Optimal Training

Anyone trying to get in shape or take their training to another level will find themselves surrounded by ads, products and programs all promising either a ripped, athletic, toned* physique or a massive swole lump of veins. But even beyond infomercials a lot of seemingly advanced sites *ahm tnation ahm* seem to throw around perfect diets and routines. German Volume TRAINING, max swole, anabolic diet etc. It’s unfortunate so many people get caught up in this mass-psychosis, hell you might be on a similar program right now. What’s the answer? What IS optimal training?

Back to the Basics

Answer: There is no such thing as optimal training. It’s not the routine that makes the individual but the individual who makes the routine. A routine is simply a blueprint to follow; giving a blueprint to a bunch of retards will result in a pile of indiscernible mess.  The fundamentals are such: the harder you work the better your results are. Its so mind- numbingly simple yet very few people seem to get it. If there is one thing I’d ask of anyone it is to get good working sets. You look at successful lifters from all disciplines and you see this one thing in common. You can do drop sets and pyramid structure, high rep and low rep,  slow negative, fast negative or fast positive whatever, as long as you are doing work, putting your muscular and nervous system under stress, you will get results.

Let me expand a little bit on ‘work’ because I see two types of failed individuals:

Mr. PR

Case:

Mr Pr. steps into the gym, usually neglecting any form of warm-up lest he get seen with lesser weights, accompanying him a spotter with an affinity for sharing. Mr. Pr doesn’t give a shit about form and his spotter cares too much to let him do a single rep by himself, the whole workout is performed assisted with the spotter acting as a quasi-smith machine that automatically removes 30-50lbs on request. I suspect Mr. Pr and his partner are short on time because they attempt to maximize every second by performing multiple simultaneous exercises both using the same barbell. Deadlifts are out of the question since no one has discovered how to spot on them.  When confronted  to do one rep on his own with the same weight that he would pump, spotted, for 14 reps, he wouldn’t be able to. Mr. Pr almost becomes part of the décor at the gym as years and years go by and he looks exactly the same as the first day you walked in and he was struggling to bench 195.

Solution:

Mr Pr needs to increase his soy intake tenfold and calm the fuck down. Some people think if they move more weight one way or another they get stronger. Decreasing ROM further and further and having your spotter help with his pinky isn’t going to make you any stronger, in fact you’re shooting yourself in the foot as you will simply stagnate or have very little progress, on top of that increasing your chance of injury since you work with weights that are too heavy with tendons and muscles that are too weak.

If your max on bench is 185, then that’s what you can bench, even with 4 guys to help you get 500lbs, you still can only bench 185.  The faster you come to terms with it and stop being in denial about yourself, the faster you can actually progress. Everybody is just watching too many videos and looking at too many pictures of the genetic elite who have gone through years and sometimes decades of training and had rivers of exogenous testosterone passed through their blood. Drop the weight, get good reps in, have a spotter help you for the last 1 or two reps and then you can actually work with heavy weight without making yourself look like an idiot.

The Liface

Case:

Who? Well here you have the opposite of Mr Pr, this guy wants to get everything perfect, you will almost always see him training by himself. His natural testosterone level is lower than that of a castrated lab mouse, and it shows. I can only classify his training as mechanical. Explosive training? Forget about it, this is about concentration. He focuses on every rep, trying to perform it with utter perfection, maintaining his tempo adagio from start to finish. He writes down everything, plugs them into spreadsheets and bar graphs, recording each week’s slope. It’s unfortunate that his Microsoft office skills are the only thing he succeeds to hypertrophy.

Advanced Training

Often we see this individual getting frustrated with the lack of results, looking everywhere except his actual training. In his mind training is a theoretical field which is to be mastered on paper and is comparable to quantum-physics. The Liface has a deep understanding of supplements which offers another avenue for more tinkering when the results stagnate indefinitely.

Solution:

500mg a day of harden the fuck up. I advise drenching all of his research and various supplements accumulated over the years in gasoline (or Spike) and burning them on a pyre. This one is more difficult to fix than Mr Pr since he lacks the actual enthusiasm to train. The only solution is being sent to a Bulgarian Olympic academy where failing to meet PRs is rewarded by lashing.

Conclusion

Please don’t be like these two specimens. It’s sometimes hard to find a good balance, between obsession with ever-increasing weights and obsession with winning St. Rippetoe’s award for elite form. Simply put, you must learn to maximize weight while maintaining a basic integrity of form.  To assure this, mix different sets together and have some days where you would max or just go heavy, and other days where the emphasis is less on PRS AT ALL COST but to train as hard as you can without having to sacrifice your form or sets.

Swole Mike

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