During Kyle Gillett’s recent appearance on the Huberman Lab podcast, he alluded to the “lazy bear bodybuilder” – the idea that the guys who get the best gains are the laziest outside of the gym. They basically are parasympathetic all day outside of their training window. I’ve also heard Ben Pakulski allude to this, saying the best bodybuilders he knew were super laidback and lowkey out of the gym.
Thoughts?
I think this would be immensely beneficial to keeping cortisol levels low and allowing for the greatest recover-ability after training.
I also think this would apply moreso to enhanced lifters than non-enhanced, but that’s a bit more iffy.
John McCallum, Stuart McRobert and Randall Strossen all wrote about the value of staying restful/softening up during periods of muscle growth. It’s got historical backing and precedent.
Well, Ronnie was a cop when he won his first couple Olympias, so that pretty much proves your point!
I can’t imagine any aspect of life not being improved by reducing stress outside of “game time,” so this stands up to my small brain.
Arthur Jones also agreed upon this, alike a male lion engaging in fights and mating - short bursts of high intensity - and otherwise taking it easy.
Charlie Francis said the same thing about sprinters. He told me in one of our hours-long phone conversations that they were “incredibly lazy” outside of the sport, innately so – not as a strategy. It was their nature.
Interesting theory – could you elaborate?
Yeah, so a lot of the guys who are heavy juicers and train those who juice hard (not olympia level, but those on the less-extreme end of genetic potential distribution) only recommend 3-4 days per week at most, and are virtually allergic to the word “cardio”. I’m speaking of people like Paul Carter (who has some higher frequency training programs as well), Dante Trudel, Jordan Peters, Scott Stevenson, etc.
These are all people who idealize failure training models, and when doing so - you NEED to rest and recover properly. Pretty much all of them are under the same ideology that the main driver to muscle growth is progressive overload. It isn’t really my theory, but I can prescribe to it under common sense… I don’t have a differing theory, rather that I don’t have enough evidence outside of personal experience and confirmation bias that supports this.
I think failure training tends to work better for those who are enhanced, as the hormonal suppression it tends to produce is stunted by exogenous hormones (obviously not true for natties). This being the case, hormones are in check, diet is in check, training is in check, but recovery? CNS recovery is not simply made of androgenic hormone rebound, so intense training would require intense recovery… “Lazy Bear” style recovery sounds about right.
I don’t think natties can make the same long-term progress that enhanced can on linear-progression style training models, because the ‘runway’ is shorter. If enhanced folks were training 5-6x per week with LP failure models, I think they wouldn’t be able to recover properly - and I think they couldn’t sustain that training method.
Anyways, I feel like I’m rambling, probably because I don’t know what I’m talking about - but it makes sense to me 
I agree.
I trained 6-7 days a week at my biggest and trained myself into the ground with high volume and grew like a fucking weed.
Now this was a very interesting input of yours. I also agree with you. Well said. Not entirely related - but the risk of injuries must also be significantly higher for the enhanced trainees, considering muscle attachments takes longer to adapt than the muscle itself (developing at an exagerrated rate).
100% concur, my friend
Ok, I can’t take it anymore.
We have “lazy bear” in the title.
This necessarily implies the existence of a non-lazy bear.
A “busy bear”, as it were.
Like this
Look at how busy those bears are! Check out that schedule! I bet they’re just a bubbling font of cortisol!
You ever seen Paddington? That little guy is busy AF.
The question, then, becomes – how can we use this information if laziness is not in our nature? Most of the guys around here, from what I’ve gathered, are driven in multiple areas of life (fitness, business, family, etc). So we probably aren’t, by nature, lazy bears. Can we “act” like one and reap the rewards?
The people that post here aren’t the ones that need to concern themselves with the possibility of becoming a top-level professional bodybuilder.
Most of us just need to make the most of what we’ve got. And you’d be surprised what you can do with bad circumstances when paired with a LOT of hard work.
For me, a very busy bear, I just learned to not beat up on myself for relaxing. There was a time when I’d do two training session most days of the week, keep working until 9PM, and basically not allow myself to kick back.
I’m better now. Still have a strong “get shit done” personality, but learned that a little “lazy” or recharge time actually made me more productive during work, much like how cutting back on training made every session better and more productive. I was probably a walking caldron of cortisol back then.
So it’s all about reframing. “I’m not being lazy, I’m replenishing my ammo!” Or how about: “To jump farther, you must first step back a little.”
RC was using tons of PEDs and was probably the most genetically gifted bodybuilder of all-time. He doesn’t represent the norm for any class of bodybuilders.
Dude, it’s been 3 years: let it go.
I was just browsing older posts……. I couldn’t, hoping to get a response.