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The Wisdom of Train Long, Not Hard

Simple Methods to Improve Your Workouts and Obtain Better Results      Over the years, one of my most popular articles has been my “ Train Long, Not Hard ” feature that I wrote for Testosterone Nation around the beginning of this century.  The title comes from a saying of Arthur Jones, the creator of Nautilus equipment and the father of so-called “high-intensity training” and the whole one-set-to-complete-momentary-muscular-failure approach to workouts.  He and Mike Mentzer are responsible for brain-washing an entire generation of lifters and quite possibly ruining real strength training, at least here in America—though I’ll save my ramblings on that for another essay or you can read my article on REAL High-Intensity Training .  Anyway, his saying goes like this: “You can either train long or you can train hard, but you can’t do both.”  Jones, quite obviously, believed that “train hard” was the answer to that conundrum.  In my article...
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The Power of Minimal

Minimalistic Programs for Strength and Power, Added Size, or an Aesthetic Physique      The other day I was at the grocery store stocking up on meat, veggies, and my other pantry mainstay, dog food and treats.  If you have a couple of Labradors who you consider part of the family, then you understand.  I’d actually go to the grocery store less but one of my dogs’ favorite pastimes is riding there, so we go a few times a week.  Anyway, on this particular day, I decided to look over the magazine rack—I’m glad that enough people read so that the magazine section still exists, despite the preponderance of fluff that most of them are filled with.  Obviously, I decided to peruse the “fitness” magazines, just to see what-the-heck are the current fads in training and to see what crap is currently being hawked in the advertisements.  But then I opened a pop-psychology rag and came across an interesting study that claimed that depression is direct...

More Thoughts on Grease-the-Groove and High-Frequency Training

     In my last article, I presented a few workout routines along with some training ideas for using high-frequency training (HFT) with what is commonly termed “grease-the-groove” workouts.  After writing it, I had a few thoughts still rumbling around my mind for some various ways that you can implement and use HFT.  HFT, just like other methods of training, has multiple routines and programs that you can work with.      Grease the groove training is sometimes called synaptic facilitation .  Why?  It comes from Russian research on strength training and the methods that the countries from the former Soviet Union used in both weightlifting and powerlifting training.  “Soviet research clarified that repetitive stimulation of a motoneuron increases the strength of its synaptic connections and may even form new synapses… the process is called synaptic facilitation or, in lifter speak, ‘grease the groove’... by frequen...