You’re making the mistake of getting caught up with numbers. How much weight you lift isn’t as important as how much effort it takes for you to lift it. That said, if someone who is relatively weak uses a relatively light weight they can produce the same stimulus as you, relatively speaking (i.e. enough to grow).
If there were really some gateway weight at which exercises became valuable, most beginners would be too weak at everything to ever make any progress.[/quote]
I may not have my numbers right but weight training isn’t completely relative for every individual. Under your logic, if there is an experienced lifter who curls 60 pound dumbbells and on a scale of 1 to 10 is doing these curls at a difficulty level of ‘8’ then a novice lifter doing curls with 20 pounds who finds the difficulty of these curls to be ‘8’ on the same scale, then both lifters would experience the same increases in strength relative to the strength they started with.
[Stop me if you have no idea what I’m trying to say]
I’m arguing that the novice lifter won’t experience the same increase in strength relative to his previous strength level as the experienced lifter since weights as low as 20 pounds, no matter the induvidual, just isn’t heavy enough to cause change.
Look at the person in the gym doing chest flys with 25 pound dumbbells. Then look at the jacked guy doing chest flys with 65 pound dumbbells. Next month, the jacked guy will probably be using more weight and will have put on even more size while the guy doing chest flys with 25 pounds will be stuck at 25 pounds.
Sure this is because the jacked guy is
Trying Harder
Knows How to Train/Eat
but it’s also because he’s surpassed the level of strength you need to benefit from isolation moves.
And even if I’m WRONG about everything I’ve already said, isolation moves like curls and flys are bad for beginners because it takes them so much time to move up in weight. The jump from curls with 20’s to 25’s is a bigger jump than doing curls with 55’s to 60’s.
And even if I’m WRONG about everything I’ve already said, isolation moves like curls and flys are bad for beginners because it takes them so much time to move up in weight. The jump from curls with 20’s to 25’s is a bigger jump than doing curls with 55’s to 60’s. [/quote]
I see where you are coming from, but this part I disagree with. Yes 20-25 is a larger percentage jump than 55-60 but it is MUCH easier for a beginner to add weight to an exercise especially in the beginning.
And how curls are bad for a beginner is still a mystery to me, but those battles have been launched before and no sense getting into another one.
[quote]FightingScott wrote:
I may not have my numbers right but weight training isn’t completely relative for every individual. Under your logic, if there is an experienced lifter who curls 60 pound dumbbells and on a scale of 1 to 10 is doing these curls at a difficulty level of ‘8’ then a novice lifter doing curls with 20 pounds who finds the difficulty of these curls to be ‘8’ on the same scale, then both lifters would experience the same increases in strength relative to the strength they started with.
[Stop me if you have no idea what I’m trying to say]
I’m arguing that the novice lifter won’t experience the same increase in strength relative to his previous strength level as the experienced lifter since weights as low as 20 pounds, no matter the induvidual, just isn’t heavy enough to cause change.
Look at the person in the gym doing chest flys with 25 pound dumbbells. Then look at the jacked guy doing chest flys with 65 pound dumbbells. Next month, the jacked guy will probably be using more weight and will have put on even more size while the guy doing chest flys with 25 pounds will be stuck at 25 pounds.
Sure this is because the jacked guy is
Trying Harder
Knows How to Train/Eat
but it’s also because he’s surpassed the level of strength you need to benefit from isolation moves.
And even if I’m WRONG about everything I’ve already said, isolation moves like curls and flys are bad for beginners because it takes them so much time to move up in weight. The jump from curls with 20’s to 25’s is a bigger jump than doing curls with 55’s to 60’s. [/quote]
I’m afraid you’re wrong.
If all other factors are equal (rest, nutrition, effort etc.) in most cases the beginner would experience a greater rate of progression as they still have more ways to progress (newbie gains, becoming more efficient etc.).
How do you know the jacked guy didn’t once do flyes with 25’s?
How do you know that the jacked guy has to try harder to use the 65’s than the beginner using the 25’s?
Isn’t the term ‘heavy’ relative?
If you’re body can’t recognise stimulus from isolation movements until you’re strong why would it recognise stimulus from compound movements until you’re strong?
One last take home point, although I don’t use 25 pound DB’s to do flyes if that’s all that was available I could still make it work. Thinking heavy weight is the only way to put muscle under stress is one dimensional.
For the most part I’m following everyone’s point here. But it raised a question, and perhaps I’m going down the wrong road here but I’ll throw it out there anyway…
In regards to the guy doing 25 lbs and the guy doing 65 lbs in the above examples, it seems there are several factors to consider; experience, intensity put into the workout and body weight being just some of them. Body weight is what immediately sprung to mind while reading the comments of relative strength. For example, a guy that weighs 100 lbs that can bench 200 lbs would have more relative strength than a guy that weighs 200 lbs that can bench 300 lbs.
So in the 25 lbs/65 lbs example, the size of the two lifters would be a factor I would think. Just an observation.
[quote]FightingScott wrote:
A 45lb plate may have been too high of a benchmark but I stand by my points that you need to develop a solid base of muscle and strength before you can find flys and curls to be more beneficial than just doing strength-building compound moves.
