Building the Behemoth

A friend of mine here in Tuscaloosa - Jared Smith - has a new blog. It looks like it'll be pretty cool (especially if you're into super-high-intensity training).

Here's a link:

http://buildingthebehemoth.blogspot.com/

Overtraining Your Movement Pattern

First, I want to apologize for my long delay between blog posts. I have been more than a little busy as of late. Between work (I do have a regular “9 to 5” job), moving into a new house (and all that entails), and writing quite a bit of articles, my blog just took a back seat. (Speaking of writing articles, I now have an article in almost every issue of Planet Muscle, so that’s where you can find all of my latest stuff. And I now only write occasionally for Iron Man.)

With that out of the way, let’s get on with this blog post:

As regular readers of my material know, I believe that fairly high-volume, frequent training is the best (the quickest, the most result-producing) route to bigger, stronger, more (dare I say?) functional muscles. (It must be noted that this wasn’t always my opinion. If you read a lot of my early stuff in Iron Man – mid ‘90s to very early ‘00s – you’ll find that my training programs tended to be based around infrequent training. But all of that changed when I actually started performing high-volume workouts, and began to achieve fantastic results.)

So, basically, I think the whole “overtraining” thing is overdone. Here’s something from Christian Thibaudeau (which you can find in a previous post from last July):

One of the reasons why these people fail to train hard enough to stimulate gains is out fear of overtraining (which is often just a justification for laziness).

Well, let me tell you this: True overtraining is exceptionally rare. In all my life as an athlete and coach, I've only seen two real cases of overtraining, and in both the guys were Olympians training over 30 hours per week under tremendous psychological stress.

In reality, most elite athletes train over 20 hours per week, with some even hitting the 40-hour mark. Not all of this is strength training; speed and agility work, conditioning, and skill practices are also on the menu.

Before you throw the doping argument in my face, I've seen a ton of young athletes who were obviously not on drugs follow that type of schedule. I've worked as the head strength coach of a sports academy where kids ranging from 12 to 18 would go to school from 8:30 am to 12:00 pm, then train or practice from 1:00 to 5:00 pm every day. Their programs included daily strength work, agility training, and practices cumulating over 20 hours per week. None of them were overtraining; all of them progressed quite well.

Having said that, I think there are a couple of reasons why lifters often believe they’re overtrained. The first – and I’ve mentioned this elsewhere – is that they have a low work capacity. They’re simply not capable of frequent, intense, voluminous training because they have never placed demands on their bodies that would (eventually) allow them to perform such workouts. In more simplistic terms, the reason you get so sore from training everything once per week is, well, you only train everything once per week.

But there’s also another reason.

While it’s relatively difficult to actually overtrain, it’s relatively easy to overtrain your movement pattern. I believe this is the reason that the methods of Louie Simmons have been so successful. Westside Barbell understands this, and they make good use of it. This is also the reason why you can’t continually train heavy on the same exercise and make good progress. Your body grows too accustomed too quickly to the exercise, and another exercise needs to take its place. If you have attempted to train your bench press heavy (and by heavy, I mean sets of triples, doubles, or singles) on successive weeks, then you probably know this. The first week, everything goes well. The second week – especially if you’re new to these almost maximal loads – things go even better; you’re stronger. By the third week, however, you’re often back to your week one poundages. And if you attempt it for a 4th week, then you’re even weaker than week one. Well, technically you’re not weaker, but you are slower from training the specific movement pattern just too damn often.

Here’s another thing: depending on the exercise, certain movement patterns become more quickly overtrained than others. Let’s take powerlifting as an example. You can train the squat frequently for long periods of time. This is the reason that Olympic lifters can max out on this exercise every damn day (although I don’t advise training that extreme). But you can’t train the bench press and the deadlift to anything approximating the same frequency. You can train the bench press more frequently than the deadlift, but I still wouldn’t advise more than one all-out bench press session more than once per week. As for the deadlift: about one all-out session every two to three weeks seems to work well for most people.

But all of this is not to say that you shouldn’t train the muscles that you deadlift and bench press with frequently.

