Only workout info you will ever need

[JRX]

Read this:

On the Anabolic Mind's forums, a powerlifters take on getting big and why some people who are always over analyzing 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."


There you go

[JRX]

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.


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

[Guinness5.0]

The title of this thread made me cringe but it's pretty accurate! This is the type of info that this board desperately needs. The author (Matt Reynolds) is the guy who came up with the Dual Factor Hypertrophy program. At mesomorphosis.com, his username is Animalmass. It'd be a great idea for some of our newer lifters to check that place out - some great articles/stickies in their training forum.



BTW it's always nice to use quote tags for this stuff so the proper people get credit.

[dbcb314]

THere seems to be a revolution all other the internet about stuff like this article. I wonder why

[JRX]

Whoops sorry. Yeah i deleted it by accident as the whole post wouldnt fit on one page.

Yep I apologize. Do not give me credit for this. I just wanted to inform people of the real way to train. Forget the wielder principles and one day per weekers. This is a revolution in bodybuilding that everyone slowly but surley is changing to.

[Madcow2]

Yep I apologize. Do not give me credit for this. I just wanted to inform people of the real way to train. Forget the wielder principles and one day per weekers. This is a revolution in bodybuilding that everyone slowly but surley is changing to.

This type of training has been around forever. The revolution in BBing is that people are starting to learn and the internet has provided them access to something beyond the guys at the local 24 hour fitness and the outright criminal bull**** the mags shovel at them.

BBing has been all over the place in training over the past 30-40 years and it is only the massive linear increases in drug and anciliary dosages that have allowed them to pull off some this crap - there was zero progress in training or knowledge or refinement going on. Bodybuilders started as olympic lifters in the physique sideshow and gradually it became it's own thing. It was not long ago (1980s to early 1990s) that BBers weren't squatting because it 'thickened the waist', the deadlift was unheard of (Chris Duffy brought this back in the early 1990s), and no one was doing barbell rows (Yates brought this back). Training was 3 on, 1 off (some with A/B sessions), lots of machines and high rep sets, absolutely no plan of progression whatsoever. And guess what, BBers got bigger than before during this period where a natural trainee or someone on a fixed dosage of drugs would have been very lucky to see anything. But instead double your dosage and hey - you're gaining again, it's 90% diet as long as you are willing to take enough drugs to get a good response out of a really ****ty stimulus and poor planning.

Of course the training and strengthening of athletes has never really changed much. It works with drugs (and if you take enough, anything will work - just look at grazzing cattle) and most importantly without drugs. And for those with any performance criteria outside of raw meat, it is night and day.

[Darkmind]

I agree 100% with this article. STICKY IT! It desperately needs to be stickied.

This "revolution" of full-body workouts is no revolution at all. it's more of a rise from the grave situation. Full-body linear/non-linear periodized workouts will produce the best results, PERIOD. That's how the old timers did it before steroids came into big use. They were the best looking bodybuilders of all time too. A lot of BBers today just look too puffy and rediculous. The lightweight and natural BBers look better.

[Rachel_n_SD]

great post

[Patrok]

excellent post, reps !

[tonich03]

OMG This is scary, I feel just like I took the red pill and woke up outside the matrix!!Serously i think I really should be making some changes in my training.

[Markpep]

Good post, I just started Dual-Factor training the other day, anyone else try it?

[slippy]

Just wanted to add to Madcow's comments . . .

People have to understand that BB culture goes through cycles in almost all facets of training and diets. Today carbs are bad; tomorrow carbs are better than steroids. Today splits are bad; tomorrow full-body doesn't let you work on that specific ab muscle between the 2nd and 3rd rib. Whatever.

The point is, BB culture is unstable, and most of us confuse that with progress. The other problem is, though the academic and hard science aspects has gotten more accessible, conclusions drawn from said things are still drawn into this vortex. You may think we've progressed in our knowledge, but we haven't really gotten wiser. Many powerlifters may not have the most up-to-date sci-fi geek knowledge, but they have the wisdom built from their experience and the strongmen tradition which created BB as well.

