I like to write these every once in a while just to alienate my readerbase, make them feel weird, and have them try to rationalize why they read what I write. Enjoy!
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| I am too good at this... |
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* I believe in somatotypes. I don’t care who that offends or what the science says. I acknowledge that the origin of somatotypes is goofy, and attempting to employ them to explain criminal activity is goofy, but I also “know” that I’ve known dudes that were beanpoles that lived on fast food and cinnamon rolls and I’ve known dudes that just seemed to put on muscle no matter what they ate or trained and I’ve known dudes that, when they get fat, they get humpty dumpty looking. I know I’m part of the latter group. I also know that there seems to be instances wherein those in the endomorph group always seem to respond better to low carbs for some reason, and those in the ecto and thrive on carbs.
* On the above there, I believe in fast metabolisms. I’m not too sure if I believe in slow ones, which is a funny contrast, but often I find people complaining about slow metabolisms are just eating garbage THINKING it’s healthy and moving very little. But I know there are some cats out there that are just pounding the food and NOT seeing the scale move. I don’t think it’s an excuse, because we all have to play the hand we’re dealt, but I still think it’s real.
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| "It's a glandular issue!" |
* Training a muscle once a week is fine. It’s more than fine. It worked for decades. It still works today. I’d even be willing to say that the people who aren’t at peace with this have never done an actual hard training session before. I can train my legs to the point that once a week is ALL they are good for.
* I take apple cider vinegar about 3-4x a day, before meals. Does it do anything for insulin sensitivity? Who knows, but it’s so cheap I may as well.
* The mind-muscle connection is VERY important when one’s goal is to actually GROW the targeted muscle. There’s been a trend of folks expressing the idea that “if you are moving the weight through the full ROM, you are training the muscle”, and I’ve seen enough cats with big arms and no back doing rows and chins to know that it’s just not true. I WAS that guy. I had to learn to actually FEEL my lats in pulling to be able to actually GROW the lats. I could do a practically all bicep chin up. I know how to bench using almost entirely delts and triceps. All of that can be cool if your goal is to move max weight, but if your goal is to build specific muscles, you need to have that MMC. Like Dave Tate said: “if you can’t flex it, don’t isolate it.”
* There had to be at least ONE natural Mr Olympia in the steroid era, World’s Strongest Man winner, and world record holding powerlifter. I hate the idea of natural limits so much, because on one hand we all acknowledge that there’s going to be a “one in a million” athlete and then we turn right around and the instant one of those shows up, we just say they’re on drugs. At one point, SOMEONE has to walk the earth that was just so goddamn gifted they never needed them.
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| Let's not forget this fine specimen |
* Counting calories is STILL goofy to me. If you wanna get bodybuilder stage ready peeled, it’s absolutely necessary (although there are STILL some bodybuilders that never count calories), but for the everyday person it’s just insanity to me. I have gotten stupid lean never counting calories and also got VERY strong the same way. In that regard, food QUALITY is SO important and so overlooked, and I feel like calorie counting contributes to that. And here’s a sneaky little thing about that: sometimes, switching to a better quality food source results in calorie reduction. I went from grainfed grocery store beef to grassfed piedmontese beef and, in doing so, equal cuts of beef were lower calorie because they had less fat and more protein.
* Let’s tackle the above with a little more: clean food DOES exist. What’s the simplest way to define it? I think Justin Harris put it well “don’t eat it unless you can hunt it or grow it”. What’s another definition? Single ingredient food. Or how about with Dan John’s “eat like an adult” meaning to avoid “cardboard carbs and Frankenstein fats”. And clean foods SHOULD make up the majority of a diet. “Will it get me more jacked than a IIFYM approach?” Ya know what, I’m just gonna say yes. Yes it will. Calorie for calorie, clean food is better. Go ahead and prove me wrong.
* Stretching isn’t important. Neither is mobility work. Both can be addressed with conditioning work and GPP. Guess which of those things people will do and which ones they won’t.
* Bill Kazmaier was the most impressive and captivating World’s Strongest Man of all time, making him the best. Pudzianowski is second. Shaw and Big Z are boring.
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| Shaw would spontaneously combust if he tried this |
* Sumo deadlifts…oh boy. If you wanna make powerlifting watchable, get rid of the squat and make it a push/pull meet with conventional only.
* I think protein supplements are not at all required to get big and strong…yet I STILL have a protein shake post workout. Used to be water and 2 scoops of whey, because milk slowed down absorption of course. Then it became skim milk and 2 scoops of whey, because skim milk had no fat and it was fine, plus more protein. Now it’s drinkable egg whites and 1 scoop of whey…and it’s honestly because protein powder is SO tasty these days compared to when I started that I feel ripped off and it’s my chance to have a treat post workout. And sometimes that whey gets switched out with a protein blend.
