The outspoken critics of the olympic lifts on this thread put forth the idea that olympic lifts have not traditionally been used by successful bodybuilders as a premise to their core argument that oly lifts are essentially useless. I think that this old guard mentality leads to stagnation.
For people that question my credibility on the grounds that I am not a massive, ripped bodybuilder and so therefore I have no credibility I can only say that I cannot sway you with anything but with the knowledge that I have. If you do not respect me for this then so be it! Obviously staying around my competition weight is more important to me than my T-Nation street cred, that is not going to change.
Like I already said, there is far too much emphasis on the endocrinological aspects of building muscle whether it be through sleep, nutrition, HRT, etc. Obviously these factors are huge and they work.
My argument, however, is that there are alternatives to the HIT methodolgy of training that in theory work even better. If you have been reading Chad Waterbury’s articles - a person I presume most bodybuilders respect - and you do not get it, then I will spell it out for you.
According to CW’s principles, you should be using heavy explosive lifts - olympic lifts and their variations - in order to recruit all of the motor units by placing the demand on your nervous systems necessary to innervate your highest velocity HTMUs which compose your muscle fibers. Doing so activates ALL OF YOUR MUSCLE FIBERS according to the Size Principle of neuromuscular adaptation.
Training in this fashion ensures that you are not only exhausting your medium threshold and slow threshold motor units, but also the bigger, faster fibers innervating a great deal of your muscle tissue.
It is fair to say that there needs to be evidence that Chad’s methods need verifiable proof for comparison with the HIT method’s long record of success. I agree! But just to speculate, if most of those olympic lifters out there are truly drug free, as would be suggested by the strict doping standards and rules of the USA Weightlifting Federation, USADA, and WADA then imagine their aesthetics if they were doping and did focus on hypertrophy for long macrocycles in their yearly routine.
You do not need to rely solely on the optimization of anabolic conditions via sleep, nutrition, HRT in conjunction with the repeated effort method in order to provide the conditions necessary for optimal myofibrilliar and sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. Increasing the efficiency of muscular innervations between the central and the peripheral nervous systems reaps huge benefits for bodybuilders. I just thought that more people, even those who do are not drug-free, would be more open to the idea of implementing new training techniques.
I am glad that there are people on this thread that, in spite of having initial doubts, are at least questioning the status quo by using oly lift variations. Lifting moderate-heavy weights explosively is going to be a huge change - it is going to make you sore because you’re recruiting muscle fibers that you haven’t a chance of getting no matter what the weight is, and no matter what the tempo + rep scheme is.
I don’t want to rehijack this thread away from the main point of developing the Vastus Medialis muscles. I just think that it’s worth one more effort to explain why lifting explosively is good and open up some civil discussion on the matter. It’s worth a shot and I hope it’s possible!
My greatest hope is that there are some BBers out there reading this thread that have been using these concepts for a long time, perhaps whom actually use oly lift variations or explosive lifts in reaching hypertrophy goals specifically, and actually have some verifiable proof that these methods work!