[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
A part of the problem is that BB’ing is something that is far more suited to internship-type learning, so to speak, rather than reading-learning.
For example, if I understand Professor X’s posts correctly, he didn’t find out from books how to train. There were some big guys in his gym and he learned to train how they did.
I am sure he supplemented this also with knowledge acquired from reading, but the backbone and gold standard was what was working in the gyms for the guys who had gotten big and were getting bigger.
These days, going into the typical gym and seeing what the various yahoos are doing isn’t going to do much good in most cases.
So I can readily understand seeking the written word to fill the gap.
Problem is, as Bricknyce says, most of it is full of shit. And some of it does have validity if you know how to filter through the shit, but you have to know where the shit is in the first place to be able to filter through it, so that doesn’t help much when starting out.
I will say however that CT’s writings are very clear and I don’t think are going to lead anyone astray. It also seems to me that each of the successful powerlifters that writes on the subject gives out good information that is clear, and while some regards of it are not optimized for bb’ing there are valid things to learn from what they have to say. Just employ some judgment and ask “Are successful bb’ers also doing this?” and if the answer is no and your goal is bb’ing, then you don’t need to do that.[/quote]
I read quite a bit about bodybuilding; the history of it as well as the philosophies of many of those earlier guys in the 60’s up through the 80’s…but this was AFTER I had put forth the effort in the gym following a very basic lifting skeleton and already understood how to make my own muscles grow. There was no “splits vs full body” bullshit. Guys who got really big all pretty much trained the same…so I did what they did and it worked since I was beginning to eat more and I lifted with the same intensity they did.
I agree that newbies today may not be able to even find really big lifters in their gyms and more of these people are clueless…but that isn’t all that is holding them back. many of these guys over the last few years seemed to actually think those who had seen more progress were the ones you DON’T listen to. They get told by gurus that the big bodybuilders all got there by “genetics/drugs” so you shouldn’t listen to anyone really big…only listen to the small people who don’t grow much because they somehow worked harder.
Many of these dudes defeat themselves with such bullshit logic.
On top of that, I just had a debate with a guy in another thread who called Bonez out for being clueless because he misspelled the word “ridiculous”…which in itself is ridiculous and implies some of these people are dumb enough to avoid advice from successful lifters unless it sounds like a physics lecture.
I get the impression people in general just aren’t as “superintelligent” as they think they are.