* Pre-workout supplements are still gimmicks.
* I WANT to believe the Mark Rippetoe story that you can take a beginner lifter, give them 15 reps of squats a workout, a gallon of milk a day, and they will put on 40lbs of muscle in 3 months. Same way I walk into a supplement store and WANT to believe the lies. The world is so mundane without it.
* Most people don’t need a cheat meal, let alone a cheat day.
* The trap bar pull does NOT replace a conventional deadlift. They train the same muscles: they aren’t replacements.
* Pressing is better than benching. If you have to ask what a press is, start over.
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| Why no, it's NOT called the "clean and overhead press" you idiot... |
* There is no point in knowing your bodyfat%. You look how you look irrespective of that number. You mean to tell me that you’ll give yourself the greenlight to bulk even if you look like a melted candle because some machine spat out a 12, but if you are diced to the gills but the machine says 15 it’s time to cut? And no: no one can tell you a number from a photo. You have fat between your organs that contributes to bodyfat %, and no one is seeing that without x-ray vision.
* Beginner lifters shouldn’t even be beginner lifters. If they’re starting out with NO athletic foundation, they need to play a sport FIRST and get used to moving their body through space. After that, they start with bodyweight exercises, sled dragging, and high rep (12+) machine and dumbbell work. They won’t touch a bar for a while. They need to get STRONG enough TO train.
* Social media is for entertainment: not education. If your “education” comes from internet stars, you haven’t learned. Yes, this includes blogs. Yes, this includes this one. Please go read from an established author/coach with real bona fides that was able to take the time to compose their thoughts and put them down on paper.
You've written in the past about using conditioning in order to train everyday, even the same muscles trained with strength training parameters the previous day. It's been working pretty well so far for me.
ReplyDeleteI really like this approach, as it kinda bridges the gap between the "train only on specific non-sequential days, do absolutely nothing on rest days" and "Bugenhagen style train the same thing everyday" false dichotomy in my mind.
Thanks for that
Absolutely dude! It's been eye opening for me as well. In the most ideal of ideals, all of that conditioning work would be concentric only, so sleds, prowlers, floor to overhead based WODs, throwing stuff, bikes, rowers, hills, etc. I'm sure there are studies that contradict it, because exercise science is amazing that way, but I've operated off the premise that eccentric work is what beats you up, and if you minimize it, you can do more training AND the concentric only training that you do ends up helping you recover.
DeleteBut even outside of that ideal of ideals: conditioning is magic! Haha
As far as training a muscle more than once per week, where do people get the idea that muscle groups can distinguish between one week to the next? 7 day weeks are a human construct, why would once per week have any relevance to what a muscle can handle? Same superstition as max 30g protein "per sitting"
ReplyDeleteRight?! I always asked "what's a sitting? What if I eat it while standing? Say I cross time zones in the middle of a meal: does it reset?"
DeleteBench is the most boring part about powerlifting. I wish it would be squat , press and deadlift instead.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes powerlifting more watchable to you if you cut out the squat?
It sounds like you'd appreciate Strengthlifting. They have meets nearby me frequently.
DeleteCutting out the squat cuts out a LOT of the drama around the sport. Far less subjectivity regarding depth, fewer gifts from judges, fewer red-light lawyering, etc etc. It's the only lift in the meet that doesn't have a clear division between eccentric and concentric phase, which makes judging it so much trickier and makes it confusing for spectators.
A part of me wishes that there was a brute force version of Olympic lifting that's just the overhead press and the deadlift. Having only two events did good for Oly events, as far as cutting down on how long meets were.
DeleteIf something could be done about limiting the layback on the press, I think it'd be a really fun federation that takes what every casual fan seems to want to see in Strongman comps.
@Nix, what you’re describing isn’t too far away from Static Monsters, which is a log clean and press and an 18” axle deadlift.
Delete@Emevas, these days (on you tube and Reddit at least) I seem to see more drama over bench press arch height than squat depth. Mind you, the Internet being what it is, there will always be somebody there to complain about something.
raging_bill
There will always be something to cause drama, haha. I just think cutting out the squat will make the sport easier to understand for an outside viewer.
DeleteOn the subject of somatotypes and nutrition, I've recently watched a John Meadows (Rip) Video where he goes through a whole day of eating and in the end his calorie count is only at around 2500-3000.
ReplyDeleteAlso speaks to the vast difference between eating to gain vs eating to maintain.
