Hey
folks, its grumpy old man time. Someone
on reddit posted a thread asking for unpopular training opinions, and I
unleashed the majority of what is below.
Tacked on a few more at the end.
Figured it was enough for a quick and dirty blogpost this week. If none of these upset you, then I did a bad
job. See if you can come up with some of
your own.
EDIT: And I have NO idea what happened to the formatting this week.
EDIT: And I have NO idea what happened to the formatting this week.
---
· Absent
the ability to see through your skin and observe the visceral fat between your
organs, offering a meaningful bodyfat percentage number from a photo is
impossible.
·
Form
isn't important.
·
Injuries
aren't a big deal, and avoiding injury limits people significantly in reaching
their goals.
·
Counting
calories and macros isn't necessary.
·
Getting
big and strong is simple. It's difficult. Those are two different things.
Boxing is simple too: just punch the other guy in the face. Duh!
·
No
one should start lifting weights without at least 6 months of playing a sport
under their belt. After playing a sport, I'd have that trainee do some
bodyweight, dumbbell and machine training while pulling a sled and practicing
technique on the barbell lifts before they get started on them.
·
You
can get very big and strong training a muscle group directly only once a week.
·
Genetics
don't matter nearly as much as people say they do.
·
It's
ok to be hungry.
·
You
don't have to like training. In fact, you can hate it. In fact, if you don't,
you're probably not training hard enough.
That about sums it up
·
Your
conditioning sucks. I am speaking directly to you at this time. No, stop
thinking I'm talking to someone else. I mean you, right now.
·
Dietary
compliance is easy. You just have to want the results of it. As soon as you
decide that you do, you WILL comply with the diet. The only time you won't
comply with a diet is if you decide the results aren't worth it. The exact same
thing is true about waking up early to train.
·
It's
much better to train through an injury than to rest it. You don't have to be
stupid about it, but moving the injured part and getting blood to it is a
million times better than just hanging it up and letting it atrophy.
·
Pre-workout
is a gimmick.
·
If
you're worried about creatine causing hairloss, you shouldn't take it. Or
train.
·
No
one needs to do the big 3 lifts to get big and strong. They're fine choices,
but not required.
In case you had a rebuttal
·
There's
no such thing as "the big 4/5/6/8/etc". It's PURELY "the big
3". It comes from powerlifting.
·
You
can't be a non-competitive powerlifter. A powerlifter, by definition, is
someone that powerlifts. Powerlifting is the activity of setting a total on
your 1 rep max on 3 lifts in a single day. I'd be ok with a mock meet, but if
all you do is train to get stronger in the big 3 but never try to set a total,
you aren't a powerlifter: just like, if you only shoot free throws, you aren't
a basketball player.
·
People
obsessed with who is/is not on steroids were never going to get big and strong
in the first place.
·
The
gallon of milk a day works. But you gotta train to earn it.
·
Anecdotes
are way more valuable than science.
·
Stretching
doesn’t prevent injury.
Sometimes it can even cause it
·
Foam
rolling is never required.
·
There’s
no such thing as “strongman training”, primarily because there is no preset
strongman competition. Until you have a
comp coming up, you can’t train strongman: you’re just getting stronger.
·
Cardio
doesn’t kill gains, and the people that think it does are all fat.
·
If
you are unwilling to spend money on at least one book about training, you will
not succeed at getting bigger and stronger.
·
Youtube
lifting drama is fake: the idiots that believe it are real.
·
Lifting
6 days a week is less effective than lifting 4 days a week.
·
If
you can only parrot what other people have said and don’t have any original
thoughts on a subject, you shouldn’t speak on it. Let the original work speak for itself.
·
Most
folks that say they “don’t care about looks” are really meaning they lack the
discipline to eat well.
How awful he had to settle only for being the most winningest World's Strongest Man in history
·
Hip
thrusts are a meme.
·
Facepulls
are stupidly overrated.
·
Training
for “aesthetics” is stupid. And I don’t
mean it’s a stupid goal: it’s a stupid thing to say. You’re getting bigger. There’s nothing wrong with saying that.
"Lifting 6 days a week is less effective than lifting 4 days a week."
ReplyDeleteCould you expand on this please? I've followed your blog for a while and I don't think you've ever commented on 4 days being better than 6 days for lifting.
I've actually commented on it quite a bit, haha. Here's some of the most recent ones.
