not in jail yet.)
This exercise alone makes people gain weight like crazy. Any time I have someone who needs to gain weight fast and doesn't have a whole lot of time, I have them do snatch deadlifts. And with the snatch grip deadlift, straps are okay because you'll be doing reps above three, but don't use them until you get to your working weight.
If you think about it, this is the opposite of the sumo deadlift, which shortens the range of motion. Likewise, some powerlifters will lift in ballet shoes to shorten the ROM. What we want to do here is lengthen it. The snatch grip and platform will take care of that.

Oblique Exercises = Thick Waist?
Q: Some bodybuilders say they avoid direct oblique work to avoid developing a blocky physique and thick waist. Should they really be worried about this?
A: You mainly see that kind of oblique hypertrophy in throwers. The average guy shouldn't worry about this, unless he's throwing five days a week for ten years.
There's some research saying the obliques have a very low potential for strength development anyway. It's actually been shown that the obliques have the least amount of potential for hypertrophy and strength.
This is why I'm against those Tornado Balls and other things recommended by coaches who can't get anybody strong. The core is most recruited by squats and deadlifts, even though there's no rotating action.

Average Dudes and 1RMs
Q: Is there ever a reason for a non-powerlifting gym-rat to perform 1RMs?
A: Sure. Remember, hypertrophy is a function of a certain load and a certain amount of volume and time under tension. Thing is, if a guy is stuck at doing sets of ten at 200 pounds and he hasn't improved since Jimmy Carter was president, he probably needs to test his maximal strength and work on that.
So if he's benching 200 for ten, he's probably doing around 250 for a single, plus or minus ten pounds. If he goes on a cycle where he gets his bench up to 280, then he'll then be able to do ten reps with 230, then he'll see growth again.
He doesn't necessarily have to perform singles though; a safer way to train with high loads for the average guy would be six sets of three.

[tinyman5000]

guys i meant this article
http://www.t-nation.com/article/most...ndtable_part_2

[Bon]

[xuerebx]

This is the new one. I liked the other article better though.

T-Nation: So far it seems to be the consensus that the majority of time should be spent on compounds, while how much time you spend on isolation movements will vary in importance depending upon the trainee's goals and priorities. This leads me to ask, does one have to be strong to look strong?

One example would be Dave, who trained as a powerlifter for over 25 years, then made an amazing bodybuilder-esque transformation last year. On your interview with John Berardi on Fitcast, you spoke about how you (at least up until that time of the interview) did not do much barbell bench pressing, squatting, or deadlifting, because you didn't want to be reminded that you were not as strong on those lifts as you once were.

Obviously, poundage progression is of the utmost importance, especially for a powerlifter, but how would this all play in for someone who wants primarily size and to be able to lift more than a wet paper bag?

DT: "Does one have to be strong to look strong?" Did you seriously just ask this?

Sorry, but I have to bust your balls on this one. I can't help it. Does one have to be rich to look rich? Does one have to be a good person to look like one? Does one have to look packed to have a huge cock or is it just a sock in his pants?

What does strong look like? To me, strong is what you lift, not what you look like. I can, however, tell someone's potential for powerlifting by looking at their wrists, elbows, and knees. The bigger the better. I can also tell "strength" by torso and upper back thickness. The rest really does not matter. I can introduce you to many guys who would not fit the definition of what many say strong looks like, but they are some of the best lifters in the world.

I'm not sure I understand the second part of the question. My decision to not do those movements has zero bearing on anyone reading this. For over 20 years those movements were the biggest part of my training program, and my base was developed using those lifts, and lifts to help increase those lifts. I knew my training was going to change from heavy sets under 5 reps (between 5-15 seconds) to sets over 10 reps (between 30-45 seconds). This would right away require lower weights than I've been using.

I also knew that I wanted to slow the rep speed down and focus more on the muscle rather than the movement. This also brought the training weight down. This was done to give my joints a break from being pounded all the time and to maintain whatever muscle I had acquired while dieting. If I used the power lifts, my mindset would always revert back to how I used to train, I'd automatically begin to focus on the movement and my aggression would take off, as I want to blast into the heavy stuff.

For the guy who wants to lift more than a wet paper bag, I have a very simple suggestion: get stronger!
Grow stronger!

"Grow stronger!"

Look, this stuff is notthat complicated for most people. It gets harder when you run into sticking points, injuries, and competition but this is less than 10% of the people who will ever read this. And if they are in that 10%, they are reading this for entertainment value because they already know what to do and who to ask if they need help. For the rest it comes down to something most people just don't get. Get ready for the shocker of your life: strength and size take time to acquire.

