Ok, one week has passed and I don’t hear the replies, only the breeze in the room and the dust settling in…
I think i should take a moment and tell you guys of the thread “Bodybuilders in Wheelchairs” by Quadmaster-Fly…any asshole who deosn’t train legs or feels lazy to train should read this thread.
Now, 'nuff said. I think it’s time to go over the basics of lifting, as this guy is trying to do. I once heard a teacher say: “doesn’t matter if you talk to a quamtum physicist or a 6th grader, in mathemathic, the rule is the simplest rule works all of the time, the complex rules always have corolaries and exceptions”.
That applies to bodybuilding.
Who the fuck said you eneded to lower in 4 seconds and pause for 1 second at the bottom of the rep, or whatever stupid eccentric phase and pause-at-the-bottom time combination that adds up to 5 or 6 seconds or more, gets you to be big?
I know a set of 50-60 seconds ets you big, but a set of 30-45 seconds too, any set from 25 to 45 gets you big, even if it’s not much more or less than 30 seconds,it gets you big.
The take-home lesson: count the duration of the set by simply watching the clock.
Don’t time the rep’s phases, or the entire rep, just contract the muscles hard, lift by getting the hardest sequeeze on them for as long as you can hold it, and lower by keeping the same hard squeeze, as hard as you can make the msucle by going slow, for as much as you can…it’s easy as shit.
Now, if you feel like you are all that good, start slowly, and as you get week, allow yourself to go faster, on the eccentric phse or in both phases, as long as you squeeze as much as you can out of eevry rep, you will get as much as you can out of every set, and adapting to the sress as the set progresses, changing from one rep to the other, you get a more thourough set.
When the set ends, it’s because you fail, reach failure, you can’t handle the load…that’s traditional thinking, you don’t fail at all…failure means you can’t keep lifting THAT weight.
So drop the load by 10-20% and squeeze out some mroe reps. Do them right, just because you already went from slow to fast on the first set doesn’t mean you can do this ones in a hurry, you are gonna try and feel them out one at a time, just like the set with the first load, and if you end the set and still can squeeze soemthing out, do it…no more than 2 weight reductions, the second being wider than the first, about 20-30% (20% if you only reduced 10% off the starting load int he first weight reduction, 30% if you stripepd 20% off) and then rest.
Rest periods get you big or lean or just strong. If you train with a rest period between 30 seconds and 2 minutes, you will get big…start resting as much as you need, ONLY, not as mucha s you like. You may start with 30-45 seconds of rest and end in 2 full minutes…if you need to rest more to kep going at it, just stop doing the exercise, and if you can only do 1 per session at first, it’s ok, and if you plan on doing 2 or 3, watch out and don’t start the next exercise with a 2 minutes rest. Go home and sit it out, even if you recover by next day and hit the same muscle again, you will know that you won’t be overtraining.
I normally advise people to use a load that allows them to get the most weight moved per set…I can probably do 10 sets of 5 on a workout with 200 pounds, but if I can do 10 sets of 7 with 180, i am getting more weight moved…however, this doesn’t mean that 1 rep at 300 pounds is equal to 30 reps of 10 pounds, when you reach the peak, stop.
I know that I can get sets of 12-15 reps with 150 pounds on the bar, but if I go higher than 15-20 reps with a laod that allows me to equal or even top the amount of weight moved, I still feel the transtion from a pump set that goes to msucle density and volume, to a endurance set to get ripped or lean, and I am going for size, not lean, so unless you are a model, you will go for the pump and the size.
Now shut up and lift…