Deletehttps://mythicalstrength.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-tao-of-hard-training.html
-"rt and you feel exhausted when you’re done, but what if this is simply an illusion. What if these trainees deceive themselves into believing that they’ve finally figured out what “hard training” is, when, in fact, by definition they CAN’T be training hard BECAUSE the volume is so high. I’ve written before about how I can’t fathom the currently en vogue push/pull/legs split that has trainees lifting weights 6 days a week, because everything I grew up with and experienced emphasized the value of RECOVERYING from training insofar as growth was concerned, and, in turn, training tended to be so hard that one could not reasonably expect to lift weights 6 days in the span of 1 week. If one wanted to train the whole body twice a week, it was done with an upper/lower split, and if they wanted to do it 3 times a week, it was done with a full body program. If they wanted to have muscle group focused days, the muscles got focused on ONCE a week, because an entire day spent training a muscle was going to be a HARD day of training. One from this mindset would make the argument that a trainee training 6 days a week is training lightly, and that hard training done less often would be far more productive."
https://mythicalstrength.blogspot.com/2020/01/success-cant-become-obsolete.html
-"And let me just make the observation that, the more I see trainees try to follow the “new rules” of training, the more I see trainees failing to make results. One of the most popular programs I’ve seen recently is a 6 day a week Push/Pull/Legs program. Since push/pull/legs would only train the muscles once a week (taboo, you see), this means trainees need to run the program 6 days a week, in order to hit that holy “2 days a week’ for training muscle groups. And every time I’m online and I see someone say that they’re stalling in their training, I ask them what program they’re running and they reply with this. And I can’t help them. Primarily because I grew up in an era where, if you told any dude you were lifting weights 6 times a week, their immediate reply would be “stop doing that: it’s too much training”. Primarily because there was an expectation back then that you were absolutely slaughtering a muscle group when you trained it, and that you needed to rest it so it could recover and grow. And now we’re told that idea can’t possibly work, in spite of the fact that it does, and that instead, this new idea is what works…in spite of the fact it doesn’t?"
Off the back of last week's discussion re injuries/framing, my Feb-April back injury gave me a chance to try this ballyhooed 6xPPL split and I found it worked for me, **only because** I was forced to do zero bilateral barbell training other than feet-up bench per PT's rehab instructions. So, PPL of all band/bodyweight/unilateral pumpy shit let me go super hard on one muscular area with minimal fatigue spillover, for a 6-8 week chunk of just trying to maintain muscle mass while rehabbing. I did Myo-Rep/cluster sets of shit like rear foot elevated squats, heels-elevated goblet squats, hamstring curls, single-leg hip thrusts, all the band row variations I could think of, just to thrash one very specific area. No way that would have worked with barbell exercises and cumulative fatigue. I think this has the appearance of another framing issue....6xPPL might work coming from the bodybuilding community of low-load highly focused muscular training, but have essentially no utility for someone doing compound lifts of any appreciable weight or strain.
DeleteWR
Although it's logical that training 6 times a week leads to less effort/volume/intensity per session surely the work done accumulates over the week anyway?
Delete5/3/1 and other programs have sub-maximal work and auto-regulation built in where the RPE is relatively low. Meanwhile GCZL has praised training daily. I dont think that high intensity/high effort is the only way to gain muscle.
http://swoleateveryheight.blogspot.com/2019/10/200-days.html
Although, you might not be getting the best bang for your buck for the time you spend in the weightroom surely gains will still occur at a comparable rate to other methods of training.
There is a large variety of ways to gain muscle so to me it's logical that training 6 times a week leads to gains. Much like supersetting certain exercises your body can adapt to the training to limit fatigue and increase performance under the new conditions.
"Although, you might not be getting the best bang for your buck for the time you spend in the weightroom surely gains will still occur at a comparable rate to other methods of training.
DeleteThere is a large variety of ways to gain muscle so to me it's logical that training 6 times a week leads to gains."
To clarify, my opinion isn't that 6 days of lifting won't result in growth: just that 4 is better.
Will Ruth nailed it on the framing side of things.
Ah yes, logic--the great arbiter of gains!