DeleteTotally anecdotal, but I think there must be some truth to the somatotype distinctions because they are really obvious in my family, which is a blend of adopted and biological folks. We are all living the relatively same lifestyle and eating mostly the same stuff in the same portions scaled for age, and yet there are very obvious differences in body types. Plus, it's even easier to see that I'm a mesomorph since I'm female and yet put on muscle quite easily. My youngest son is only a year old, and he's very obviously a mesomorph too--he's a mini Viking already! Not sure if I agree with the standard training recommendations for somatotypes, but the categories can be useful when thinking about ways of eating, in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely. I think there is even value discussing how to train, but it's a chicken and egg thing. You tell an ecto to stick with compounds and really push themselves, because their waspy waist is going to make it that they're not going to really be able to pack the weight on the bar and tap into their recovery. You tell the same thing to an endo with a massive abdominal circumference and he's going to bury himself.
DeleteSomatypes are totally a thing.
ReplyDeleteBody types are a thing at a basic level. Throw enough data into a processor and some sort of categorization system will emerge. Exercise science just did its usual dumb thing of co-opting a shoddy idea from another field to become more sciency sounding, and continues to do its dumb thing by holding onto that idea/term even when the field from which it stole it has moved on.
ReplyDeleteWhat started out as racist psychology and a nice ruse for a pervy dude to ogle nude college students is now known as exercise science, because we couldn't take ourselves seriously if we just said "big-boned," "naturally skinny people," "those for whom muscle gain is easier," etc. We can keep the concept and ditch the pseudoscience phrasing.
WR
PS I love all of these as usual. Who's your guess for natty WSM? Bruce Wilhelm is a tempting thought, on account of his established freakiness (HS track and field star, 3-sport athlete in college) and competing in international Olympic lifting with at least some sort of testing before coming to strongman. I think you've written this before, that people who haven't been around freaks don't understand how truly freaky they are and how high that sets the bar for human performance potential.
DeleteWR
Well put on the bodytypes thing. I see the word "hypertrophy" experiencing a similar fate. Legitimate word, stupidly employed. I love seeing kids say "I wanna train for hypertrophy and size".
DeleteAs for my vote for natural WSM, I think Phil Pfister had a shot at it. Right era for a natural guy, his strengths were mostly being athletic, didn't do a lot on the static stuff, and he really didn't change much physically upon retiring. I feel like I heard Bruce talking about using during his "Talking Strongman Post", but dude was still a freak no matter what. It's absolutely true: just unfathomable ability.
I could even see Geoff Capes being that way come to think of it.
Can't forget about that "lean muscle" too when you're tryna gain hypertrophy and size.
DeleteAh, I haven't listened to Bruce's. Shit, I really HOPE Capes was. He should get his money back if he wasn't.
WR
The only part I disagree with in principle is that beginners should start with a sport. I really don't enjoy competition, and most of my decades of hatred of exercise come from being forced to play sports in PE back when I was a fat kid - it just means I get to lose repeatedly while the coach makes me try and fail again and again because I lack the fundamentals. I didn't start to actually like exercise until I started lifting weights, because the solitary nature of the sport really appealed to me. This was something I could do for me, against only me, and the point is not to win but just to improve.
ReplyDeleteIf I'd been told to join some kind of sport before getting into lifting, I never would have gotten into lifting, which is what got me into running and other cardio, OCR, bouldering, etc. Weightlifting is what gave me the fundamentals I was lacking in the first place.
Sounds like you have a lot to overcome my dude. Happy you are doing so.
DeleteI'm convinced Magnus Samuelsson was natural farmboy strong and have been since I first saw him.
ReplyDeleteWhen he came on the scene he was relatively small even for that era, coming from armwrestling, and he grew ever so gradually into a monster over the decade or so he was active.
He just has that look that doesn't scream juice to me, and had some serious weaknesses (e.g. Deadlift) which made his lengthy tenure at the top of the sport all the more impressive.
I dunno, natty Magnus is kinda like my Santa at this point.
Magnus is a fantastic pick! Could definitely see him being the case.
Delete"Stretching isn’t important. Neither is mobility work. Both can be addressed with conditioning work and GPP. Guess which of those things people will do and which ones they won’t."
ReplyDeleteI've always thought of GPP as conditioning for power output or endurance through unconventional movement patterns, but this statement implies it's something else. How would you define GPP?
Unrelated, piggybacking off your comment about eccentric and concentric movement with conditioning and how they affect recovery, I have a pet theory. I think the contraction of muscles acts as a blood pump, by putting them under tension you pump blood volume out. If you perform the eccentric with load, the muscle is still attempting contraction so the blood can't flood the muscle with nutrients. By removing the eccentric you create a secondary blood pump to the heart acting to enhance blood flow locally. This was inspired by stories of dudes locking their knees to stand at attention in formation and passing out due to blood pressure drop when the leg muscles don't pump blood back to the heart for circulation.