QUESTION:
There are so many guys getting good results with the 1 bodypart per day, 5 day per week routine (training each bodypart once per week). Why do you recommend 3 days per week and training bodyparts more often?
ANSWER:
There are guys who are better built than you and me who don't even workout! There are guys out there stronger than you and me who have never lifted a weight! There are guys out there who don't need to lift heavy weights or train very hard to become capable of lifting insanely heavy weights! And there are guys out there who suddenly become one of those other freaky guys as soon as they inject a few drugs.
The issue is, you are writing to me because you are NOT one of those guys. I am NOT one of those guys either. In fact, very few of us are one of those guys. But we all look up to those guys. We all WISH we were those guys. So we make the logical but stupid mistake: we ask those guys what they did and then try to copy it. And the inevitable result is: we fail to look like those guys cos we just aint those guys. And we fail to get strong by doing pumping training with light weights and lots of exercises like they do because it doesnt even make sense why a human WOULD get strong training like that!!!
So the reason I don't recommend the standard '1-bodypart-per-day' program is because so many guys ARENT getting good results with it. In fact, MOST trainers arent getting good results with it. In fact, the ONLY trainers that ARE getting results out of it are those rare individuals who get results out of ANY program! And even they tend to get MORE results out of any other program than the standard 1 bodypart per day regime.
Almost EVERY trainer who comes to me for a program is using the '1 bodypart per day' program and has failed to achieve anything for YEARS! But they stick with it because every monday they train chest and they get a big pump and it feels good and they look swollen the next day and are sore for 2 days after. By the time they arent sore its monday again and they get a big pump and feel good and get swollen etc etc. But after a year they havent changed AT ALL! They just swell up and down every week in every muscle and go nowhere overall. But its easy, it feels SOOOOO good, it looks good and everybody does it. And that is why everybody does it: its just lazy, feel-good, lemming behaviour.
I was lucky enough to realise early on that the really muscular guys are really muscular because they are CAPABLE of lifting HUGE weights; even if they rarely bother to. It just makes sense - muscle exists to exert force. It doesnt need to do it for very long or very often. Its just there in case a lot of force is needed. Big muscles equal big strength; even if they don't mean strong work ethic!
Given that I was very weak and I wanted to become very strong, ASAP, it was obvious that I needed a training program that made me able to lift heavier and heavier weights EVERY time I trained. With SO much strength to be gained, it made no sense to waste time on any program that gave me no strength gains each week. So I rationalised and then trialled every combination until I found the ones that gained strength well.
Quickly it became obvious that a program like "the pro's" use - 1 bodypart per week with lots of half-assed 'stuff' - wasnt, in any way, relevant to what I needed to achieve. And it didnt take much trial-&-error to find out how poorly it worked. I am just lucky to be an argumentative, contrarian SOB who doesnt do what everyone else does just because its what everyone else does! ;-)
So by trying stuff and then thinking about it, the logical programs proved to work best: push heavy weights to failure and plan your WEIGHTS given that the WEIGHT is the purpose and outcome of training.
The rest is just logical. I don't recommend doing flyes after bench press because I can't understand how doing light-weight flyes, when I'm tired, is going to help communicate to my body that it needs to become capable of doing a 200kg bench press? Some guys can do that. Most of us can't. If you can do that then keep doing what you are doing. If you can't do that.... it doesnt take too much brainpower to understand why!
I hope that helps. Its not rocket science. Its just pretty obvious. Focus on your end goal - lifting a crazy deadlift, squat and bench! Doing so should make you realise how dumb the standard 'routine-of-the-pros' is!
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
Wednesday, 23 March 2011
Tuesday, 8 March 2011
Fit, Flexible & Fat
Check out this girl who has been training hard to get fit, flexible and fabulous. And she succeeded! Check out that flexibility. Wow! Thats really fit.
Doesn't she just make you want to run to your nearest yoga class to achieve the same sort of fitness?
No. Me either. In fact, I think she could benefit by dropping the Fitness work and engaging in some Body Recompositioning. Click here if you don't know the difference...
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
Doesn't she just make you want to run to your nearest yoga class to achieve the same sort of fitness?
No. Me either. In fact, I think she could benefit by dropping the Fitness work and engaging in some Body Recompositioning. Click here if you don't know the difference...
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
Tuesday, 21 December 2010
Looking Back to Move Forward
Anyone who has seen rally driving on TV has probably noticed that the racers' front wheels are very rarely pointed in the direction that their vehicle is moving. To take a LEFT hand corner the driver will deftly 'flick' the car into a skid, turn the front wheels to the RIGHT and then apply excessive power to send the car, paradoxically, around the LEFT hand bend. This wasn't the intention of the engineers who originally designed the steering rack of the motorcar. Nor was it the expectation of scientists or academics. But on the track where the game is played, the fastest way to send a ton and a half of metal hurtling round a gravel road is with the wheels pointed mostly in the wrong direction!
This is not a dissimilar situation to weight training for muscle growth. Scientists and academics (and the people silly enough to listen to scientists and academics) bury their heads 'under the hood' and obsess over the chemical and mechanical PROCESSES of "protein synthesis" and "anabolism" with the assumption that pointing part of the bodies chemistry in the right direction will ensure the rest of the body arrives at the desired destination. But, as any rally driver will tell you, looking away from the desired destination to worry about which way the wheels are pointed is a sure fire way to not even finish the race!
A smarter person wanting to jump straight in and join the race as quickly as possible doesn't need to study circuit diagrams of cars ECU or consider the metallurgy of the alloy used in the engine block. A smarter person consults a map! (And has someone show them how to drive)! They consider their destination, the turns in between and work backwards to where they are now.
The tools in the race to grow muscle are food and weights. You don't need to know whats going on 'under the hood' (ie inside your body) when you eat food and lift weights. You just need to consult a map and steer your food and weights, around the twists and turns, toward your destination.
Logically, a muscularly larger version of yourself is going to be eating more food and lifting substantially heavier weights. You can probably guess how much good quality food you'll need to be eating at your desired size. And you can even predict how strong you'll probably be by looking at the maximal strength of other trainers at your desired size. It doesnt matter if you are exact because, like a rally driver, you are going to need to make countless adjustments as you go. But you still have to plan your journey first or it will take twice as long.