DeleteWR
As an ex-browser of r/fitness, I think one of the biggest problems with the hive mind there is that it has absolutely no ability to grasp nuance. Every movement/rep scheme/program/diet/universal truth/etc. is either god’s gift to lifting and will get you jacked and strong in 6 months or is the literal spawn of satan and your spine will spontaneously explode upon contact with the bar. So when someone like Mythical comes along and offers a nuanced take on strength training, they really struggle to grasp that you’re not trying to convince them of some ground-breaking universal truth, because deep down they WANT to pandered to and told exactly how to train and eat and they want what you tell them to be consistent with what they already want to believe. So when you tell them, “the big three are good options, but not necessary,” the only way they can interpret that is, “the big three are terrible, awful lifts and if you do them you will DIE,” which contradicts the current meta in their subreddit and therefore is wrong and therefore Mythical is an idiot who doesn’t know anything. For a group of people who put “science backed facts” on a pedestal, they have a shocking inability to think critically about the information they’re presented.
ReplyDeleteVery fair observation, and science has definitely become a religion for many. Extremism has always been the easiest method of "thinking", because it's no thinking at all. Black and white, no grey at all. Things are either good or they're awful. Things are either optimal or garbage. And this kind of thinking makes it that any thing that comes along that is DIFFERENT from what you do is a threat and has to be dissected and destroyed before it threatens your paradigm.
DeleteThe comedy of it all being that, when I go there, I genuinely don't care if anyone agrees with me, because I KNOW what I do works for me, and me is the only person I care about things working for. If people think I'm stupid, but I'm bigger and stronger than them, I'll just let them go on being so damn smart, haha.
Here's another unpopular opinion: if you feel a need to post a form check on reddit, go hire a coach instead. If you don't want to do that, join a powerlifting club. If you don't want to do that, join CrossFit.
ReplyDeleteI suspect the people needing form checks are the same ones who have been unathletic in their lives and haven't learned general body awareness yet.
I think CrossFit would be beneficial to those people.
As for form, well, please correct me if I'm wrong on this, but, my own personal thoughts are such that
ReplyDeleteForm is important in the context of sport. Want to know the form? Go look up your federation's handbook. Then just go look up another one. Form isn't universal.
How you achieve that form is technique, low bar or high bar for squats, arch or no arch on bench, conventional or sumo on deadlift, etc. Technique isn't incredibly important since you don't get any bonuses for doing it a certain way, you either meet the form and get points or you don't.
Obsessing over either too much is bad.
Just my thoughts on that. Please let me know if you feel that any of it is wrong though.
It's an opinion dude. It can't be wrong, haha.
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DeleteIn my own personal experience, form came with muscle. When I started squatting, I was horrendous at it, and weak. It was my worst lift by far, and for a very long time I could bench more than I could squat.
DeleteI kept at it, because I hated that feeling of being a weak ass squatter. Slowly, as I kept putting on some actual muscle in my lower body, form improved. I went from not knowing if the bar was straight on my back, bending my lower back, breaking in two at the bottom, to a pretty damn decent squatter. And it wasn't because of watching YouTube videos (I did that too), it was simply because of putting on the needed muscle to actually support wtf I was doing.
Unpopular opinion, I guess(?): Just do the work. If your form is off, do more of the work. Don't ask Joe Internet, just keep doing the work.
I have noticed that, as well. I think it's parts getting stronger and being able to just get away with less as the weight gets heavier.
DeleteI also think some form deviations are just results of weakness. Like if you know how to deadlift 315 but your form gets jacked at 350 it's probably a strength issue than anything else and probably that you also just threw out the program. Resistors are weird.
More unpopular opinions, because these are fun!
ReplyDeleteIf you feel a need to up your fat intake by drinking olive oil, cook a bashbrown with it instead. You get the fat intake, and also a yummy hashbrown.
If an inmate can do it, you can do it. Barring some sort of physical deformity or profound mental illness, there's no reason to not get fit. But if it's not your thing, that's cool too.
... But if it's not your thing, then why you even on r/fitness?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to let you know your blog has changed my life. It's turned me from a lazy slob, to someone that knows how to work really hard, not only in training, but in all areas of my life.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate you. Keeping it simple but brutal was the best thing that ever happened to my training life. I follow a rule of "3" which is lift 3x a week, condition 3x a week, and eat 3 meals a day. This has made me the most consistent I've ever been with training in my life and I'm continuing to make gains by not over thinking it!
Also my lungs, heart, and brain would like to thank you for making sure I don't neglect my conditioning.
Hey man, that's awesome to hear, and thank you for sharing it with me. It's been amazing seeing the impact this blog has had. Thanks for being a reader, and congrats on doing the things that you need to do to get things where you want them to be.
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