Posts by pamelarwise:
Advanced Cycles For Advanced Lifters (Part 3)
October 25th, 2008By now you should be in your second week and wanting to back off the 80% x 6 x 2 light session cause you just can’t fact it any more. You feel your only option is to go and get the latest copy of Men’s Health magazine cause you can’t be a real man. At this point I will give you some real self-confidence cause I know you can be a strong man. You know, feeling tired out is something you are just going to have to live with and it certainly isn’t an excuse to have time out and lay in bed all day playing with your todger. You can only make any judgment on your efforts if you are finishing your lifts and if you are you on your way to getting the expected results.
You can rearrange the remaining exercises over the week at whatever set and rep scheme you prefer. In the case that you were to specialize in overhead press, you could consider choosing to squat press on Monday, chin press on Wednesday and bench press on Friday. The best thing I like about this is that you can keep the poundages for the other lifts at around 80 – 90% of maximums and it doesn’t matter which rep range I am using.
For example say you can bench 100Kg for 12 reps, you would do sets of 80-90Kg for 10-12 reps in the bench. It is also worth rotating what days you do your assistance work on so that you never perform similar assistance to your main lift on a “heavy” day.
Let’s assume that the overhead press were your specialization lift, then you need to make your bench press fall on one of the 6 x 2 days, and certainly not on a more intense day. By doing it this way you can actually do bench pressing while doing heavy overhead pressing. You could even compare this to doing deadlifting as assistance work while doing squats as your main lift. The outcome being that you just can’t progress on deadlift when doing heavy squats and deadlift on the same day. There is no doubt in my mind that you can only go forward by maintenance only on other lifts.
After 6 weeks you can change the specialization lift and start again, or move back to a more typical bodybuilding routine and use your newfound strength to pack on even more muscle with slightly higher rep ranges. Or if you’re like most people you will totally disregard the outstanding strength gains you just made and go back to training leg extensions once a month because training my way was “too tough”.
I hope you don’t take it the wrong way or anything, but it’s true. Great training methods are turned down just on the grounds that it gets uncomfortable. It may have gone unnoticed but not everyone around us has got big muscles and that’s because it takes dedication and resistance.
People often ask me just what sort of results are we talking about when it comes to strength gains in a routine like this. Well I can boast 7.5 – 10% on a lift for each session of suffering and big increases on repetition work post program.
Past results I’ve seen from this exact program include a deadlift going from 200Kg to 220Kg and reps with 180kg from 6 to an easy 11 at a bodyweight of 93Kg. Not to bad for 6 weeks work eh? I’m shooting for 180Kg x 20 reps by the end of this year and I’ll train for that in a very similar manner to what’s described above, and by increasing my limit strength repetition lifting will increase automatically.
No 2 people are the same and I am hardly the incredible hulk, and I am sure other bodybuilders could get better results by doing my routine. You need to have balls to go out there and look for better routines and if you find any, well please share them with me. Just look for the Mick Hart blog and you will see what I mean when there are a lot of great bodybuilders out there and I am honored to have them sharing their thoughts and ideas with me.
Bodybuilding Routines – Bodybuilding and Training Errors (Part 2)
October 21st, 2008It is a proven fact that our post training body has the ability to synthesis more protein. It is also a fact that our muscle tissue after training is a lot more sensitive to insulin and that the simple carbs tend to stock themselves up with glycogen rather than replenishing our body fat levels.
This knowledge is in itself a great thing but it has lead bodybuilders into the habit of eating after the event and ignoring their nutrient needs at other times. For example, you need carbs well before you train in order to get through the session. You need a high blood pool of aminos DURING training to get the growth process off to the best possible start. These aminos will come from the protein you ate hours before you trained.
Another important point is that you make sure that you only eat those radical power bars before training begins so that they are already present and functioning in the blood stream when the level of oxidative stress is at its highest; (which is during and immediately following training), and not having them hanging around in the stomach digesting away while your torn apart body is just pleading for help.
The same eating routine should be maintained throughout the day. If you are going to be sat by a desk for three hours then reduce on carbs and take in more protein. If you are about to do punishing leg routines then take on more complex carbs, a protein mix, lots of fluids and antioxidants even before you leave for the gym. You should also follow up supplementing your hard training with post workout specialist nutrition but only as part of a well thought out nutrition strategy taking into account your upcoming requirements.
It doesn’t happen very often that a competing bodybuilder owns up to being outclassed by his fellow competitors. Nine times out of ten you will hear all sorts of back stabbing comments and low life conspiracy theories regarding the judges or the event organizers. Competitors will come up with virtually anything as an excuse for their own pathetic looking physiques that just weren’t up for it on the big day.
This is down to how bodybuilding is currently judged which without a doubt could be improved big time. The judges should be forced to write down notes that made quite clear the break down of the score for each physique. These documents could then be at the disposal of the competitors following the event so they could see for themselves what they were lacking. A judge will always highlight poor diet from what he has seen, and this would help bodybuilders prepare better for any future competition.
Bodybuilders are the best athletes in the world at kidding themselves they are making progress simply because their sport has very little in the way of truly objective criteria for judging performance gains. In order to compensate for this every bodybuilder should have photos taken once or twice a year in the same light, in the same poses. Every bodybuilder should keep track of his / her muscular girths and have his / her body fat tested at least once a year also.
In short if you are gaining lean mass and or losing body fat your muscular girths will increase whilst your waist will remain much the same. If you are not losing fat or gaining muscle then what the heck are you training for? Bodybuilding is a sport of large, lean muscles so if you are not getting bigger and / or leaner you are not succeeding in bodybuilding. Forget all the nonsense about “increasing density” or “quality” or “having enough size”.
It always annoys me when I hear this and know straight away that the competitor has tripped up on nutrition and training and that’ the real reason behind zero gains. You won’t often see on a bodybuilding contest judging sheet that a competitor has lost marks for being too muscular or lean, so what are the main objectives? Well I’ll tell you…ALWAYS more muscle and better condition.
The majority of bodybuilders are virtually insane. As defined by Albert Einstein “Insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. This is a perfect description for how bodybuilders consistently eat and train. You will quite often come across bodybuilders in the gym who never seem to change, but who are quite happy to carry on with the same training and nutrition routines.
If you are not making gradual progress in the gym then you need to change something or you will look the same in five years as you do right now. Chances are pretty good that what you need to change is your training, if you’ve been at it long enough to have been stale for years then you had better have a good handle on your nutrition.
Ever heard someone say they have “crap genetics for bodybuilding” when they don’t even look like they have ever been near a weight? This bothers me greatly. The truth is usually that these guys don’t train sensibly, don’t eat right and don’t pay enough attention to recovery so how can they possibly expect to fulfill whatever potential they may or may not have? These guys seem to think that because they are tall / skinny / fat / lanky / whatever NOW that they will always be that way. Not true!