Over the course of your 'race' for muscle you are going to need to see yourself measuring your food intake and making adjustments according to the scales; just as a rally driver adjusts the throttle and steering angle through the bends. And just like a rally driver, your food intake won't always move in the direction your body is going. Its not a precise science; you can only keep your eye on the apex and keep fine tuning your inputs to stay on track. And if you 'close your eyes' on your diet and try to 'feel' your way through the twists, you'll probably wind up with a mangled chassis, going nowhere!
Similarly, to be muscularly larger you are going to need to be MASSIVELY stronger. The weights you use at each workout won't necessarily be moving in the direction of your strength - you will routinely need to drop your weights back as well as overload your muscles with excessive weight and less-than-good-quality reps. But you make adjustments as you go in order to keep moving toward your destination of getting truly strong. You never stop trying to get as strong as possible because in the race to gain muscle, thats like... stopping.
Most importantly, the second you stop focussing on your destination - massive strength with a measured, high intake of high quality food - and start worrying about whats going on 'under the hood' (or just cruising by 'feel'), that is going to be the exact moment you stop moving towards your destination and come crashing to a halt!
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
This is not a dissimilar situation to weight training for muscle growth. Scientists and academics (and the people silly enough to listen to scientists and academics) bury their heads 'under the hood' and obsess over the chemical and mechanical PROCESSES of "protein synthesis" and "anabolism" with the assumption that pointing part of the bodies chemistry in the right direction will ensure the rest of the body arrives at the desired destination. But, as any rally driver will tell you, looking away from the desired destination to worry about which way the wheels are pointed is a sure fire way to not even finish the race!
A smarter person wanting to jump straight in and join the race as quickly as possible doesn't need to study circuit diagrams of cars ECU or consider the metallurgy of the alloy used in the engine block. A smarter person consults a map! (And has someone show them how to drive)! They consider their destination, the turns in between and work backwards to where they are now.
The tools in the race to grow muscle are food and weights. You don't need to know whats going on 'under the hood' (ie inside your body) when you eat food and lift weights. You just need to consult a map and steer your food and weights, around the twists and turns, toward your destination.
Logically, a muscularly larger version of yourself is going to be eating more food and lifting substantially heavier weights. You can probably guess how much good quality food you'll need to be eating at your desired size. And you can even predict how strong you'll probably be by looking at the maximal strength of other trainers at your desired size. It doesnt matter if you are exact because, like a rally driver, you are going to need to make countless adjustments as you go. But you still have to plan your journey first or it will take twice as long.
Over the course of your 'race' for muscle you are going to need to see yourself measuring your food intake and making adjustments according to the scales; just as a rally driver adjusts the throttle and steering angle through the bends. And just like a rally driver, your food intake won't always move in the direction your body is going. Its not a precise science; you can only keep your eye on the apex and keep fine tuning your inputs to stay on track. And if you 'close your eyes' on your diet and try to 'feel' your way through the twists, you'll probably wind up with a mangled chassis, going nowhere!
Similarly, to be muscularly larger you are going to need to be MASSIVELY stronger. The weights you use at each workout won't necessarily be moving in the direction of your strength - you will routinely need to drop your weights back as well as overload your muscles with excessive weight and less-than-good-quality reps. But you make adjustments as you go in order to keep moving toward your destination of getting truly strong. You never stop trying to get as strong as possible because in the race to gain muscle, thats like... stopping.
Most importantly, the second you stop focussing on your destination - massive strength with a measured, high intake of high quality food - and start worrying about whats going on 'under the hood' (or just cruising by 'feel'), that is going to be the exact moment you stop moving towards your destination and come crashing to a halt!
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
Why You SHOULD Use Supplements
I've frequently stated that nutritional supplements are largely, for most people, a complete waste of time and money. This position confuses people who logically ask me:
"so why does Biologic Labs have a supplement store then"?
So let me clear that up.
Nutritional Supplements are CAPABLE of improving a trainers rate and extent of body composition change. The RIGHT supplement, added to the RIGHT diet with the RIGHT training can improve the fat loss and/or muscle gain achieved. Sometimes the effect can be dramatic.
For example, I consider Alpha Lipoic Acid (ALA) a 'must have' supplement to clients on high carb, high calorie, low fat diets. Without it, most clients suffer horrible bloating, lethargy and extreme food cravings. With ALA, all of those negative effects literally disappear within a day! It is truly incredible.
But ALA is only incredible in that circumstance. In no other circumstance is there such a dramatic, instantly noticeable, almost drug-like effect.
Unfortunately, most supplement companies and stores won't tell you the fine-print about supplements. They'll just tell you that ALA, for example, will MAKE all these incredible things happen, all by itself, like a drug would. And it just won't! ALA makes a dramatic difference to an exceptionally good diet in the same way that expensive speaker cables make a dramatic difference to exceptionally good speakers. If you put $2000/meter speaker cable on your $200, JB Hifi all-in-one home theatre, you still have bad sound!
So my issue is not so much with supplements as peoples application of supplements. People want and expect supplements to MAKE UP FOR their atrocious diets and inappropriate training. They want to buy a potion that will build muscle for them and strip all their fat off while giving them boundless energy and sex drive that never abates. And no such potion exists! Supplements COMPLEMENT particular diets; they help them work better. They don't fix bad diets. They don't turn dog turds into gold bars!
So the bottom line is: nutritional supplements help DIETS work; sometimes dramatically better. But you need to make sure you are choosing the right supplement for the right diet and the right training for the right goal. Because in of themselves, supplements don't 'work'!
And that is why Biologic Labs sells supplements. Because we create the MEASURED diets to match the MEASURED training to achieve your MEASURED body composition goals, we can properly advise of the appropriate supplements to deliver maximum benefit and value.
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
"so why does Biologic Labs have a supplement store then"?
So let me clear that up.
Nutritional Supplements are CAPABLE of improving a trainers rate and extent of body composition change. The RIGHT supplement, added to the RIGHT diet with the RIGHT training can improve the fat loss and/or muscle gain achieved. Sometimes the effect can be dramatic.
For example, I consider Alpha Lipoic Acid (ALA) a 'must have' supplement to clients on high carb, high calorie, low fat diets. Without it, most clients suffer horrible bloating, lethargy and extreme food cravings. With ALA, all of those negative effects literally disappear within a day! It is truly incredible.