Even with all the drugs in the world it still takes time. For most people this time is measured in years. Not just years, but consistent years. Everyone is looking for the way to go from a 300 squat to a 800 squat the fastest way they can. While this is great, don't forget you still need to squat 350 first, and then 400.

I hate to be the prick here, but this is a sad reality everyone wants to ignore. Unless you have outstanding genetics it will take a long time, and even if you're the spawn of Odin you still need to train to see any results.

I'm not sure I answered this at all, but hey, do I have to look like an writer in order to write?
Writer

You don't have to look like a writer to be a writer.

ZE: For the most part, you can tell if someone is strong by the way they look. But, there have certainly been times where we've all seen a dude who looks skinny, doesn't look like much, and then he's deadlifting and benching more than you, and you look way bigger than he does. In a nutshell, some people simply don't eat enough or perform enough volume to get jacked up, yet they still get strong.

There are plenty of people who look big and jacked but they can't move impressive amounts of weight either. I've seen a large number of people get pretty big doing a lot of "pumping up", nothing too heavy or extreme.

In the end, the guys who eat and lift big, these are the guys who have a very distinct look and you know that they're strong. These guys usually have a rugged, solid physique. There's that toughness and hardness they've developed, where as the pump up type lifters don't have this physical appearance.

Getting big and strong needs to stay simple. Let me bore you to death with my answers, but they are the truth. Take away the fancy programs, periodization, de-loading, superset, wave loading, etc. and let the lifter train hard, heavy, frequently and take time off when necessary and you'll get great results. Coupled with clean, wholesome eating and we have a recipe for success.

Look at many of the guys from the Golden Era. It was common for guys to bench 365 to 405 while weighing between 205 and 210 pounds. Their food choices were whole eggs, steaks, fruits, plenty of water, potatoes, rice, and more of the same. They lifted barbells and dumbbells, heavy.

Let's search for the strongest guys in the world and the biggest guys in the world. Look at their training facility: Westside Barbell, Metroflex Gym, and then you have the hole in the wall gyms outside of the USA: ****ty upright stands for squatting, heavy barbells and dumbbells and not much else.
Metroflex Gym

You won't find any Metros flexing at Metroflex Gym.

EC: I guess it really depends on your perception of what strong is. I think the guys on this panel have a bit of a different mindset in this regard than many of the people reading this roundtable. We've all seen (and trained alongside) guys who have squatted a grand, pulled 900 plus, and benched over 800.

Throw in some crazy Olympic lifting strength spectacles, big tire flips, and the occasional beat-down given to some drunk guy who manages to get out on the field at Fenway Park, and I guess you could say that we thrive on this stuff, so the bar keeps getting pushed higher (pun intended).

As for poundage progression, I can't overstate how important it is for the average trainee. In a broad sense, you can get stronger through two means: neural efficiency and increased cross-sectional area. The former will ultimately help the latter develop because you'll be able to handle bigger weights long-term. Do what it takes to develop both strength and size in the short-term, and you'll be fine long-term.

I think Dave would be the first to tell you that training to get strong helped him get bigger, and ultimately helped him get leaner. Ronnie Coleman and Arnold would probably tell you the same. Brad Pitt won't tell you anything, though, so quit watching "Fight Club" and put down the pink dumbbells.
Tyler Durden

Tyler can't teach you much about getting big and strong.

DJ: I think this comes to the crux of a whole set of other problems: do you really just want to "look strong" and actually lift weights that a freshman boy would skip on the way to going heavier? I just can't fathom that, but I understand that there are people who think this way.

My wife has a cousin who once showed up to help grandpa move with this huge damn truck with all the crap on it. He wouldn't, however, allow anything to go into the bed of his truck because, and I quote, "It might scratch it." Now, that opened the door for me to

make fun of him and all of my wife's family for quite a while.

He didn't want anything to scratch the bed of his pickup truck.

So, in my madness, I think that anyone who just wants to look strong, but not be strong is like my wife's cousin. I'm a performance guy, I get that, so maybe I need to shut up right now.

CH: While there's certainly a statistical correlation to being big and being strong, it's not as intimately connected as many people make it out to be. For example: the average size of someone who can bench 400 is bigger than the average size of one who can bench 200, but there are millions of contradictory examples in between.

I feel that strength primarily involves the nervous system. To some extent, new actin and myosin filaments will form and existing ones will get larger if one is training for sheer strength. The majority of improvements in strength, however, come from improvements in various aspects of the nervous system that I'll collectively call neural efficiency.

Training for size, however, is far less about the nervous system and more about causing the body to build "stuff" that takes up more space. This "stuff" not only involves the size and number of the contractile proteins, but a number of others things like sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, capillary density, glycogen storage, and so on. On a side note, I feel that the fascia is one of the key limiting factors in muscle size, but I digress.

