If one thing that is true about general training and diet it’s that people over complicate the ever living fuck out of every single aspect yet don’t see superior results and in most cases actually, realise inferior results than those who don’t pay attention to these factors. There are many areas in strength training and fitness in general that people try to run before they can walk on and end up making a pig’s ear of their training or diet as a result. Here are a few of those instances
1 – Warming up for lifting. Listen there is zero need to do a self-led yoga class before you do your squat workout it’s not necessary. The vast majority of world record lifters have been doing the same warm up for decades and it’s still super effective. I’ll let you in on the secret world heavy weight champion warm up for squat, it’s a closely guarded secret.
1 – Put on your workout clothes
2 – Go to the gym.
3 – Get a bar and a rack
4 – Do some squats with the bar.
5 – Grab two 20kg or 25kg plates and lob them on either end of the bar, put on collars (in some cases)
6 – Squat the weight for a few reps
7 – Grab two 20kg or 25kg plates and lob them on either end of the bar, put on collars (in some cases)
8– Squat the weight for a few reps
……
Continue to desired working weight or close to your opener if in competition.
Take yourself off the internet for a few days and get to the gym check out the strong guys and gals in your gym and see how much they don’t roll around on the ground like a fucking upside turtle. One of the disservices the internet has given our generation is having people who don’t even lift, convince people who don’t even lift that they need to do warm ups and exercises that people who don’t even lift do.
If you need to stretch to move properly for the exercise, you should stretch. If you don’t then don’t.
2 – If you’re not injured you don’t need to do rehab!
This one is related to the above, I’m just doing plenty of external rotator work to bring up the strength of my perfectly adequately strong external rotators… Stop it please for the love of god, stop fucking about with Thera bands and hips circles and get your candy ass under some fucking steel. Let me give you another top secret tip unless you’ve been prescribed a rehab protocol for an injury that you actually have by a qualified physiotherapist or sports medicine professional. Then you probably are doing random exercises prescribed arbitrarily by yourself or a jumped up moron…. Sorry I mean personal trainer or “coach”.
If you want to strengthen up smaller areas of your body such as adductors or rotator cuffs try applying the same process you do with your big muscle groups. Get some good exercises together and practice some progressive exercise and drop the entertainment exercises, please.
3 – DUP, Juggernaut method, Linear Progression, Conjugate Method, Westside – whatever the programme you’re doing I don’t give a fuck if God himself wrote it himself. They are all manifestations of the same thing; they are manipulations of
- Frequency
- Variation
- Volume
- Intensity
- Time
That’s it some do it some way, others do it the other way, with no context of your situation one is as about as good as the other. Just because a coach can’t properly apply volume and intensity manipulation for a period longer than 1 week doesn’t mean that the “insert stupid name method” is any better than the rest. Most of the programmes you have available out there are 1-8 week mesocycles with no context of where you are in your year or what your goals are. They are just a random training cycle you dug up and started doing.
A mesocycle I write for one lifter might be a career changing 8-12 weeks maybe they fix a big problem in their deadlift and put on 20-40kg as a result. For you, it might be a complete and utter waste of time and energy and result in zero progress. Without context, training programmes are about as useless as each other and it’s only through random attribution error that you are going to find the right training cycle at the right time. If you are a beginner the programme you do is literally fucking irrelevant, learn how to move well.
4 – You’re not a hard gainer or “genetically” fat – you’re not hard enough on yourself and you are either under or over eating.
Look there is no secret answer to this one so stop fucking looking.
- Record how much you are eating using an app like my fitness pal
- Depending on your goal up or reduce the calories.
- Do this until you start to see the change you want.
- When this stops happening to go back to stage 1 & 2.
If you’re finding it hard to get bigger you are probably training like you’re afraid of doing hard work and eating like you’re afraid of food. Pick a programme, smash your fucking self in the gym, eat a calorie surplus, eat 2.2g of protein per kg of body weight and sleep 8-10 hours a day. Apply this for 8-10 years or 3-5 years with drugs and you will see good results.