But ALA is only incredible in that circumstance. In no other circumstance is there such a dramatic, instantly noticeable, almost drug-like effect.
Unfortunately, most supplement companies and stores won't tell you the fine-print about supplements. They'll just tell you that ALA, for example, will MAKE all these incredible things happen, all by itself, like a drug would. And it just won't! ALA makes a dramatic difference to an exceptionally good diet in the same way that expensive speaker cables make a dramatic difference to exceptionally good speakers. If you put $2000/meter speaker cable on your $200, JB Hifi all-in-one home theatre, you still have bad sound!
So my issue is not so much with supplements as peoples application of supplements. People want and expect supplements to MAKE UP FOR their atrocious diets and inappropriate training. They want to buy a potion that will build muscle for them and strip all their fat off while giving them boundless energy and sex drive that never abates. And no such potion exists! Supplements COMPLEMENT particular diets; they help them work better. They don't fix bad diets. They don't turn dog turds into gold bars!
So the bottom line is: nutritional supplements help DIETS work; sometimes dramatically better. But you need to make sure you are choosing the right supplement for the right diet and the right training for the right goal. Because in of themselves, supplements don't 'work'!
And that is why Biologic Labs sells supplements. Because we create the MEASURED diets to match the MEASURED training to achieve your MEASURED body composition goals, we can properly advise of the appropriate supplements to deliver maximum benefit and value.
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
Monday, 15 November 2010
Supplement Ads: Scientifically Factual, Inferential... untruths
If you haven't heard, to protect consumers from unscrupulously dishonest operators, the Government has outlawed any and all 'claims' on nutritional supplements; even if they are 100% true and valid. So it would seem that the preferred method of still making supplement claims, but without actually making illegal "claims" is to use (pseudo) scientific facts to INFER.... untruths.
Powerzone HGH is an excellent example of this current marketing trend. Its multi-page brochure explains the function and benefits of Growth Hormone while quoting a variety of scientific studies. Everything stated is perfectly true and factual.... about Growth Hormone... and particularly injected, pharmaceutical Growth Hormone.... in elderly people.
The brochure does not claim that the HGH product itself delivers these results. Nor does it claim that results of pharmaceutical Growth Hormone in old people translates to the healthy gen-Y's that HGH is pitched at. Nor does it claim that HGH will compare to Growth Hormone injections. In fact, Powerzones makers don't actually claim that Growth Hormone levels will be raised by their product. They aren't allowed; and they don't have to. They know that YOU will make those claims for them!
Marketers know that they don't have to make claims for products that people desperately WANT access to. Like Chris Rock joked: [nobody] 'sells' drugs; drugs sell themselves! And when it comes to fat loss and muscle growth, EVERYBODY wants the magic pill! You only need to put the words "fat loss" on the bottle and people will buy it. Even when they know with 99.99% certainty that the product won't work! People will buy it for the .01% chance that something might happen. Heck, people buy lotto tickets for worse odds!
Now I should state that I consider Protein Powder to be a food and not a 'supplement' in the nutraceutical sense. So, protein powders aside, the fact is, as you probably know, no legal 'supplement' products 'work'. No natural product that you can buy over the counter is going to significantly manipulate your hormones, grow muscle and/or burn fat, safely and effectively, without side-effect, indefinitely, until you resemble a model on the cover of a magazine! In fact, with the same training and diet, the only single difference you will ever experience in a year of taking supplements will be to how poor you are!!! Your body will be exactly the same!
So here is everything you need to know about supplements (excluding protein powders which, as I said, are simply a good quality food):
1) if it provides drug-like effects then it will be classified as a drug and illegal to buy over-the-counter (OTC)! Marijuana is 'natural' and still illegal to buy and sell! Tryptophan is an amino acid in most protein foods and even IT is illegal to buy and sell!
2) If you can buy it OTC, then it does NOT produce drug-like effects.
3) If you want to manipulate your hormones with a natural product then get blood tests so that you can measure your disappointment accurately!
4) If you want a natural product to build muscle or lose fat then make sure your nutrition and training is 100% perfect, 100% of the time first or else you are absolutely wasting your money!
5) if you think your training and nutrition is 100% perfect and yet you aren't getting the training and body composition results you desire, reconsider your training and diet.
6) if you still think your training and nutrition is so perfect that it could not be even slightly improved in any way AND you've confirmed that your blood chemistry is absolutely perfect AND you STILL can't get the body you want then you are either a professional athlete being offered supplements for free OR you are too stupid to earn enough money to consider spending it on supplements!
Whoever you are, unless you have a measured, diagnosed deficiency or specific nutritional need, just don't waste your money on supplements (other than protein powder)!
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
Powerzone HGH is an excellent example of this current marketing trend. Its multi-page brochure explains the function and benefits of Growth Hormone while quoting a variety of scientific studies. Everything stated is perfectly true and factual.... about Growth Hormone... and particularly injected, pharmaceutical Growth Hormone.... in elderly people.
The brochure does not claim that the HGH product itself delivers these results. Nor does it claim that results of pharmaceutical Growth Hormone in old people translates to the healthy gen-Y's that HGH is pitched at. Nor does it claim that HGH will compare to Growth Hormone injections. In fact, Powerzones makers don't actually claim that Growth Hormone levels will be raised by their product. They aren't allowed; and they don't have to. They know that YOU will make those claims for them!
Marketers know that they don't have to make claims for products that people desperately WANT access to. Like Chris Rock joked: [nobody] 'sells' drugs; drugs sell themselves! And when it comes to fat loss and muscle growth, EVERYBODY wants the magic pill! You only need to put the words "fat loss" on the bottle and people will buy it. Even when they know with 99.99% certainty that the product won't work! People will buy it for the .01% chance that something might happen. Heck, people buy lotto tickets for worse odds!
Now I should state that I consider Protein Powder to be a food and not a 'supplement' in the nutraceutical sense. So, protein powders aside, the fact is, as you probably know, no legal 'supplement' products 'work'. No natural product that you can buy over the counter is going to significantly manipulate your hormones, grow muscle and/or burn fat, safely and effectively, without side-effect, indefinitely, until you resemble a model on the cover of a magazine! In fact, with the same training and diet, the only single difference you will ever experience in a year of taking supplements will be to how poor you are!!! Your body will be exactly the same!