Though that's changing too. Probably in the last 4-5 years, we're starting to see the notion of powerbuilding And what that really comes down to is marrying the successful schemes, techniques, and general thought of the powerlifting tradition with the slash-and-burn Sportscenter mindset of BB culture.

Powerbuilding, as a culture change, is about bringing the impatient energy of BB into the unpretentious common sense of PL. Instead of subversion, we have evolution. Instead of science used to support agenda, we now have context to properly funnel science. Multiple systems exist, but the underlying assumptions and language are now stable.

If you look at the most popular growth systems today -- Max-OT, HST, DFHT, 5x5, DC, even some tenets of HIT -- they all subscribe to basic notions of powerbuilding. They just interpret it differently (i.e. failure training.) Even when they apply split scheduling, it is correctly between the program's demands and a minimum requirement of frequency.

Question remains whether powerbuilding is just another fad in BB. Everything in BB is cyclical, and, though PL culture is on a fairly straight line of ascent, BB and PL culture don't see eye-to-eye. If the next Mr. Olympia wins with something else, will everybody else follow suit?

[nbk]

I had a 1 bodypart per week program i was about to start. Is it a bad idea, and should i hit everything twice. Is this true even if i am an ectomorph and my goal is only to gain mass. Also, i was going to go back to seated shoulder press instead of standing, since i put up a good 20 more pounds seated, will i really gain more doing standing?

Instead of:
Monday:Chest
Tuesday:Back
Wednesday:Shoulders
Thursday:Legs
Friday:Arms

Hows:
Monday, Thursday:Chest, Biceps, Forearms
Tuesday, Friday:Back, Triceps
Wednesday, Saturday:Legs
Sunday:Rest

Hit me up with some answers please

[Guinness5.0]

Hit me up with some answers please

Try a new thread please bro.

[nbk]

theyre questions about the article why would i start a new thread....

[RipStone]

I agree 100% with this article. STICKY IT! It desperately needs to be stickied.

.

Can I get a "Halleluiah"!?!

Hell YES! Awsome post....sticky now!!!!

[fassilt]

can anyone help with neck workouts? my body is building while my neck is the same size. what workouts should i do to make it bigger?

[RavensFan2k3]

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.

why is using the same weight with the same reps better than pyramiding?

[DrewZ]

I agree 100% with this article. STICKY IT! It desperately needs to be stickied

Very good ****. Maybe if it's stickied the subject could be in an enormous font so it's visible to everyone who writes those "Please teach me everything about lifting and nutrition" and "What's the best way" posts.

[Guinness5.0]

why is using the same weight with the same reps better than pyramiding?

I think he's referring to the people who take a set of 10 to failure (or thereabouts), take a set of 8 to/near failure, etc. b/c you end up burning yourself out before you get to your best sets. Submaximal sets at the same rep range allow you to get lots of work in at the range you're training for. I.E. it's hard to get stronger at a double when you've done four tough sets before it, but it's much more likely you improve your doubles if you do 6 doubles instead of all the BS before it.

Hope that makes sense.

[all pro]

why is using the same weight with the same reps better than pyramiding?

5x5 pyramid improves speed and power more than 5x5 straight weight. 5x5 straight weight improves muscular endurance, and size more than 5x5 pyramid.

[roamer]

this thread is great. looks like a few changes will be made to my workout after reading this.

[Madcow2]

why is using the same weight with the same reps better than pyramiding?

It's about workload and moreso performing relevant workload. It's a generalization but it's meant as a shot against the typical way it's used (by those who don't know what they are doing) meaning taking all those sets to failure on your way up the way most people do. Believe me, he isn't advocating that every single person regardless of experience and in every program use 5x5 at set weight every time one lifts. There is a frequency component that ties into this and you can't take that in isolation.

