I haven’t mentioned it myself because for me it is very nearly a borderline personality order, but I totally agree with this. I started doing this 12 years ago. I artificially elevate “going to the gym” as the most important thing I have to do. Don’t feel good? Too bad. Too busy? No such thing, priorities wrong. Granny on her death bed, only hours left to live? Surely I can sneak in a quick session.
I mean, in the real world stuff happens, and it isn’t really the most important thing in my life. But using this basic principle has meant that I never have to muster the will to go to the gym. Sometimes I have to muster the will to NOT go, but that is a whole different thread.
I recently heard this on a Dave Tate/JM podcast and considered trying it. I’ve been failing at gaining weight so I’m sure just the additional calories will help push me along. His whole 6 month weight gain diet sounds absolutely insane, though.
I’ve only been lifting a but over 2 years so I’m not a veteran by any means but…
1). Don’t do too much too soon
ie: slowly add both weight and reps. I’ve tried progressing too quickly multiple times, and while it works for the first week or two, burnout sneaks up and destroys any additional progress
2). Get good at squatting, and do many different types of squats/lunges. Back squatting is difficult to learn, difficult to do and tests willpower more than any other lift. The better you get at squatting, the better you get at lifting period. Zercher squats are just badass. Weighted lunges can be brutal and are another great test of willpower. IDK about front squatting. It seems like a zercher squat wannabe to me.
Those are the two that I can think of right now, I’ll add more as I think of them.
Been interesting to see a lot of folks with only a few years experience already have training principles. Those in the younger crowd, you ever get concerned about getting locked in to something too early and possibly missing out on something?
Not quite to this extreme, but after my son was born they kept us in hospital for 3 days to monitor my wife. I may have snuck out for a gym session or two…
I went the complete opposite way. If you’d have asked me this 10 years ago I’d have had a list as long as my arm of things one simply ‘had’ to do to make progress in training.
This is the exact reason I haven’t posted anything: I have many principles that guide my training and eating, however they’re almost exclusively taken from people who have had success training. I figure people might as well learn these principles from the people who wrote them and had success with them.
The only principles I have that are purely from me are extremely dubious, go against all conventional advice and are definitely unique to me.
Great conversation about nutrition, metabolism, and cardio above.
I have, unfortunately, discovered over the years that, absent extreme daily output (and I don’t mean an hour of cardio), you simply have to reduce calories to lose bodyfat.
I also completely agree with the conversation about people not understanding what is/ isn’t a lot of calories and thinking they have a unique metabolism.
Two quick examples:
When I ran high school cross country, I’d actually get chubbier, even though I could knock out a 10k at a 6 minute/ mile pace. That made no sense to my way of thinking! Then would come wrestling season, and I’d have to make a specific weight, which meant I had to cut out food, and I’d magically get leaner. My overall output was likely similar (we liked to practice and run stairs).
I saw through quite a few cycles of Army OSUT (it’s basic training + advanced training for the Infantry/ SF contracts, so it’s a little longer and, back then, all male). We had complete control of their lives for 14 weeks, they were all basically the same age, gender, health markers, etc. They did the exact same training and ate the exact same meals every day. Everyone regressed toward a mean; the skinny kids gained weight (even with all that work in the Georgia heat) and the fat kids lost weight. Now, if you showed up extremely heavy, maybe you didn’t get all the way there in 14 weeks (and some of those kids had to do it again!), but the trends were always toward the middle.
Question here. Is this a chicken and egg thing? I’ve been throwing weights around a gym for a long long while and bigger was never something I got until I had an intent to get stronger.
I guess you try to get stronger to start, but at some point, getting bigger helps with getting stronger, which triggers a positive feedback loop I guess
I didn’t post any nutritional principles, because I don’t have any unique thoughts of my own from a high level stand point. I’m trying to figure out how the “eat to support your training” thing works for me but that’s a week at a time adventure right now.
As far as superstitions, I only have one:
It’s okay to eat crappy food (candy bars, junk food, processed whatever) as long as it’s your pre-workout meal or your preferred backpack fuel (for hiking, climbing, kayaking, whatever else you need on-the-go food for).
I don’t know if they “Have to” get stronger to bigger, at least past a certain point, but my personal experience is that I have never trained for size. Just strength. I am significantly larger than most people now, and at a point where I actually don’t want to get bigger. I will always want to get stronger, and I am hoping to cut some fat, but lifting for strength has made me large.
Yes definitely. I always wonder if I’m doing the right thing or if my efforts would be better focused elsewhere. I have essentially done 531 and short stints of isdatnuttys and GMM for about 2 years. I question myself because honestly, I don’t know what I’m doing.
That’s most of the reason I post here… because I can see what people who have accomplished what I want to accomplish do and I can copy them. Also, to have feedback from more experienced people and hopefully have them let me know I’m on the right track or way off base.
It’s obvious to me that my diet needs work. I haven’t gained weight in a pretty long time, so I need to lay down some serious ground rules for myself on that front. Again, though, I just don’t know what to do.
Training is the process of providing your body what it needs when its needed in order to achieve a desired movement. There is no ‘program’. There is life organization and balance. If you don’t do needful things at the proper time you are slowing progress. If you do needless things when you shouldn’t you are reversing progress.
Rarely use numbers while training. The only thing numbers are needed for is competition and testing. Everything adheres to principle #1. Don’t count reps, time, speed, weight. Chasing numbers will limit you, injure you, or trick you into doing something you didn’t intend.
Use numbers to learn about your body. What heart rate is good for recovery training? At what bodyweight are you most explosive? At what glucose level do you have the best training sessions?
Chase feeling. The goal of any session should be to achieve a specific state of feeling. It could be feeling relaxed, pumped up, strong, explosive, exhausted, scared, depleted, loose, stable, warm. Visualize how you are going to achieve that feeling. Once you achieve the feeling end the session. Never cool down. Let the feeling stay with you. Be thankful that you achieved it. Experience it. Once the thought pops in your head “this isn’t going to happen.” End the session. Accept you made the wrong choice. Cool down, then let it go and move on.
Have only one goal for your training. Then do whatever needs to be done to achieve it. If your goal is honest your subconscious will guide you, but you must focus on letting it happen. Never get sidetracked by anyone or anything that is not conductive to that one goal. Allow yourself to create your own exercises. Don’t think. Don’t analyze. Listen and follow. The only thing you control is how many obstacles you put in your own way.
I don’t want to derail here, but I’d recommend starting a thread and opening it up with a narrative about your current state and goals, with a specific question or two, and tagging the folks whose opinion you respect in this regard.
I think this might be due to the fact that, while training does require a certain (high) level of specificity in order to be successful, nutrition doesn’t require such complexity.
That’s why we can talk for hours on end about training volume, intensity, etc. and know that those variables play a huge role in the results you get, whereas if we’re talking nutrition everything beyond “hit your calorie and macro goals,” or “eat to recover/grow/support your training” (which essentially means the same thing as the first statement, with the assumption that your calorie and macro targets are well calibrated to support your training) quickly suffers from diminishing returns and becomes minutia.
That’s the way I’ve seen this for the past couple of years, once I started to feel I had at least a little bit of this figured out.
If you’ve got chickens and eggs, don’t worry about it, keep training!
But if you’re not getting the results you want, consider another approach.
Like Pinkie mentioned, training for size is sort of like training individual muscles for strength. If building “movement strength” on the big lifts hits and builds all your individual muscles, that’s cool.
If not, you may need to do some specific work to target, strengthen (increase contractile strength) and grow individual muscles.
