3 Elements of a Successful Workout

[Dork McSchlorp]

Hi Lee Labrada here! I am often asked by people in the gym for basic tips to help them in their workouts. Here are 3 basic, but important essentials of weight training program:• 1) Warming Up:o The goal here is to heat up your muscles and tendons with lighter weights to get them elastic and [...]

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[BigTallOx]

• 2)Lifting
o Stimulate, don’t annihilate. You want to stress the muscle enough to induce a growth response, but not so much that you over train it and break it down more than you can recover from. Think about sun tanning. The right amount will of sun will get you nice and tan. Too much results in a sunburn. Same with muscles! The right amount gives you growth. Too much makes you lose muscle.
o The first thing to do is choose the right amount of weight. Select a weight you can lift about 10 times. By the 10th time, it should be difficult to lift.
 This will take a little trial and error but you’ll quickly figure out how much you can handle
 Each repetition, or “rep” should take you about 2 sec to lift and 3 sec to return to the start position.
 Exercise until you cannot do another unassisted repetition—that’s called reaching positive failure.

URG, I'm starting to detest the phrase "over training". This article is talking about a single workout. Over training does not happen in a single workout, but it's a state that your body gets into after months/years of training. A single workout will not cause over training, and over training has a lot to do with things outside of training, like diet, stress levels, sleep patterns,... It actually has very little to do with actual training, IMHO. Fear of overtraining limits many peoples progress. I used to think that way, but I now realize the way my body builds muscle is to try to "annihilate" ( using their words ) and then to give my body enough rest between sessions. I bet the author is one who says you should train 5-6 days a week to. It's not the way to progress, IMHO. And I guess this is just a personal thing, but I hate analogies like the sun tanning one above ( I guess partly because it's a tactic used by the mormon church to try to convince unknowledgable people that certain false things are true, IMHO ). Just because something applies to suntanning it doesn't mean it applies to lifting, especially when experience proves it otherwise.

Also always lifting to positive failure in the 10 rep range is not the way to build muscle. I did that for years and made little progress. But once I started powerlifting and started doing lots of max singles and rarely doing sets of more than 6 reps, my muscle growth exploaded. Personally I think it's important to LIMIT how often you reach failure.

I can see there are time where there could be benefit from doing slow reps as described ( ie 2 seconds concentric and 3 second eccentric ) but I've also had lots of success with training dynamic effort. Stating to ALWAYS do 5 second reps is a little rediculous, IMHO.

[BendtheBar]

I've overtrained once (at the age of 21) - on a 3 on, 1 off push/pull/legs split. I was doing about 25-30 sets per work for about 4-5 months, including a load of squatting and rack deads each week. Even then, I would consider that overtraining experience minimal. I am like a freak and slept like a bear, and after 3 days I got back on the same program.

With that said, I've learned to annihilate a muscle in about 6 to 8 sets in my old age. I don't think I could do 30 sets for a muscle if I tried. Nothing against guys who train with greater volume. To each his own. I just like destroying my body in as few sets as possible.

Personally, I don't believe in an excessive amount of slow negatives with heavy weight. Take bench press for example, the body is meant to push the weight away, not slowly lower it. Slow lowering is not a natural movement. By "slowly lowering", I'm talking about excessive slowness. On top of this, eccentric stresses kill the CNS first and foremost. I am a firm believer that once the weight gets heavy, you allow the weight to determine the eccentric.

Sure, eccentrics have been show to be instrumental in muscle mass, but with heavy weight, all eccentrics become difficult anyway. So therefore, heavy weight creates heavy eccentric stress naturally.

Now, as a caveat, I think you can train to failure and use eccentrics to some degree if volume is minimized. DC training is a good example of this. DC doesn't have you doing 8 exercises per bodypart. At least with DC you get in, destroy, and get out.

[BigTallOx]

Originally Posted by BendtheBar

Personally, I don't believe in an excessive amount of slow negatives with heavy weight. Take bench press for example, the body is meant to push the weight away, not slowly lower it. Slow lowering is not a natural movement. By "slowly lowering", I'm talking about excessive slowness. On top of this, eccentric stresses kill the CNS first and foremost. I am a firm believer that once the weight gets heavy, you allow the weight to determine the eccentric.

Yeah. It's funny, I trained slow like that for so long ( with little/no progress ), now I have a hard time not lowering the weight slow when benching heavy. It's something that I was struggling with when I was strictly powerlifting. I think *only* training slow like that is missing half of the equation.

[andys_trim]

One of my good friends takes maybe 1 day off a week from the gym. He is one of the top 10 biggest guys that lifts at gold's. And he is only 19. He only takes protein powder, and is jacked. For him, I don't think overtraining exists, I on the other hand am on a 2 on 1 off for now until my knee gets healed up. I hate training for high reps (10 and up) I did it for 6 months and didn't make a ton of progress. When I got on here I started lifting heavy and made progress, put on muscle, and got stronger. I like to lift heavy weight for just a few reps.