So here is everything you need to know about supplements (excluding protein powders which, as I said, are simply a good quality food):
1) if it provides drug-like effects then it will be classified as a drug and illegal to buy over-the-counter (OTC)! Marijuana is 'natural' and still illegal to buy and sell! Tryptophan is an amino acid in most protein foods and even IT is illegal to buy and sell!
2) If you can buy it OTC, then it does NOT produce drug-like effects.
3) If you want to manipulate your hormones with a natural product then get blood tests so that you can measure your disappointment accurately!
4) If you want a natural product to build muscle or lose fat then make sure your nutrition and training is 100% perfect, 100% of the time first or else you are absolutely wasting your money!
5) if you think your training and nutrition is 100% perfect and yet you aren't getting the training and body composition results you desire, reconsider your training and diet.
6) if you still think your training and nutrition is so perfect that it could not be even slightly improved in any way AND you've confirmed that your blood chemistry is absolutely perfect AND you STILL can't get the body you want then you are either a professional athlete being offered supplements for free OR you are too stupid to earn enough money to consider spending it on supplements!
Whoever you are, unless you have a measured, diagnosed deficiency or specific nutritional need, just don't waste your money on supplements (other than protein powder)!
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
Thursday, 11 November 2010
The Ugly Side of Training Biologic Labs Style
Tonight I had a bitterly disappointing workout. And the thing that made it disappointing was my own Biologic Labs training methods which told me exactly how NOT good the workout was!
The workout wouldn't have been at all disappointing if I just trained like everybody else. You see, I was doing Deadlifts and I worked to my limit and went to failure - I absolutely failed to complete the last rep despite my greatest effort. I did a relevant number of reps. Afterward, my muscles felt pumped and very fatigued. Tomorrow and the next day I will be sore. And the weight was so heavy that if I'd done the set in any gym in Australia everybody would have stopped to watch.
So I lifted heavy weights to failure, did a number of reps, got sore and got a pump and drank a protein shake afterward. How can I possibly be bitterly disappointed? By all contemporary thinking, that is a perfect workout.
The reason for the disappointment was (is), unlike all the other trainers out there, at Biologic Labs we MEASURE our performances! And all the feelings in the world don't change the FACT that, tonight, I missed what I needed. Let me explain.
Tonight I Deadlifted 275kg for 8 reps in touch-&-go style. That equates to a 327kg 1-rep-maximum deadlift according to our calculator for that movement (we have 5 different calculators for different types of exercises).
Before I began the set I calculated that 8 reps on 275 would only EQUAL my previous workouts 265kg x11 reps (also a 327 max). So at a minimum I HAD to do 9 reps (331 max) to beat my previous workout.
But I really wanted more than 9 because 265 x11 was still way off my best. My records show I deadlifted 340kg on 20 September 2008 (and again on 6 December 2008). I needed 11 reps on 275kg (in touch-&-go style) to equal that 340kg max.
My VERY best Deadlift performance has been 300kg x7 (and almost 8) on 31/10/08 which equated to a 353kg max. 16 reps on 275 beats that with a 355kg max; 15 is a 352 max.
So going into the set tonight with 275kg, I knew I wasnt going to get 16; I'm just not back up at that level of strength or muscle currently. But I was confident for a comfortable 9 (331 max), focussed on 11 (340 max) and wishing for anything extra to bring me closer to 16 (355 max).
I went into my set 100% focussed on the job. I knew EXACTLY how many reps I needed, what every rep represented in terms of the exact kilos of progress over (or toward) my previous performance. I even knew the dates of the workouts I was measuring against so I knew how far my training had regressed.
To succeed with the 11 reps would have made me elated; so I wanted that BAD! That would have put me back on track to meeting or exceeding my 340kg max for the first time in 2 years. And it would be exactly 13kg gain on my previous deadlift workout. That was my goal.
Failing that, 10 reps would still be 7kg up on last time and only 6kg off my 340; even if it was 19kg off my calculated best. I could live with that. 9 reps was the minimum acceptable representing a paltry 4kg step back toward weights I've lifted before. I'd resign myself to the slowness of progress but progress none-the-less.
But I failed. I got 8.
The thing that made that set (and therefore the whole workout) so bitterly disappointing was the very thing that made it possible: I measured it! If I never measured my workouts I never would have had the drive to take my genetically skinny, weak little 56kg body up to World Record Deadlifts and a winning Heavyweight Bodybuilders physique.
The downside of measuring your training is that you know when you've failed and you know exactly how much you failed by!
They say "failing to plan is planning to fail". They also say: "The great thing about not planning is failure comes as a complete surprise". Both are true. Neither make failing on your plan any easier.
But for all my disappointment, I'm still glad I'm not one of those guys who doesnt know how disappointed they should be!
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
The workout wouldn't have been at all disappointing if I just trained like everybody else. You see, I was doing Deadlifts and I worked to my limit and went to failure - I absolutely failed to complete the last rep despite my greatest effort. I did a relevant number of reps. Afterward, my muscles felt pumped and very fatigued. Tomorrow and the next day I will be sore. And the weight was so heavy that if I'd done the set in any gym in Australia everybody would have stopped to watch.
So I lifted heavy weights to failure, did a number of reps, got sore and got a pump and drank a protein shake afterward. How can I possibly be bitterly disappointed? By all contemporary thinking, that is a perfect workout.
The reason for the disappointment was (is), unlike all the other trainers out there, at Biologic Labs we MEASURE our performances! And all the feelings in the world don't change the FACT that, tonight, I missed what I needed. Let me explain.
Tonight I Deadlifted 275kg for 8 reps in touch-&-go style. That equates to a 327kg 1-rep-maximum deadlift according to our calculator for that movement (we have 5 different calculators for different types of exercises).
Before I began the set I calculated that 8 reps on 275 would only EQUAL my previous workouts 265kg x11 reps (also a 327 max). So at a minimum I HAD to do 9 reps (331 max) to beat my previous workout.
But I really wanted more than 9 because 265 x11 was still way off my best. My records show I deadlifted 340kg on 20 September 2008 (and again on 6 December 2008). I needed 11 reps on 275kg (in touch-&-go style) to equal that 340kg max.
