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America, I’m just gonna jump right into the 30 biggest bodybuilding lies, but I might be back later for a short blog on a couple points that I wanna make from conversations I had with clients recently.

#9. You can’t grow if you only work each bodypart once a week. Are you kiddin’ me?  If you workout – workout intensely – then it can take 5-10 days for the muscles to heal enough for you to hit them again.  I blogged on this last year.  HOW do muscles grow?  Muscles grow by a stress imposed upon them slightly greater than they’re accustomed to handling.  WHEN do muscles grow?  When they’ve had complete and total rest.  What is the stimulus for muscular growth?  Proper nutrition. 

Although the following should be taken with a grain of salt when determining your own exercise frequency, a study in the May 1993 issue of the Journal of Physiology revealed that it can take weeks for muscles to recuperate from an intense workout.  The study involved a group of men and women who had worked their forearms to exhaustion.  All of the subjects said they were still sore two days after exercising, and the soreness was gone by the seventh day, and swelling was gone by the ninth day.  After six weeks, the subjects had only gained back half the strength they had before the original exercise! For all of you competitors who train intensely, this is no surprise.  In fact, if we’re NOT sore for 2-3 days following a workout we assume we didn’t put max effort into it.  In essence, it becomes a wasted workout!  The problem I had with this study was that it did not state whether these were trained athletes or not.  The untrained individual would more than likely explain only gaining back half-strength levels after six weeks.  In a trained individual, recovery occurs much faster, and we’re USUALLY ready to go a week later.  But this is an adaptive process.  It takes time to build to this.  That’s why you don’t put a beginner on an advanced bodybuilding routine. 

By no means am I advocating that you wait two months between workouts, or even a month, although back in the day Ellington Darden and Arthur Jones, the inventor of Nautilus equipment, were big proponents of once every 2-3 weeks workouts.  I’m just trying to prove a point that it takes muscles longer to heal than what you might have previously thought.  Add to that the sub-caloric diet you’re all on, and the harder you push yourself, the more rest you need.  Either that or you need to adjust your total volume down a bit.  If not, prepare to get sick!  The body will MAKE you rest if it’s pushed to far without adequate energy intake (food).  For some people, especially natural bodybuilders, waiting a week between bodypart workouts might be just what the doctor ordered for size and strength gains.  I’ve never been a big advocate of natural bodybuilders training a bodypart more than once a week provided the workout was of sufficient intensity.  In fact, it’s been my experience that if an individual truly pushed hard on say, legs, and then hit them 3-4 days later, within a month they usually injured themselves or their legs were so tired that they literally couldn’t do anything!

#10. You can’t make gains if you only train with weights three days a week.  Well…here’s one I don’t necessarily agree with, but I’ll write what they said, add my input, and let you guys decide.

“Although you probably couldn’t find a single steroid-assisted athlete who trains only three days a week, there’s absolutely no reason why a three-day-a-week routine couldn’t work well for many natural athletes.  As long as your routine attacked the whole body and you worked to failure on each set, you could easily experience great gains on this sort of routine.  However, you need to pay even more attention to your diet if you only train three days a week, especially if your job involves little or no physical activity, and you like to spend your idle time eating.  Ignore those that say three-day-a-week bodybuilders are only “recreational lifters.”  Think quality, not quantity.”

This is one of those if-then, if-then, if-then statements.  All the stars in the universe have to line up to make this true – that you can build a quality competitive bodybuilding body on only three-days-a-week training.  First, you’d better be a genetic marvel who builds muscle simply by sniffing the weights.  Second, you’d better be of the right mindset to constantly and continually push to complete and total physical failure, including drop sets, strip sets, compound sets, etc., each and every workout.  Third, plan on being ‘perfect’ on your foods because you’re losing 2-3 additional days/wk of energy expenditure that can keep bodyfat in check.  Four, they never mentioned anything about cardio – is that supposed to be done on the three days you lift or the other 3-4 days you’re off?  Okay…I added my input.  And that’s why I don’t necessarily agree with this statement.  In all my years of competing I don’t recall seeing or hearing about anyone stepping onstage and winning a tough class or overall on only 3 days/wk.  That kind of news would spread like wildfire.  I’m willing to do as much as I need to do, but I don’t want to do any more than I have to do.

That’s the beauty of education and knowledge, America.  I read everything, but don’t necessarily buy into or agree with it all.  But I keep it stored in memory to use as a resource, to add reliability and validity to what I say, or to refute what I disagree with.   I’m sure that many of you have disagreed with some of the things I said.  I don’t have a problem with that.  I’m not the end-all, know-all.  As I’ve said many times, “I know what I know, and that’s all that I know…the question is, how MUCH do I know?” 

I’m out…peace…

The Dr.

David “Dr. Buff” Patterson

Personal Training Systems

“There Are No Shortcuts!”

 www.personaltrainingsystems.net 

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