Dave is a great example of how strength and muscular size aren't directly proportional. While he may have lost a good bit of strength in his quest to look sexy, he didn't lose a proportional amount of lean muscle mass. I'm also an example. My strength varies tremendously depending upon how I'm training, but I generally have about the same amount of lean mass. Heck, I was stronger on most lifts when I was 19 years old, but I now have far more muscle mass than I did then. As soon as I learned that chicks don't care how much I can lift but do care about how my body looks, I started focusing on the latter.
Big dude

Most chicks care more about how you look than how much you can lift.

With all that being said, looking good for the ladies and being strong enough to impress the guys isn't that difficult. Simply use a powerlifting approach on the exercises where strength improvement is your goal — maybe bench, squats, and deadlifts. Perform your "strength exercise" first in your routine and use a rep scheme like 5 x 5, 8 x 3, or 6, 5, 4, 3, 2.

Don't go to failure on these sets, and make sure to improve a little each time you come back around to the lift. Next in your routine do something that's more hypertrophy oriented like flyes for three sets of 12. Take a shorter rest and train close to failure on these sets, with the last set (or two) being done to failure. Essentially, if you're seeking two goals you'll have to blend two types of training.

T-Nation: If someone were to come to each one of you looking for equal and maximal gains in both strength and size, what type of a split would you set them up on?

CH: As any trainer knows, unfortunately we often have to take things into account that really don't have anything to do with the "ideal" program. For instance, if the client only wants to train 3 days per week, then a four day per week program is worthless. But for the sake of this question, I'll try not to be difficult and assume the person will do whatever I ask of them.

I've actually designed a program that addresses maximizing size and strength simultaneously. It's called Blending Size and Strength Version 2.0. In addition to the success of myself and my clients who have used it, I've gotten tons of feedback from people getting great results with this program. So I'm confident that the program is quite sound.

[xuerebx]

CONTINUED

Here's the split for this program. You'll do a heavy upper body workout on Monday, a light lower body and ab workout on Tuesday, take off on Wednesday, a light upper body workout on Thursday, followed by a heavy leg and ab workout on Friday and some R & R for the weekend. The exercises, sets, and reps are selected in a manner to address both goals. Essentially the light days are a bit more hypertrophy oriented while the heavy days are more strength oriented.

Oddly, another split that I've seen to work time and time again is training four or five days per week and only hitting each body part once per week. I know that's damn near sacrilegious around T-Nation, and it scientifically seems less than optimal to me too. But I've seen it work time and time again.

I believe it was John Berardi who used to have this email tagline: "No matter how elegant the science, you must occasionally look at the results." I love that! So although science may point us otherwise, an appropriately designed program that hits each body part once per week tends to yield real-life results.

For those of us who have a hard time breaking ourselves away without doing at least three exercises for one body part, this once-weekly type of split is great as it allows ample recuperation. You may be asking, "How in the world can this and high-frequency training both work?" Simple: the common denominator is to train, recuperate, then train again.

I've found that training each body part once per week is a sure fire way to allow for ample recuperation. Sure, it may even have you under-train a bit, but de-conditioning does not happen that quickly. If you've recuperated five days later; you'll still be stronger seven days later. Remember this, if you under-train a bit you'll still make progress, but if you over-train, you won't.

Let me take a step back for a moment to mention an old saying, "The best program is the one you're currently not doing." Hypertrophy can absolutely be a result of heavy, low-rep strength training as Dave mentioned (and has proven). I've especially seen this to be the case if one has been training a bit lighter and more like a bodybuilder for a while.

For example, I had been tinkering around the gym for the past 8 weeks just doing some fairly light, bodybuilder-type training. I recently decided to put the bench, squat, and deadlift back into my routine. These are done in a heavy, low-rep manner. Since I hadn't done them or even lifted very heavy in a while, my strength on these would make Dave fall out of his chair laughing. But, after just a couple weeks of focusing on my strength on these lifts, they've gone way up, and I look denser to boot.

On the other hand, on a number of occasions I've ended a strength cycle to pick up a standard bodybuilding split that's much higher in volume and generally lighter in weights. I'll notice almost immediately a new fullness and roundness to my muscles that I haven't seen in quite some time. My point is that there are benefits to virtually all of these types of training. You just have to know when and for how long to use them, and how to combine them.

To conclude and finally answer the question, if I had to design just one program to help accomplish both goals for the highest percentage of readers, it would be a half-body split done four days per week with various sets and rep schemes."

EC: No doubt about it: in the overwhelming majority of cases, it would be four days per week with two upper and two lower days. In some cases, we'd throw in some single-leg work on one of the upper body days as well. A lot of people move like crap and just need to stand on one foot more often.

[Bon]

Gah, long article.

Repped for copy and pasting it.