My VERY best Deadlift performance has been 300kg x7 (and almost 8) on 31/10/08 which equated to a 353kg max. 16 reps on 275 beats that with a 355kg max; 15 is a 352 max.
So going into the set tonight with 275kg, I knew I wasnt going to get 16; I'm just not back up at that level of strength or muscle currently. But I was confident for a comfortable 9 (331 max), focussed on 11 (340 max) and wishing for anything extra to bring me closer to 16 (355 max).
I went into my set 100% focussed on the job. I knew EXACTLY how many reps I needed, what every rep represented in terms of the exact kilos of progress over (or toward) my previous performance. I even knew the dates of the workouts I was measuring against so I knew how far my training had regressed.
To succeed with the 11 reps would have made me elated; so I wanted that BAD! That would have put me back on track to meeting or exceeding my 340kg max for the first time in 2 years. And it would be exactly 13kg gain on my previous deadlift workout. That was my goal.
Failing that, 10 reps would still be 7kg up on last time and only 6kg off my 340; even if it was 19kg off my calculated best. I could live with that. 9 reps was the minimum acceptable representing a paltry 4kg step back toward weights I've lifted before. I'd resign myself to the slowness of progress but progress none-the-less.
But I failed. I got 8.
The thing that made that set (and therefore the whole workout) so bitterly disappointing was the very thing that made it possible: I measured it! If I never measured my workouts I never would have had the drive to take my genetically skinny, weak little 56kg body up to World Record Deadlifts and a winning Heavyweight Bodybuilders physique.
The downside of measuring your training is that you know when you've failed and you know exactly how much you failed by!
They say "failing to plan is planning to fail". They also say: "The great thing about not planning is failure comes as a complete surprise". Both are true. Neither make failing on your plan any easier.
But for all my disappointment, I'm still glad I'm not one of those guys who doesnt know how disappointed they should be!
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
The Shape Training Myth
INTRODUCTION
Bodybuilding is full of wishful exercise and diet myths borne of our innate need to feel in control of our circumstances. None of us wants to accept that our short biceps, fat bums, narrow clavicles, or toothpick calves can’t be improved. Even if we accept that we might be unable to achieve perfection, we still need to believe we can neutralise our aesthetic weaknesses.
This article is a mixture of good and bad news for those of you training to ‘shape’ your body rather than just build size. The good news is that you do have massive control over your overall shape. Even better news is that those changes that you can make can be made quite quickly.
But the bad news is that just about everything you’ve read or been told about ‘shape training’ is probably untrue. Worse than that, following the popular ‘shape training’ advice will probably ensure that you fail to achieve the shape you could have otherwise. Read on if you want to know what works and what doesn’t.
FOUNDATIONS
Before we even begin discussing dietary, chemical and exercise interventions for shaping muscles, something must be said about your base structure; your skeleton.
Your skeleton is the frame upon which all your muscles attach. Without some sort of violent surgical procedure (or pre-pubertal genetic manipulation) you are not going to be able to change your skeletal structure and therefore your overall shape is set before you even start training.
MUSCLE ATTACHMENTS
Where and how your muscles attach to your skeleton is another fixed, structural quality that profoundly affects your shape. In fact, it is your muscle attachments that ultimately determine the shapes of each and every muscle in your body. The tissue in between the attachments can only get bigger or smaller.
Using the thighs as an example, whether you are ever going to have an outer thigh ‘sweep’ like Capriese Murray or Lenda Murray depends upon where your outer thigh muscle (Vastus Lateralis) attaches at the hip* and knee* as well as the size and shape of your hips and femur.
Whether you will ever have an inner-thigh region that appears full and round from the knee to the groin like Jon Davie depends significantly upon where the Gracilis, Sartorius and Adductor Longus attach (among others). If your Gracilis attaches closer to the front of your knee and your Sartorius attaches further around your hip toward your groin then you are likely to be forever frustrated with a thin, bowed looking lower thigh similar to Greg Kovacs (though probably not quite as big). And all the hip adducting exercises in the world won’t change that.
In the case of your arm, if you have ‘short biceps’ like Luke Wood (where there seems to be a large gap between your bicep and forearm) then you will always have short biceps. You cannot build muscle where there is only tendon. So if you get a big burn and pump in the bicep tendon from those preacher curls you read would build your ‘lower biceps’, that’s actually an injury!
The depth of separations between muscles is also largely determined by their attachments. If the muscle attachments create wide, flat muscles with significant overlaps then your separations will never be particularly deep. And all the peak-contraction, isolation exercises in the world will be unable to ‘carve’ out any separations.
So subtle differences in the attachment points of different people’s muscles profoundly affect the ultimate visual impression made by their physiques. And short of surgical detachment and reattachment, there is nothing you can do about what your genetics gave you. You just have to work with them.
But before you hang up your training belt and quit bodybuilding forever, consider that Ronnie Coleman, Dorian Yates and Lee Haney have all been widely criticised for their poor abdominal muscles’ shape and structure among other faults. Yet these 3 men have collectively held the Worlds greatest bodybuilding title for over 20 years!
So just because your structure isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it can’t be totally awesome. Just be realistic about what you hope to look like.
MUSCLE TYPES?
There is no tissue in the body known as ‘bulk’. Neither is there a type of muscle known as ‘toned muscle’. Muscle is only muscle. How hard, soft, separated, cut, vascular or ‘toned’ it looks is a function mainly of how much fat covers it.
Front row Rugby forwards don’t have ‘bulk’ – they have a lot of muscle covered in a lot of fat. They might not be fat by comparison to the slobs in the pub watching them play but the reason they don’t look hard and defined is because they are fat.
So you cannot ‘build bulk’; there is no such thing. Neither can you develop a bulky physique as a result of exercise choice. But you can cover your muscle with a layer of fat giving the ‘bulky’ appearance of front row rugby players.
Similarly, you cannot build ‘cut’ or ‘separated’ muscles as opposed from building bigger muscles with obviously deeper gaps between them. But you can reduce your muscle blurring body fat to see the cuts and separations already between your muscles.
LOGICAL ADAPTATIONS
Muscle growth occurs as a logical adaptation to extremely stressful levels of muscular tension; otherwise known as stinking heavy weights!
