Post by gti steve on Dec 7, 2006 9:04:21 GMT -5
I stumbled upon this on another forum and felt that it was GREAT info for both newbies and intermediate level lifters. I'm going to copy and paste most of it here.
Here are some of the primary reasons most trainees don’t grow:
Good post I found a while back from Iron Addict.
1. You overtrain and under eat.
These are listed as the main primary reason because they go hand in hand and BOTH must be balanced or you can forget growth. The most perfect training regimen will fail miserably if diet is not there to support it. And conversely, the most perfect diet will be wasted if the trainee is doing more workload than they can recover from—most do WAY too much!
2. The training workload is not varied.
Doing the exact same lift the same way stops being productive for most trainees within 3-6 weeks. Once the body has adapted to the loading it must be changed if you are to continue to force the body to adapt.
3. Too much focus on isolation exercises, not enough compound work.
You can do all the “small” lifts until you are blue in the face, but until you are moving big poundage’s in the big lifts you will remain small. Which brings up point #4.
4. You MUST squat and deadlift if you are going to reach your bodies growth potential.
Think it through. Doing squats or deads activates 70-85% of the bodies overall musculature in one move. Doing a set of curls maybe 3-5%. Which sends a big signal that the body better get better at synthesizing protein and better at handling the need to grow as a unit? You will NEVER reach your potential without doing the squats and deads.
5. You constantly fluctuate between lifts that have bad carry-over.
Here is an example:
I have seen many times, and one I have done myself. The trainee burns out on benching and decides to do Hammer Strength Benches for a change. He makes the switch and is jazzed. His Hammer press is going up every week and he is stoked. After a time he has added 50 lbs to his Hammer bench and decides to go back and hit the bench, only to find it’s up a whole 10 lbs!!!!!
That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with Hammer Benches. It just means that the lifts are dissimilar enough that an increase in one may not necessarily help increase the lift on another. Use of stabilizers and inter and intra-muscular coordination are two primary reasons, along with neural recruitment pattern gains that don’t apply well to the other lift.
6. You don’t know when to de-load/cruise , or take time off.
NO ONES body takes a constant pounding of hard training without periods of active or full rest recovery. Until you learn how and when to don this your training will never be optimal
7. Your micro-nutrient support SUCKS!
I can’t count the number of guys I have seen trying to build great physiques taking a “one a day” vitamin and thinking they have it covered. If you want great things out of your body, you need to put great fuel in it.
8. You train with the intensity of a arthritic old lady.
Nuff said.
9. You have no clearly defined goals.
Most people just “lift to get bigger”, and while this is a fine goal, not having and strength related goals will kill your progress in the long run. Your primary goal should be getting stronger on the big lifts on a CONSTANT basis. Setting short and long-term strength goals and achieving them is what equals a big strong trainee in the long run.
10. You are inconsistent.
Getting excited about your training and killing yourself in the gym only to burn out and few weeks later and miss a bunch of sessions ends up being 1 step forward, 3/4 steps backward for many trainees. Getting and staying consistent and racking up sustainable gains over the long-term is what it’s about.
--------------------
The real champions of the training world are not the drug-enhanced genetically blessed competitive "elite". The real champions are the unsung heroes who applied years of dogged determination in order to build themselves up against the odds, without ever using drugs, without seeking or finding publicity, and without divorcing themselves from the rigors and responsibilities of everyday working and family life.
Might as well throw in a quote from AM since it's completely relevant to the above post..Heavy compounds, frequency, ect..
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.
Here are some of the primary reasons most trainees don’t grow:
Good post I found a while back from Iron Addict.
1. You overtrain and under eat.
These are listed as the main primary reason because they go hand in hand and BOTH must be balanced or you can forget growth. The most perfect training regimen will fail miserably if diet is not there to support it. And conversely, the most perfect diet will be wasted if the trainee is doing more workload than they can recover from—most do WAY too much!
2. The training workload is not varied.
Doing the exact same lift the same way stops being productive for most trainees within 3-6 weeks. Once the body has adapted to the loading it must be changed if you are to continue to force the body to adapt.
3. Too much focus on isolation exercises, not enough compound work.
You can do all the “small” lifts until you are blue in the face, but until you are moving big poundage’s in the big lifts you will remain small. Which brings up point #4.
4. You MUST squat and deadlift if you are going to reach your bodies growth potential.
Think it through. Doing squats or deads activates 70-85% of the bodies overall musculature in one move. Doing a set of curls maybe 3-5%. Which sends a big signal that the body better get better at synthesizing protein and better at handling the need to grow as a unit? You will NEVER reach your potential without doing the squats and deads.
5. You constantly fluctuate between lifts that have bad carry-over.
Here is an example:
I have seen many times, and one I have done myself. The trainee burns out on benching and decides to do Hammer Strength Benches for a change. He makes the switch and is jazzed. His Hammer press is going up every week and he is stoked. After a time he has added 50 lbs to his Hammer bench and decides to go back and hit the bench, only to find it’s up a whole 10 lbs!!!!!
That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with Hammer Benches. It just means that the lifts are dissimilar enough that an increase in one may not necessarily help increase the lift on another. Use of stabilizers and inter and intra-muscular coordination are two primary reasons, along with neural recruitment pattern gains that don’t apply well to the other lift.
6. You don’t know when to de-load/cruise , or take time off.
NO ONES body takes a constant pounding of hard training without periods of active or full rest recovery. Until you learn how and when to don this your training will never be optimal
7. Your micro-nutrient support SUCKS!
I can’t count the number of guys I have seen trying to build great physiques taking a “one a day” vitamin and thinking they have it covered. If you want great things out of your body, you need to put great fuel in it.
8. You train with the intensity of a arthritic old lady.
Nuff said.
9. You have no clearly defined goals.
Most people just “lift to get bigger”, and while this is a fine goal, not having and strength related goals will kill your progress in the long run. Your primary goal should be getting stronger on the big lifts on a CONSTANT basis. Setting short and long-term strength goals and achieving them is what equals a big strong trainee in the long run.
10. You are inconsistent.
Getting excited about your training and killing yourself in the gym only to burn out and few weeks later and miss a bunch of sessions ends up being 1 step forward, 3/4 steps backward for many trainees. Getting and staying consistent and racking up sustainable gains over the long-term is what it’s about.
--------------------
The real champions of the training world are not the drug-enhanced genetically blessed competitive "elite". The real champions are the unsung heroes who applied years of dogged determination in order to build themselves up against the odds, without ever using drugs, without seeking or finding publicity, and without divorcing themselves from the rigors and responsibilities of everyday working and family life.
Might as well throw in a quote from AM since it's completely relevant to the above post..Heavy compounds, frequency, ect..
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.
