MUST READ article about gaining muscle

[Woolly_Manmoth]

Getting big - All you need to know about gaining muscle.

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.

15) A good gym has nothing to do with how nice the machines are or if they have a pool or tanning beds or even if it’s air conditioned. A good gym smells like a mix of body odor and liniment and supplies their members with a big box of chalk.

[Woolly_Manmoth]

Kelly Baggett, one of the best strength coaches his take as well on how to get bigger

This is not to attack anyone but I'd be willing to bet a lot more natural muscle has been built using the recommnedations of Matt and Glenn over the years then all the complicated bodybuilding schemes out there. The problem with bodybuilders is they try to overcomplicate everything and lose site of the big picture.....that's making strength gains in the gym on basic movements along with scale weight increases on a week to week basis. Now you can complicate that as much as you want but those are the only 2 things it takes to get big. It doesn't take any sort've fancy specialized training routines and special diets. If more people would spend more time in dark stinky ass gyms worrying about putting weight on the very basic movements and spend more time eating in high volume (note the golden corral reference) with an emphasis on gaining scale weight then a lot more muscle would be built.

For every bodybuilder who has success building a physique naturally I'll show you at least 20 who don't get jack **** in the way of results because they sit around with their thumb up their butt worrying about this and worrying about that and basing everything off of their "pump"...worrying about the "feel" of this exercise and trying to trash the muscle every workout without any regards to periodization and failign to realize that if they would've just strived to put 50 lbs on their squat and 15 lbs on the scale their problems would be taken care of......They go starving themselves to death on boiled chicken and broccoli while spending $300 per month in supplements thinking they can get "bigger" and "smaller" at the same time spending 5 years wasting time not gaining 10 lbs of scale weight all while looking at strength athletes with their nose up in the air when what they don't realize is that fat powerlifter they like to make fun of has actually put on 50 lbs of muscle in the last year and he could spend 3 months stripping that fat off and hand you your ass and balls in a bodybuilding contest simply because he trained very simple, focused on strength gains and most importnatly wasn't afraid to sit down at the dinner table and do some serious eating.

Give me 2 twin brothers one who hangs around with and reads bodybuilding related info for a year and another who hangs around with and trains at a powerlifting gym both without steroids and after that year is over let's see which one builds more muscle. Nine times out of 10 I'll take the powerlifter.

Having said that a strength athletes routine may not be 100% optimal for a bodybuilder but there are a lot of things people could learn from strength trainers.

[ChimarraoMate]

I think I am more stupid after reading this entire rant. I cannot believe I wasted my time... To save the rest of you time, he is basically stating 80-90% truth mixed with 10-20% BS.... My X-Wife was a master of this same game.

I will take offense and note to this, Other people in other countries do not work harder.... Some individuals work harder, and country has nothing to do with it... I'll be dammed if someone generalizes my effort.

[TheResistance]

I think I am more stupid after reading this entire rant. I cannot believe I wasted my time... To save the rest of you time, he is basically stating 80-90% truth mixed with 10-20% BS.... My X-Wife was a master of this same game.

I will take offense and note to this, Other people in other countries do not work harder.... Some individuals work harder, and country has nothing to do with it... I'll be dammed if someone generalizes my effort.

I think you forgot the part where you explain what the 10 - 20% BS is.

[DaddyR]

What part of OVER 35 don't you understand?

I come in here to get away from B.S. like this!

[JC480]

Soon as I read the silliness about Eastern Bloc nations working harder than us hence their proficiency in winning Olympic events...I stopped.

For the record, Eastern Bloc Olympic athletes were notorious steroid users and sanctioned to do so by their governments.

[TheResistance]

What part of OVER 35 don't you understand?

I come in here to get away from B.S. like this!

Oh dear! Somebody has got their knickers in a twist.

[rocketman44]

Some of the stuff is true - concentrate on core and leg exercises and compunds, for example (though I would argue there is value to isolation work and machines). But to me this article is mainly just general knowledge shrouded in some kind of anti-bodybuilding diatribe by some guy who supposedly worked around 'the best' athletes in the business.