Muscle exists to exert the forces necessary to create movement. Different types of exercise – stressful movement – will stimulate different adaptations within the muscle. But these adaptations will always relate to the functional force generating capacity of the muscle; either making the muscle able to apply force longer, faster, through a greater range of movement or just produce more peak force.
Like all adaptations, the bodies response to weight training stresses will be the least required to get the job done. Despite what many bodybuilding writers will make it sound like, the body is not interested in making extravagant, extraneous changes to muscle form and structure for the purpose of improving our external aesthetic form. Unfortunately, the psychological stress of possessing a subjectively unattractive body does not induce positive physical adaptations in muscle.
You cannot build ‘thigh sweep’ or peaked biceps or wide pecs if you weren’t born with the structural potential (the combination of skeletal structure and muscular attachments) to do so. And if you were born with great structure then you can still only increase the overall size of the muscle in the areas you already have it.
SHAPING VS MASS BUILDING EXERCISES
While the basic compound exercises such as squats, deadlifts, rows, and presses are often described as ‘mass builders’, many other exercises are touted as ‘shaping’ exercises. Shaping exercises apparently train their respective muscles from different ‘angles’ thereby allowing you to change the shape of your muscles. Nonsense!
A more correct categorisation for weight training exercises would be ‘potent’ and ‘impotent’. An exercises’ effectiveness or potency can be measured by how comparatively quickly body composition changes (muscle gains) are made. And in all cases you will find a basic ‘mass builder’ outperforms a ‘shaping’ exercise.
The simple fact is that an exercises ability to stimulate muscle growth is the sole determining factor as to whether it can positively affect your body composition (ratio of fat to muscle) and therefore your shape. That means that even if you are a bodyshaper you should be doing heavy deadlifts and presses to look your shapliest.
The inefficiency of shaping exercises for developing muscle is well recognised even by those who recommend their employment in a training program. As such, it is frequently recommended in bodybuilding literature that a trainer should build mass with ‘mass building exercises’ before later trying to shape it with ‘shaping movements’. The inference is that once a quantity of muscle tissue has been developed for functional reasons, the body will then happily disassemble and reassemble the muscle proteins with an all new shape; extending or reducing attachments, adding partial-length fibres where there were none previously and disproportionately thickening sections of muscle for no functional purpose whatsoever. And all of this will apparently happen in response to an exercise that is incapable of developing the muscle from the start.
Though we might wish the body was aesthetically generous and functionally schizophrenic in response to otherwise impotent, ineffective exercises, it isn’t. Adaptations to exercise are logical and functional. And while unnatural positioning of your feet during Hack Machine Squats might eventually require a new cruciate ligament, it is unlikely to require a kilo of functionally useless, partial length muscle fibres added to the outside portion of your thigh (Vastus Lateralis)!
TRUTH ABOUT SHAPING EXERCISES
Shaping exercises tend to fall into 2 categories: single joint isolation exercises and regular compound movements done with an abnormal body position.
Single joint isolation movements fit the category of ‘impotent’ exercises described above. By nature, isolation exercises require lighter loads than compound movements for the same muscle. And by nature, isolating a muscle means that the lighter load being used is applied to much less musculature.
Isolation exercises usually hurt like hell! You can achieve a very intense, isolated burn unlike that felt from compound movements. They FEEL as though they are working the muscle very hard. And they are. The problem is that they do not provide a particularly intense systemic stress and therefore the adaptive response is minimal. No matter how hard you feel you are training with isolation exercises, the inherent stress is light; i.e. not intense.
Using abnormal body positions on compound movements – like pointing your toes in or out while squatting – to train a different aspect of a muscle is simply dangerous. If it was possible to work the outer thigh at the expense of the inner thigh during squats, for example, then the knee joint would have to be subjected to enormous sheering and rotational stresses that would inevitably lead to chronic injury.
Similarly, changing a compound exercise so that far less weight can be lifted does not make the exercise more effective or intense. By definition, a lighter weight means that a movement it is less intense, less effective and typically damaging to the joints. That burn you feel in your outer pecs during bench presses to the neck is likely to be a nerve impingement in the acromion complex or a strain to one or all of the rotator cuff muscles. And there is going to be little stimulus for pec growth when you halve the weight stress that the torso normally accommodates.
TRUTH ABOUT MASS BUILDING EXERCISES
The basic ‘mass building’ exercises are the most effective, efficient exercises you can use. They apply the greatest load stress upon the body thereby inducing the most significant adaptive, muscle growth response. These exercises include squats, deadlifts, rows, bench presses, seated or standing presses – basically any multi-joint compound movement.
Mass builders won’t make you ‘massive’, ‘bulky’ or ‘blocky’. That myth comes from the fact that big, bulky, blocky looking people with wide hips tend to be very good at lifting big weights on basic compound exercises.
But, as explained above, your structure has already been set by your genetics. If you are big and blocky then the use of light, ineffective exercises is not going to make you small and/or shapely.
Heavy mass building exercises are the most efficient for maximising your natural muscular shape. And when it comes down to it, maximising what you’ve been structurally handed is all you can do anyway.
Heavy, compound exercises actually enable you to carry the greatest possible lean mass at any given body size. In other words, they are the best exercises for making you as lean and muscular as you need. If you don’t want excessive size, don’t worry; excessive size doesn’t tend to happen by accident. Besides which, your size is a function of how much you eat. How strong you are only determines how much of you is muscle.
QUANTIFICATION: THE REAL ISSUE
Consider how much muscle you can expect to gain in a year of focussed mass building. The late Mike Mentzer based his exercise calculations on expecting no more than 5kilos of new muscle per year. Pro bodybuilder Dexter Jackson says not to expect more than 2.5kg per year. And some Natural Bodybuilding ‘experts’ have publicly recommended lowering your expectations to 1-2kg per year.
Whatever quantity of muscle you expect to gain in a year of focussed mass building, it will be several multiples more than you could expect to gain in a year of focussed ‘shaping’ training. In short, you can expect to gain pretty close to nothing in an entire year of training with ‘shaping’ exercises.