To make all of this very simple to understand, here’s the “in-the-gym” version of how to apply what you (may have) learned here:

• Build up your work capacity to the point that you can train with a fairly large amount of volume 4 to 6 days per week.
• Train your squat frequently. I think that 2 days per week will do fine.
• Train the muscles that you squat and deadlift with even more frequently. I think 3 to 4 days per week is ideal. Not all of this has to be weighted workouts – I love sled dragging, tire flipping, and farmer’s walks.
• On average, I believe that you should train your upper body three to four times weekly. Just make sure that the movement pattern is different at each workout. At every session, put the emphasis on a vertical push or pull movement and a horizontal push or pull movement. That’s 4 different movement patterns for each workout.

Around the Web

Here are some collections of articles that I discovered on the web recently, thought I'd share them with you. Some are new; some aren't. But they're new to me, so they might be new to some of y'all, as well.

If you haven't been to it, a great site is www.theironsamurai.com. It's an Olympic lifting site run by strength coach Nick Horton. I don't know the guy—never heard of him until I came across the site—but he has some great stuff for all lifters, not just Olympic lifters. (Oh, and he has a touch of Zen here and there, as well, which might also interest some of you.)

Here's a really good post from his site: http://www.theironsamurai.com/2011/02/09/happy-birthday-to-me-reflections-on-lifting-coaching-and-the-pre-masters-class/. It has his thoughts on lifting and coaching, including a good bit on Bulgarian style training. For those of you who are fans of high-volume training (or would like to give it a shot), Nick has some insights that can help you.

For those of you who powerlift, here's an article on the great Latvian lifter Konstantin Konstantinovs: http://www.ampedtraining.com/2009/strength/konstantinovs-is-a-badass

The article contains some footage of his lifts, and then a discussion (albeit brief) at the end about his form. I always deadlifted with a similar form, and found that it greatly aided in my pull. Beware, however, you do need a really strong lower back.

Over at Mike Mahler's website: www.mikemahler.com, Mike has re-printed my article "The Mass-Building, Split-Training Ultimate." http://www.mikemahler.com/articles/massbuilding.html

It's an article that's pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. Seriously, though, Mike Mahler seems like that rare combination of great strength coach and all around good guy. Even if you don't read my article, visit his website and check out a lot of the other great stuff he has to offer.

Finally—for all lifters—here's a terrific article from the always-good Dan John entitled "Can it Really be That Simple?" : http://www.dragondoor.com/can_it_really_be_that_simple/

Good stuff.

Q&A

If anyone has e-mailed me in the last couple of months, and not gotten a response, please feel free to write me again.

It appears that quite a lot of the mail I was receiving was going to "junk," and I'm afraid that I probably deleted a good deal of my mail without ever responding.

Ultimate At-Home Workouts

Ultimate At-Home Workouts

Volume One: The One with the Session from the Night of March 7th

The Intro

Recently, I’ve been forced to do almost all of my training at home. At first, this might not sound like that big of a deal to you. If you have read my posts—or my articles—for any length of time, then you know that I trained at home for years. But that was different. At one time, I had over 1,300 pounds of weights in my garage. (I counted the total amount of weight one point, but I don’t remember what it was—and I probably accumulated even more stuff after I counted it.) My entire garage was a gym. This included a squat rack, a bench press (Forza, good stuff), and a deadlift platform.

When my wife and I separated a couple of years ago, I trained with minimum equipment. At the time, I really didn’t know how to train using minimal equipment, since I hadn’t done it since I was a teenager and my father bought me one of those old, concrete DP sets for my 15^th birthday. (On a note unrelated to the rest of this post, I want to say that a lot of lifters around my age owe a great debt to DP for getting us started in the iron game. I digress…) Anyway, I experimented with minimal-equipment training and I got some good results. (Which you can read on past entries here on the blog.)

But that didn’t last too long. After a couple months of at home workouts, I moved all of my weights to a friend’s garage/wrecker pen. And I’ve been training consistently there for the last year and a half (or so).

That changed recently. I had to move my weights. So I called up my training partner Puddin’ (or, rather, he called me) and we moved all of those weights to a mini-storage. I’m sure that before long I will once again find a place to store my weights (such as a new house), but until that time arrives I am going to make the most of my situation. (Puddin’—also known as “The Ox” and “Big Perm”; occasionally known by his given name, Richard—will have none of this bodyweight and limited equipment training. He needs his heavy iron—or so he says—and so he plans on joining a local gym for the time being.)

And so, I go it alone.