If you can only use the 50 pound dumbbells for Dumbbell Bench, you’re probably doing chest flys with no more than 25 pounds. Weights this light aren’t going to do much of anything for you.[/quote]
I don’t have any major problems with what you’re saying here, and as I said before I agree in principle with the importance of compound movements over isolation exercises, particularly for beginners. The way you phrased it before probably just irked me.
On a different note, I have never personally found flies to be good mass builders. In my experience, the best use of flies (like the pec deck) is for pre- and post-exhaustion supersets and for getting a great stretch in the pectorals. I guess I wouldn’t disagree that flys can fill out the chest, but only if they are used in conjunction with presses.
But curls are great mass builders, and I’ve never used them for anything other than that. I don’t think that any compound movement is a sufficient stress on the biceps to allow maximum growth, so I think everyone should doing some amount of curling.
I may not have my numbers right but weight training isn’t completely relative for every individual. Under your logic, if there is an experienced lifter who curls 60 pound dumbbells and on a scale of 1 to 10 is doing these curls at a difficulty level of ‘8’ then a novice lifter doing curls with 20 pounds who finds the difficulty of these curls to be ‘8’ on the same scale, then both lifters would experience the same increases in strength relative to the strength they started with.
[Stop me if you have no idea what I’m trying to say]
I’m arguing that the novice lifter won’t experience the same increase in strength relative to his previous strength level as the experienced lifter since weights as low as 20 pounds, no matter the induvidual, just isn’t heavy enough to cause change.
[/quote]
Actually that’s a complete misunderstanding of the process of overload and building muscle. What’s important isn’t the amount of weight being used in the exercise, but instead that the weight causes an overload.
If all a person’s biceps were ever called on to lift was 10 lbs, then 20 lb dumbbell curls would most certainly cause a growth/strength/overload stimulus. That’s why people make huge (relatively speaking) improvements in strength and physique changes when they begin training (newbe gains). Even though they’re poundages are light, those poundages are still more than their muscles/body is accustomed to. Thus, it causes a super-compensation effect thus causing increases in strength and muscle.
Now, if we were talking about the same person using 20’s or 60’s then yeah, the 20’s probably wouldn’t be enough to cause a strength increase.
Once again that’s a huge assumption on your part, and isn’t necessarily true. I see guys’s using 65’s for flys for long periods of time (meaning that they don’t regularly increase weight) and guys moving up the rack from the 25’s. That’s more of a matter or training knowledge, diet, forced progression, etc… It really has nothing to do with the amount of weight being used.
1 and 2 may be true, but the last statement is once again a misconception that you seem to be holding fast to.
[quote]
And even if I’m WRONG about everything I’ve already said, isolation moves like curls and flys are bad for beginners because it takes them so much time to move up in weight. The jump from curls with 20’s to 25’s is a bigger jump than doing curls with 55’s to 60’s. [/quote]
I’d strongly disagree with that statement as well. The jump from 20’s to 25’s doesn’t take any longer than the jump from 55’s to 60’s if you know how to train. Now, yes, isolations don’t have the same total poundage capacities as compounds, but that doesn’t make them useless.
Also, like Marcus said, I’ve personally seen very few if any people who have built world class biceps without the use of curls. Those who have either have incredible biceps genetics (actually all of the people who have world class biceps have incredible biceps genetics), or they perform movements that place an incredible amount of strain on their biceps.
For instance, I’ve heard people bring up olympic gymnasts as an example of people who don’t curl and yet have great biceps development. While this may be true in many cases, first olympic athletes (in any sport) are the genetic elite. So, it might be just as appropriate to say that the gymnasts with great biceps simply have the best genetic makeup for having big biceps.
Secondly, Coach Christopher Sommer (one of the most successful and knowledgeable gymnastics coaches in the states) has stated on several occasions that gymnasts owe their bicep development to straight arm holds/moves and not to exercises like pull-ups/muscle ups.
So, if you’re suggesting that people start trying to learn moves like maltese, planche, iron cross, inverted cross, etc… then maybe you can use gymnastics training as a viable example.
guys, question. I seem to lack the flexibility (or strength) to do dips and target the pectorals this may be caused from an a/c joint tear in my right shoulder this last february. I am doing scap pushups to correct the scapular winging that is happening, is there anything else I can do ? id like to be able to do dips and increase chest mass overall.
There are some people that can just run and do pushups and have excellent full body development from head to toe. You learn what works quite a bit better if you train many people who are average in that what is specifically targeted grows. Upper chest development.
If you think about gravity and the way the fibers are arranged you can pretty easily figure out exercises that will stress the upper chest. Exercises in which you position your body so that the resistance is directed in-line with the direction the fibers are pointing will usually be good exercises for that bodypart.
Now for upper chest, incline exercises are very good. The higher the incline, the higher up on the chest the exercise will hit. The only problem being, when you incline the bench very high, say above 30% the amount of fibers that are aligned with the force of gravity are so few that if you were to use a heavy resistance, your shoulders would have to contribute an extremely large portion of the force because they have more strength than the few upper chest fibers that are in a position to push in that particular plane. So if you used a very light weight on a very high incline and concentrate very hard, you should be able to hit the upper chest incredibly well.