[christos_swc]

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.

Actually he should tell that to people who enlist at the gym before Summer or right after and quit after 2-3 months.
The rest of us who actually like to lift weights have to hold back to avoid hurting ourselves.
If it were up to me and I would guess the same for the rest of them guys around here I'd be deadlifting 24 hours a day nonstop doing one rep maxes.

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.

That's the fault of the gym owners if you can actually fault them for not scaring their clients away and having them do isolation crap to not hurt themselves with the real stuff.

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.

I actually figured that one out myself and this is pretty much what I do but I ain't no bodybuilder.

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.

A load of bull.
First of all based on the above we do not train bodyparts, we do compound stuff.
Personally doing them once a week (or less when it comes to deadlifts) means I can keep tendon and ligament pain in check, especially in the shoulder area that gets pounced by pretty much every exercise.
While at the same time doing good progress each time thank you.

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.

Let's cut the bull.
Professional athletes do drugs.
Even the bench press world record holder will tell you he's never taken anything and keep a straight face.
All Olympic athletes do, it's just a matter of what, when and how much and not to get caught.
If you wanna be a professional athlete you have to go along.
If everyone were clean then the first to get on the juice would totally destroy all records and rewrite the history books.
But he can't cause he's already loaded.
Personalyl I cannot relate to any of these examples because I'm an amateur, I have a family and I will not compromise health for world lifting fame or whatever.

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.

Agreed, although others might not.
Still, hitting them again after 3-4 days depends on who you are and, very importantly also, what you're taking.

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.

That's just dangerous, I barely have enough flexibility to bend over for a deadlift without rounding my back, going low with squats would be catastrophic.
Regardless, those who can actually go ass to grass without rounding would testify that's the way to do it.

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.

This is bodybuilding.com, isolation exercises are used to sculpt one's body, that's the only way I know of to change one's proportions if he's interested in looks more than strength.
Building a good base first to work on is a great idea but isolation exercises is a must IMO.

PS: Any criticism not directed at OP.

[kimsquit]

1. negged for failure to cite article source and author
2. negged for using stupid "MUST READ" cliche

[uncbob]

"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."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HELL this is exactly how we trained back in the dark ages 54-58

Ain't nuttin new

5 or 6 basic compound type exercises

3 sets of 8--when you could get 3 sets of 10 two workouts in a row ADD WEIGHT

If you hit a sticking point switch reps to 6 and go up to 8

OR
Switch exercises --Dips instead of BP----Lat pull downs instead of rows etc etc

And none of this pumping up over and over ( except once in a while just to see what happens with measurements )

[rpaul11]

1. negged for failure to cite article source and author
2. negged for using stupid "MUST READ" cliche

generally when somebody posts "Must Read" it's not really worth reading.


but you knew that

[kimsquit]

generally when somebody posts "Must Read" it's not really worth reading.


but you knew that

and it's always with caps lock on, because simply typing "Must Read" can't possibly be taken seriously without your caps lock on

same as when people write "TRUST ME" in their post, as if that somehow lends legitimacy to it...

[Marius_Ursus]

and it's always with caps lock on, because simply typing "Must Read" can't possibly be taken seriously without your caps lock on

same as when people write "TRUST ME" in their post, as if that somehow lends legitimacy to it...

Rule of thumb in my world is never trust a person who says, "Trust me."

Also don't take any posts seriously that are missing hyphens. Without it, the title of this thread is an imperative, and I have a little problem with oppositional defiance.

[bamazav]

Rule of thumb in my world is never trust a person who says, "Trust me."

Also don't take any posts seriously that are missing hyphens. Without it, the title of this thread is an imperative, and I have a little problem with oppositional defiance.

Dang, I wish I understoods this grammer stuffs.

[kimsquit]

the title of this thread is an imperative, and I have a little problem with oppositional defiance.

completely agree

[Calbob007]

Great article. Thanks for the post.

[rab71]

I agree with absolutely everything OP has stated. I bow down to his knowledge and am not worthy!
































































NOT!!!! Moving on...