I’m kind of looking forward to it. I’ve wanted to write a bodyweight-training article for some time, so I’m going to experiment with several training strategies that I believe to be effective—strategies that I didn’t use during my last stint with this sort of training. So far, I’m enjoying the workouts, and the results that I’m getting.

I’m limiting my weights even more than my situation requires. I have space where I currently live for more equipment, but for the time being I’m going to stick with a few pair of dumbbells.

The Advice

Before we go any further, I want to give you some advice about at-home workouts. Much of this advice applies to workouts in your garage gym or your average commercial gym, but I think that it would do some good to discuss it. (By the way, some of this advice is not the typical stuff you’ll hear from the “experts” in a lot of the muscle magazines or—God forbid—the internet forums.) But I think it’s sound advice none-the-less:

· Train hard. True, I don’t always recommend training to “failure”. But you still need to push yourself. The harder you push yourself—always striving to move more and more weight; always striving for a few more repetitions—the better the results.

· Stick with basic exercises. One of the beauties of at-home training is that it forces you to work hard on basic exercises. You could do worse than a hard session of bodyweight squats, push-ups (in whatever variety you choose to use), overhead dumbbell presses, dumbbell rows, and farmer’s walks.

· Don’t be afraid to train long. I know that it’s popular these days to workout for 45 minutes, then call it quits. But I want to go on record right now and say that some of the best results I’ve ever gotten are with hard workouts that lasted 1 and a half to 2 hours long. When I was powerlifting, I broke all my personal bests with Russian-style training that typically lasted 2 hours. And in the past year, I put on a lot of muscle mass—not to mention strength—when I trained 4 to 5 days per week, with sessions lasting at least one and a half hours.

· Overtraining is for pussies! Okay, maybe I went slightly overboard with this one. But, seriously, the whole overtraining thing has been way overdone. Guys from the past that were massively big and strong ( such as Anthony Ditillo) and guys currently (think Christian Thibaudeau, Charles Staley, Chad Waterbury, and myself) always recommend that the more frequently you can train, the better. Of course, the frequent training has to be tempered with wisdom and insight, but it’s still the best way to go as long as you know what you’re doing.

The Workout

To give you a good idea of what an “ultimate at-home workout” might look like, here is the workout that I performed this evening:

· After a couple sets of hill sprints to get the blood flowing, I started the workout with dumbbell deadlifts for speed. Using 80-pound dumbbells, I performed 5 set of 10 reps. The goal on each repetition was to explode as fast as possible, then lower the weight under control.

· Next up was one of the best exercises you can ever do with a pair of dumbbells in your hands: the farmer’s walk. For these, I walked back and forth in my back yard until I felt fairly fatigued. (Yeah, I know, you think that’s kind of vague.) Using the 80 pound dumbbells again, I walked until I felt as if I was about to drop the weight, rested a couple of minutes, then repeated this for 8 more sets.

· The third exercise was one-arm overhead presses. Once again, it was the 80s. I didn’t push these as hard (since I did a whole shite-load of push-ups the night before), but I still did 5 sets of 5 reps.

· The “heavy” stuff out of the way, I grabbed my 30 pound dumbbells and cranked out 5 sets of 20 reps of dumbbell overhead presses. I moved fast here; resting just long enough to catch my breath.

· For the final “weighted” exercise of the session, I did 100 reps of dumbbell curls with the 30s. For these, I did a set of 20, rested very briefly, did a set of 20, rested very briefly again, and then repeated for another 3 sets.

· Last, but definitely not least, I did sets of 50-rep bodyweight squats for 30 minutes. I’m not sure how many sets I did here. I did a set, rested long enough to get my strength back, did another set, and repeated in like manner until the 30-minutes were over.

· All told, the workout took around an hour and 45 minutes to 2 hours. Of course, half of the workout was comprised of farmer’s walks and bodyweight squats.

The key to making this training effective is to string several of these kinds of workouts together during a week. And then to string the weeks together into months, and the months into years, and then… well, you get it.

Jack Lalanne videos

I hope that everyone who reads my blog—and even those of you who have just stumbled upon it—will take the time to view some of the videos below. They are some of my favorites.

Although Jack Lalanne is gone, it's nice to know that we can still watch and listen to him as he tells it like it is.

Jack Lalanne - Worry