And if virtually no net gain is the best possible result from using supposed ‘shaping’ exercises for a year, how much change can you expect to the shape of your physique? We already established above that the notion of a muscle structurally reconstructing itself for no functional purpose is absurd as well as technically impossible. If there is any possibility of any change being made to a physique with exactly the same quantity of muscle, on the same skeleton, with the same muscle attachments, then that change will be totally imperceptible.
Yet if you’d focussed on supposed mass building you could have achieved a significant improvement in your muscle mass and therefore your body composition and your shape.
CONCLUSION
Through effective, hard, heavy weight training and strict dieting you can sculpt yourself an amazing body with fantastic shape. But you cannot change the structural shape of your body.
As such, regardless of your specific goals and structural weaknesses an exercise program for bodybuilding/shaping should always be focussed on heavy weights using basic compound movements.
Other than to train through injury, recover from a period of overtraining or successful overreaching, ‘shaping’ movements are never required or effective. They can be fun for something different to do when you are bored but otherwise supposed ‘shaping’ movements do not shape your muscles.
* (technically correct terminology abandoned in favour of spatially and communicatively superior options)
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
Bodybuilding is full of wishful exercise and diet myths borne of our innate need to feel in control of our circumstances. None of us wants to accept that our short biceps, fat bums, narrow clavicles, or toothpick calves can’t be improved. Even if we accept that we might be unable to achieve perfection, we still need to believe we can neutralise our aesthetic weaknesses.
This article is a mixture of good and bad news for those of you training to ‘shape’ your body rather than just build size. The good news is that you do have massive control over your overall shape. Even better news is that those changes that you can make can be made quite quickly.
But the bad news is that just about everything you’ve read or been told about ‘shape training’ is probably untrue. Worse than that, following the popular ‘shape training’ advice will probably ensure that you fail to achieve the shape you could have otherwise. Read on if you want to know what works and what doesn’t.
FOUNDATIONS
Before we even begin discussing dietary, chemical and exercise interventions for shaping muscles, something must be said about your base structure; your skeleton.
Your skeleton is the frame upon which all your muscles attach. Without some sort of violent surgical procedure (or pre-pubertal genetic manipulation) you are not going to be able to change your skeletal structure and therefore your overall shape is set before you even start training.
MUSCLE ATTACHMENTS
Where and how your muscles attach to your skeleton is another fixed, structural quality that profoundly affects your shape. In fact, it is your muscle attachments that ultimately determine the shapes of each and every muscle in your body. The tissue in between the attachments can only get bigger or smaller.
Using the thighs as an example, whether you are ever going to have an outer thigh ‘sweep’ like Capriese Murray or Lenda Murray depends upon where your outer thigh muscle (Vastus Lateralis) attaches at the hip* and knee* as well as the size and shape of your hips and femur.
Whether you will ever have an inner-thigh region that appears full and round from the knee to the groin like Jon Davie depends significantly upon where the Gracilis, Sartorius and Adductor Longus attach (among others). If your Gracilis attaches closer to the front of your knee and your Sartorius attaches further around your hip toward your groin then you are likely to be forever frustrated with a thin, bowed looking lower thigh similar to Greg Kovacs (though probably not quite as big). And all the hip adducting exercises in the world won’t change that.
In the case of your arm, if you have ‘short biceps’ like Luke Wood (where there seems to be a large gap between your bicep and forearm) then you will always have short biceps. You cannot build muscle where there is only tendon. So if you get a big burn and pump in the bicep tendon from those preacher curls you read would build your ‘lower biceps’, that’s actually an injury!
The depth of separations between muscles is also largely determined by their attachments. If the muscle attachments create wide, flat muscles with significant overlaps then your separations will never be particularly deep. And all the peak-contraction, isolation exercises in the world will be unable to ‘carve’ out any separations.
So subtle differences in the attachment points of different people’s muscles profoundly affect the ultimate visual impression made by their physiques. And short of surgical detachment and reattachment, there is nothing you can do about what your genetics gave you. You just have to work with them.
But before you hang up your training belt and quit bodybuilding forever, consider that Ronnie Coleman, Dorian Yates and Lee Haney have all been widely criticised for their poor abdominal muscles’ shape and structure among other faults. Yet these 3 men have collectively held the Worlds greatest bodybuilding title for over 20 years!
So just because your structure isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it can’t be totally awesome. Just be realistic about what you hope to look like.
MUSCLE TYPES?
There is no tissue in the body known as ‘bulk’. Neither is there a type of muscle known as ‘toned muscle’. Muscle is only muscle. How hard, soft, separated, cut, vascular or ‘toned’ it looks is a function mainly of how much fat covers it.
Front row Rugby forwards don’t have ‘bulk’ – they have a lot of muscle covered in a lot of fat. They might not be fat by comparison to the slobs in the pub watching them play but the reason they don’t look hard and defined is because they are fat.
So you cannot ‘build bulk’; there is no such thing. Neither can you develop a bulky physique as a result of exercise choice. But you can cover your muscle with a layer of fat giving the ‘bulky’ appearance of front row rugby players.
Similarly, you cannot build ‘cut’ or ‘separated’ muscles as opposed from building bigger muscles with obviously deeper gaps between them. But you can reduce your muscle blurring body fat to see the cuts and separations already between your muscles.
LOGICAL ADAPTATIONS
Muscle growth occurs as a logical adaptation to extremely stressful levels of muscular tension; otherwise known as stinking heavy weights!
Muscle exists to exert the forces necessary to create movement. Different types of exercise – stressful movement – will stimulate different adaptations within the muscle. But these adaptations will always relate to the functional force generating capacity of the muscle; either making the muscle able to apply force longer, faster, through a greater range of movement or just produce more peak force.
Like all adaptations, the bodies response to weight training stresses will be the least required to get the job done. Despite what many bodybuilding writers will make it sound like, the body is not interested in making extravagant, extraneous changes to muscle form and structure for the purpose of improving our external aesthetic form. Unfortunately, the psychological stress of possessing a subjectively unattractive body does not induce positive physical adaptations in muscle.
You cannot build ‘thigh sweep’ or peaked biceps or wide pecs if you weren’t born with the structural potential (the combination of skeletal structure and muscular attachments) to do so. And if you were born with great structure then you can still only increase the overall size of the muscle in the areas you already have it.