[Woolly_Manmoth]

I'm seeing some pretty ridiculous responses to a solid article. First of all, I just checked olympic weightlifting records and didn't see a single American in the mix...safe to say its possible that other cultures push a stronger work ethic than the US when it comes to hitting the gym. Also, bringing in things like not going ATG because of flexibility or what programs gym owners push is outside the parameters of what the article is trying to say. And by the way, this article is about the best ways to gain mass, if it was about sculpting than isolations would have their place.

Finally, instead of overlooking the "10% BS" in the article (in my expericne BB magazines offer more), people attack how I write the subject title, or nit pick the fact that this guy is obviously a powerlifter so some bias is expected.

Just in case you're wondering where I got my world record numbers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._weightlifting

[Karl_Hungus]

Wow...peeps around here in a bad mood today

The article overall was pretty solid. I agree with most of it and think many trainees would benefit greatly if they followed the principles outlined in article. The only part I question is the insistence of the body part twice per week thing. Just because it works for top level olympic lifters and powerlifters who have the genetics (and possibly drugs) to get the most out of that kind of frequency does not mean your average trainee in the gym will benefit from that. Personally, there is no way I could squat, bench, or deadlift intensely twice per week.

[kimsquit]

Finally, instead of overlooking the "10% BS" in the article (in my expericne BB magazines offer more), people attack how I write the subject title, or nit pick the fact that this guy is obviously a powerlifter so some bias is expected.

1. you couldn't be bothered to credit the original author

2. you offered no opinion of your own but merely cut & pasted someone else's effort

3. you aren't the first person to post this article on this forum

4. although you've since agreed that the article is biased from a PL perspective, you made no effort to state such when you posted it, which only adds confusion to the amount of broscience that noobs have to wade through

[DeathtoToasters]

Rule of thumb in my world is never trust a person who says, "Trust me."

Also don't take any posts seriously that are missing hyphens. Without it, the title of this thread is an imperative, and I have a little problem with oppositional defiance.

Hey but trust me...this is a must read......seriously....trust me!

[Nikonguy]

I'm seeing some pretty ridiculous responses to a solid article. First of all, I just checked olympic weightlifting records and didn't see a single American in the mix...safe to say its possible that other cultures push a stronger work ethic than the US when it comes to hitting the gym. Also, bringing in things like not going ATG because of flexibility or what programs gym owners push is outside the parameters of what the article is trying to say. And by the way, this article is about the best ways to gain mass, if it was about sculpting than isolations would have their place.

Finally, instead of overlooking the "10% BS" in the article (in my expericne BB magazines offer more), people attack how I write the subject title, or nit pick the fact that this guy is obviously a powerlifter so some bias is expected.

Just in case you're wondering where I got my world record numbers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._weightlifting

I negged you before I read this...and I'm glad I did.

[Woolly_Manmoth]

I negged you before I read this...and I'm glad I did.

Thats pretty pathetic, people on this site shouldn't confuse rep power with importance or success. Don't let it go to your head. Especially you Nikonguy, I've seen your profile and you look like ****.

[Capt_Lou]

Thats pretty pathetic, people on this site shouldn't confuse rep power with importance or success. Don't let it go to your head. Especially you Nikonguy, I've seen your profile and you look like ****.

Coming from a guy that has no pic...negged again

/thread

[kimsquit]

people on this site shouldn't confuse rep power with importance or success.

they also shouldn't confuse cut & pasting someone else's work as a valuable forum contribution of their own


just sayin'...

[ntrllftr]

. Especially you Nikonguy, I've seen your profile and you look like ****.

I didn't even read any of this thread. I did see this though. I have only negged 3 people over the years. You are number four! con sider yourself an ______!!!

[Woolly_Manmoth]

Coming from a guy that has no pic...negged again

/thread

another guy on a non existent power trip

Edit: yeah you too ntrllftr

[ntrllftr]

another guy on a non existent power trip

Edit: yeah you too ntrllftr

The difference is that the other people here have earned the respect from others. Either by showing progress or contributing over time in here. You on the other hand have earned Jack Sh*t!!!

[Pauly-Walnuts]

Pics of OP and how long you've been on this program please.