Bodybuilding's Biggest Lies - Continued... | Craigproductions, Home of the Emerald Cup and Washington Ironman

Bodybuilding's Biggest Lies - Continued...

03.11.2010 04:45:58

America, I don’t have anything witty or profound to write about today. Just doing my thang. Banged out an intense 60 minutes of cardio this morning and will hit back with Steve later this afternoon. Since I had some free time this morning I thought I’d knock out the blog. Here’s the 4^th and 5^th biggest lies of bodybuilding. Enjoy…

4. The more you work out, the more you’ll grow. No, no, NO! This is one of the most damaging and dangerous myths that ever reared its ugly head. Ninety-five percent of the pros will tell you that the biggest bodybuilding mistake they ever made was to overtrain – and this happened even when they were taking steroids. Imagine how easy it is for the natural athlete to overtrain! When you train your muscles too often for them to heal, the end result is zero growth and perhaps even losses. Working out a body part every day, if you’re truly using the proper amount of intensity, will lead to gross overtraining. A body part, worked properly, i.e., worked to complete and total muscular failure that recruited as many muscle fibers as physiologically possible, can take 5 to 10 days, or longer, to heal.

To take it a step further, even working a different body part in the next few days might constitute overtraining. If you truly work your quads to absolute fiber-tearing failure (which most of us don’t…), doing another power workout the next day that entails heavy military presses or deadlifts is going to, in all probability, inhibit gains. Why? Because after a serious leg workout, you experience what’s known as ‘total systemic fatigue or failure’. In other words, your whole system mobilizes to heal and recover from the blow you’ve dealt it. How, then, can the body be expected to heal from an equally brutal workout the next day, especially if it involves the legs or low back again? It can’t, at least not without using some drugs to help deal with the catabolic processes going on in your body. That’s one reason why so many individuals get sick somewhere between 3-6 weeks out from the show. They’re either overtraining for the amount of calories they’re taking in, or underfeeding for the amount of energy they’re expending.

Learn to accept rest as a valuable part of your workout. If you’re truly training as hard as physiologically possible, you should probably spend as many days out of the gym as you do in it. Talk with your trainer or coach to determine your intensity and whether you need to rest a bit more, especially if you’re continually tired and/or sick.

5. The longer you work out, the better. Sometimes more is not better. It just isn’t necessary to do 20-30 sets for a bodypart or even 10 sets like many ‘experts’ would have you believe. In fact, research has shown that it’s possible to completely fatigue a muscle in just one set, provided that the one set taxes the muscle completely, i.e., incorporates as many muscle fibers as possible and takes them to the point of momentary muscular failure or fatigue, otherwise known as ischemic rigor, where, rather than continue to contract and relax, the muscle fibers freeze up, sort of a microscopic version of rigor mortis. This is done to protect you. Any further contraction can cause micro-trauma as opposed to micro-tearing. Although similar, micro-trauma is sort of like an advanced micro-tearing. Think of a hamstring or quad pull. Not fun.

Now I must say that the one set to fatigue principle is NOT your first set. It could be your third, fifth, or even 8^th set, as the others are simply warm-ups to prepare the muscles for the heavy load. Mike Mentzer was known as popularizing the ‘one set to failure’ principle, yet many people didn’t know that he’d do as many warm-ups as it took to get him ready for that ‘one heavy set’. If you attempt the one set to failure principle using max weight on your first set, you run the probable risk of injury that’ll take you out of the game for a while.

This kind of intensity can usually be achieved by doing drop, strip, or breakdown set where you rep out to failure, lower the weight, and continue doing reps until you either can’t do another rep or you’ve run out of weight. It can also be achieved by doing your maximum number of reps of a particular exercise and then, by a combination of sheer will, tenacity, and very short rest periods (5-10 seconds), you complete say, 10 more reps. You achieve the short rest periods by locking out the weight-bearing joint in question, without putting the weight down. In other words, you gotta bust through your normal pain and energy thresholds and enter uncharted territories.

If you can truly work your muscles to the point described, it will afford you little, if any, benefit to do another set (Wescott, 1986). The exception would be body parts that are so big that they have distinct geographical areas, like the back, which obviously has an upper, middle, and lower part. The chest might also fall into this category, as it has a distinct upper and lower region, each with different insertion points but the same origin.

In summary, if you can train intense enough, there’s no need to do mega-sets. If you’ve got bad joints like me, then doing this kind of training would be counter-productive. I’ve now reached the point to where I’m working in the ‘weak-link syndrome’ – the weakest link in the chain, so to speak. My muscles might be able to handle the load but the joints can’t. Pushing the super-heavy weights just don’t work for me anymore. That’s why I’ve switched to the mega-set philosophy to attempt to stimulate fibers. But if your joints are strong, you might want to see how this works. But I’ve gotta warn you – this type of training is NOT for the faint-of-heart. It’s brutally hard, intense training designed to maximize fiber recruitment in the minimum amount of time. You’d better have y’game face on for this…