[timmy47]

i've gained 30 pounds in a year on a one bodypart per day split.im around 12% body fat and i was around the same % when i started. ive been training for almost 3 years now so im not new to this. so are you saying i have better genetics? cuz bodypart splits work. period. fullbody workouts work to. period. there is no right way to train. as long as it works, its fine. ive tried fullbody routines and they didnt work. my progress was alot slower than it is now. some of the routines in some of the mags arent that bad anyways. some try to make only 12 sets per body part and have very good advice. others dont however. parts of this article were still good though.

[timmy47]

Read this:

, the masses have been stuck in the one-bodypart-per-day-per-week rut for years.

thats because they follow the ones in the mags, use too many sets, or dont train with enough intensity. id also like to see proof of these masses you speak of that are in a rut.

[fassilt]

timmy, u make a good point. EVERYBODY trains differently. i've heard so many bodybuilders' ways of training and advices, and i've read tons of articles from either bodybuilders or trainers, and it's surprising how many different things you hear. i've gained 25 lbs in the last four months, following my own routine..and it's worked out perfectly. i followed a simple formula about calorie intake and how much you burn daily, and what you should do to put on mass...and i'm still loving the results.

[Madcow2]

cuz bodypart splits work. period. fullbody workouts work to. period. there is no right way to train. as long as it works, its fine. ive tried fullbody routines and they didnt work. my progress was alot slower than it is now. some of the routines in some of the mags arent that bad anyways. some try to make only 12 sets per body part and have very good advice. others dont however. parts of this article were still good though.

Get big lifts up and eat. That's the real key. How to go about it is through programming and certainly lots of methods have worked.

I'd venture that the overwhelming majority of humans are able to increase their lifts faster and grow faster with higher frequency and there is a lot of evidence to support this both hypertrophy and absolutely beyond any doubt neural (which in turn supports hypertrophy and this is a big reason for the whole newbie gain thing).

That said, plenty of people have done quite well on 1x per week and other 'suboptimal methods', look at Ed Coan's frequency and use of linear periodization - it certainly didn't hold him back (although he has alluded several times to his best lifts being in the gym so it may well have had a marginal impact but nothing big enough to keep him from being the best powerlifter ever).

Of course the big problem with frequency is that people just don't know how to program correctly or deal with anything that isn't 1x per week (which IMO and many others is a very suboptimal safety net to use year-round as a default). This is especially true in the BBing world. It's not hard - just a matter of distributing workload, it's just foreign and you see a lot of people blow it up because they've had no exposure and don't know what they are doing. So you either make an effort to learn to program correctly or stick to what you know you can make work.

In the end, big lifts must move up. How one goes about that makes no difference as long as it is happening.

[9cyclops9]

OMG This is scary, I feel just like I took the red pill and woke up outside the matrix!!Serously i think I really should be making some changes in my training.

Welcome, Neo.

JRX, fantastic post. Reps!

This seriously needs to be stickied.

[NattayB]

i think the general idea goin around rite now is...cut the isolation... and all that crap and just hit the hardcore lifts

[RipStone]

i've gained 30 pounds in a year on a one bodypart per day split.im around 12% body fat and i was around the same % when i started. ive been training for almost 3 years now so im not new to this. so are you saying i have better genetics? cuz bodypart splits work. period. fullbody workouts work to. period. there is no right way to train. as long as it works, its fine. ive tried fullbody routines and they didnt work. my progress was alot slower than it is now. some of the routines in some of the mags arent that bad anyways. some try to make only 12 sets per body part and have very good advice. others dont however. parts of this article were still good though.

I am not trying to argue here, but have you considered that your progress may have been slower with a full body program because you were applying the same intensity/volume parameters to it as you would use with a body part split? Ie; you were maybe doing too much volume and working to failure too often when doing a full body routine. You can get away with this when doing a body part split however, yet its still not optimal for most.