SHAPING VS MASS BUILDING EXERCISES
While the basic compound exercises such as squats, deadlifts, rows, and presses are often described as ‘mass builders’, many other exercises are touted as ‘shaping’ exercises. Shaping exercises apparently train their respective muscles from different ‘angles’ thereby allowing you to change the shape of your muscles. Nonsense!
A more correct categorisation for weight training exercises would be ‘potent’ and ‘impotent’. An exercises’ effectiveness or potency can be measured by how comparatively quickly body composition changes (muscle gains) are made. And in all cases you will find a basic ‘mass builder’ outperforms a ‘shaping’ exercise.
The simple fact is that an exercises ability to stimulate muscle growth is the sole determining factor as to whether it can positively affect your body composition (ratio of fat to muscle) and therefore your shape. That means that even if you are a bodyshaper you should be doing heavy deadlifts and presses to look your shapliest.
The inefficiency of shaping exercises for developing muscle is well recognised even by those who recommend their employment in a training program. As such, it is frequently recommended in bodybuilding literature that a trainer should build mass with ‘mass building exercises’ before later trying to shape it with ‘shaping movements’. The inference is that once a quantity of muscle tissue has been developed for functional reasons, the body will then happily disassemble and reassemble the muscle proteins with an all new shape; extending or reducing attachments, adding partial-length fibres where there were none previously and disproportionately thickening sections of muscle for no functional purpose whatsoever. And all of this will apparently happen in response to an exercise that is incapable of developing the muscle from the start.
Though we might wish the body was aesthetically generous and functionally schizophrenic in response to otherwise impotent, ineffective exercises, it isn’t. Adaptations to exercise are logical and functional. And while unnatural positioning of your feet during Hack Machine Squats might eventually require a new cruciate ligament, it is unlikely to require a kilo of functionally useless, partial length muscle fibres added to the outside portion of your thigh (Vastus Lateralis)!
TRUTH ABOUT SHAPING EXERCISES
Shaping exercises tend to fall into 2 categories: single joint isolation exercises and regular compound movements done with an abnormal body position.
Single joint isolation movements fit the category of ‘impotent’ exercises described above. By nature, isolation exercises require lighter loads than compound movements for the same muscle. And by nature, isolating a muscle means that the lighter load being used is applied to much less musculature.
Isolation exercises usually hurt like hell! You can achieve a very intense, isolated burn unlike that felt from compound movements. They FEEL as though they are working the muscle very hard. And they are. The problem is that they do not provide a particularly intense systemic stress and therefore the adaptive response is minimal. No matter how hard you feel you are training with isolation exercises, the inherent stress is light; i.e. not intense.
Using abnormal body positions on compound movements – like pointing your toes in or out while squatting – to train a different aspect of a muscle is simply dangerous. If it was possible to work the outer thigh at the expense of the inner thigh during squats, for example, then the knee joint would have to be subjected to enormous sheering and rotational stresses that would inevitably lead to chronic injury.
Similarly, changing a compound exercise so that far less weight can be lifted does not make the exercise more effective or intense. By definition, a lighter weight means that a movement it is less intense, less effective and typically damaging to the joints. That burn you feel in your outer pecs during bench presses to the neck is likely to be a nerve impingement in the acromion complex or a strain to one or all of the rotator cuff muscles. And there is going to be little stimulus for pec growth when you halve the weight stress that the torso normally accommodates.
TRUTH ABOUT MASS BUILDING EXERCISES
The basic ‘mass building’ exercises are the most effective, efficient exercises you can use. They apply the greatest load stress upon the body thereby inducing the most significant adaptive, muscle growth response. These exercises include squats, deadlifts, rows, bench presses, seated or standing presses – basically any multi-joint compound movement.
Mass builders won’t make you ‘massive’, ‘bulky’ or ‘blocky’. That myth comes from the fact that big, bulky, blocky looking people with wide hips tend to be very good at lifting big weights on basic compound exercises.
But, as explained above, your structure has already been set by your genetics. If you are big and blocky then the use of light, ineffective exercises is not going to make you small and/or shapely.
Heavy mass building exercises are the most efficient for maximising your natural muscular shape. And when it comes down to it, maximising what you’ve been structurally handed is all you can do anyway.
Heavy, compound exercises actually enable you to carry the greatest possible lean mass at any given body size. In other words, they are the best exercises for making you as lean and muscular as you need. If you don’t want excessive size, don’t worry; excessive size doesn’t tend to happen by accident. Besides which, your size is a function of how much you eat. How strong you are only determines how much of you is muscle.
QUANTIFICATION: THE REAL ISSUE
Consider how much muscle you can expect to gain in a year of focussed mass building. The late Mike Mentzer based his exercise calculations on expecting no more than 5kilos of new muscle per year. Pro bodybuilder Dexter Jackson says not to expect more than 2.5kg per year. And some Natural Bodybuilding ‘experts’ have publicly recommended lowering your expectations to 1-2kg per year.
Whatever quantity of muscle you expect to gain in a year of focussed mass building, it will be several multiples more than you could expect to gain in a year of focussed ‘shaping’ training. In short, you can expect to gain pretty close to nothing in an entire year of training with ‘shaping’ exercises.
And if virtually no net gain is the best possible result from using supposed ‘shaping’ exercises for a year, how much change can you expect to the shape of your physique? We already established above that the notion of a muscle structurally reconstructing itself for no functional purpose is absurd as well as technically impossible. If there is any possibility of any change being made to a physique with exactly the same quantity of muscle, on the same skeleton, with the same muscle attachments, then that change will be totally imperceptible.
Yet if you’d focussed on supposed mass building you could have achieved a significant improvement in your muscle mass and therefore your body composition and your shape.
CONCLUSION
Through effective, hard, heavy weight training and strict dieting you can sculpt yourself an amazing body with fantastic shape. But you cannot change the structural shape of your body.
As such, regardless of your specific goals and structural weaknesses an exercise program for bodybuilding/shaping should always be focussed on heavy weights using basic compound movements.
Other than to train through injury, recover from a period of overtraining or successful overreaching, ‘shaping’ movements are never required or effective. They can be fun for something different to do when you are bored but otherwise supposed ‘shaping’ movements do not shape your muscles.
* (technically correct terminology abandoned in favour of spatially and communicatively superior options)
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
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