If you’re finding it hard to lose weight you are probably exercising like you’re afraid of sweating and vomiting and eating like you’re a gold fish and can’t remember that last time you had a meal. Do hard cardio for 18-22 mins 3-4x per week, do a full body strength routine 2-3x per week, eat a calorie deficit, eat 2.2g of protein per kg of bodyweight, monitor your weight and waist measurements on a weekly basis. Adjust your calories or exercise to keep progress going. Do this until you are the lean you want to be.
Done, someone give me a fucking noble prize. No doubt someone is getting out of shape over this one somewhere but I guarantee if you do the above and are brutally honest with yourself you will get the results you want.
5 – if you want to get better at an exercise do that exercise more – here lads and ladies it’s not a difficult concept this old specificity of training. If you’re fucking shite at the squat and you squat 1x per week, squatting 2-3x per week is going to make you better at squatting. People are too quick to give credence to “smart” answers over the obvious big rock answers. Sure things like variation and special adaptations on exercises are good teaching tools and can really help you to progress but if you’re not doing the big rock steps. I.e. if you’re not taking care of the fucking obvious stuff than the sexier stuff is basically pissing in a hurricane.
Your glutes not firing, weak hamstrings, weak quads (THIS ONE IS FUCKING HILARIOUS) trust me they aren’t if they truly were too weak then daily locomotion (read getting about) would be a problem. You just suck ass at the exercise because you don’t practice it enough, this pretty much sums up 85-90% of everyone who is shit at doing an exercise. Video yourself, think about what you’re doing or better yet get yourself a foul mouthed, gruffly sexy Irish strength coach.
6 – You are not always injured because you are actually always injured – here is an idea rather than constantly poking and prodding at a sore limb or joint like a buffoon. Try leaving it alone for a while and do what exercises you can pain free. After a period of time when it’s not acutely or searingly painful maybe start doing the exercises you used to not to be able to do light and build them up very slowly over time. When you start to get too sore back the fuck off and reapply the principals over a good period of time. Welcome to advanced ninja rehab 101.
For most people they are either
- Self-prescribing “rehab” exercises around a complete lack of training or understanding of injury and the rehabilitation of injury. They are pain directed (my shoulder is sore so I need to work on my shoulder) which leads them to more often than not follow a false flag and start to work on the symptom rather than the problem. This can often lead to them making the problem worse one the primary reasons for pain is to let you know you should back off from using it to allow it time to heal. Not as a signal you should poke, prod massage and exercise the affected area randomly.
- Misunderstanding creaking joints and muscles for something they are not – if you want to get good at anything in lifting, sport or exercises you’re going to get sore and stiff joints/muscles. You are probably also going to have to live through some sort of chronic pain for the rest of your life which is good because if you didn’t train or do sport you would probably have to live through some kind of chronic pain in later life. Fucked if you do and fucked if you don’t. Exercise is a stress, it causes damage to your body to force adaptation to make you more robust against the stress that caused the damage. If you lift weights you get stronger, if you run you get better at running, specific stress = specific adaptation. You are still going to get stiff and sore rolling about like a bell end on the floor isn’t going to stop that.
7 – If you are stiff and sore all the time and picking up niggles your probably not “injury prone” –
You are probably not managing your training load at all. Let’s go into a very common scenario in training when people don’t really appreciate point 3 when it comes to training.
Billy has been doing 5/3/1 for the last 6 months, he has made some good progress on his bench press and deadlift but he is lagging on his squat. Billy reads on the internet a programme called Smolov, billy likes the thought of 50+lbs on his squat in just a few weeks or months. Billy does the base cycle. Billy gets a knee tendinopathy. Billy has fucked his squat training for the next 6-12 months. He was unlucky to get injured what a shame couldn’t be helped survey says.
Look at the comparison table below and we can maybe pick up a minor mistake billy made in his training plan.
- Weekly Volume increase of – 600-800%
- Average intensity increase of – 4-7%
Billy has increase all of his workloads fucking massively and is wondering why he got injured. Billy is not a smart man.
The majority neigh the VAST MAJORITY of niggles and injures are down to people putting literally no thought into how they are progressing from week to week, month to month. I’m not going to claim I never do it, it’s an easy mistake to make but I try to always correct my mistake. Most people don’t even know they are making the mistake in the first place.
Marc
