How To: Start Over

Whether you've been relaxing on the beach, travelling the world without a gym, or coming back from an injury, getting back to the gym can be a bitch.  And not easing your body back into the swing of things can hinder more than help.  Here are a few pointers for getting back on the wagon--and staying there.

Pro Tips: Weights

Want to maximize your results?  Want to train more effectively?  Of course you do.  Here are a few tips to help you improve your relationship with the iron.

Injury Prevention 101

When people think about lifting weights, they primarily think about becoming more muscular.  But the benefits of weight lifting extend far beyond that.  As I've discussed previously, weight lifting can have positive effects on both the endocrine and metabolic system.  But pumping iron also aids bone density and strengthens connective tissue--a desirable side effect that is often overlooked.  Working at a physical therapy office, I see a wide range of patients with a wide range of injuries that need to be rehabilitated, but the one trait they share is that their injuries could have either been prevented, or at the very least ameliorated, by strength training.  I'm not saying people don't hurt themselves doing stupid things; I am saying that doing stupid things won't hurt as badly if you develop your body.  Here are a few more ways to help keep yourself from going under the knife.

Second Chance // Insanity Legs

My training partner likes to say that past-failure techniques such as dropsets, cheat reps, partial reps, and even forced reps really only work because they give you a second chance at a high intensity set.  Now this might sound like a bit of a philosophical viewpoint, but it's actually an ultra realistic one.  Ultimately, intensity is the only deciding factor in growth and rate of growth.  Yes, isolation plays a part as well, but your intensity level directly impacts how completely you exhaust each muscle, how often you train each muscle, it even determines the volume you use during your training.

As you approach failure, several factors may determine which technique, if any, you choose to use.  Here are the most common past-failure techniques, along with a few guidelines and contraindications for each.  Remember, use them one at a time!

Having a Great Off-Season

So I've been more or less in off-season mode for the past year, my last prep was for the 2011 Tahoe Show last August.  But for a lot of people, summer is contest mode every year, so as we start heading into another bulking cycle, let's go over a few thoughts for having the most successful off-season possible.  How do we define success?  Lean muscle growth with a lean starting point for the next prep.  Credit to John Meadows, aka mountaindog1 on professionalmuscle.com, for formulating the four thoughts which were a basis for this post.  I've re-worded to improve flow and inserted my own comments where appropriate, as well as noting which comments are purely his.

Under Pressure

Funny thing about jargon, you only understand it if it's your jargon.  I realize that I throw some phrases out there that are self-explanatory to me, but may be completely indecipherable to everyone else.  Like when a DJ friend asks me about uptempo and I'm like, "Wtf is uptempo?"  Or when my training partner is talking computer stuff with another nerd and all I can hear is, "My computer is really fast and cool--literally!"  It happens in the gym too.  "Mind-muscle connection," "positive nitrogen balance," "working weight."  We all throw these kinds of terms out there and expect others to understand them without explanation.  Maybe we bodybuilders, as a community, are just trying to make it sound more complicated than "Me lift heavy thing!  Me grow strong!"  At any rate, today I will be explaining the time-under-tension principle.

Muscular Hypertrophy Basics

There are a few basic, mandatory components to muscular hypertrophy.  If you want to get big(ger), you need to at least be aware of them--ideally you should be using them too.  Ever wonder how the people you see at the gym can lift and lift and lift but never really get much bigger?  It's not rocket science or magic--they are simply not employing proper hypertrophy principles.  First we'll go into training principles, then some systemic stuff.

HIT It Hard for Summer

Yes, I've beaten the high intensity horse quite a bit, but there is still a lot of confusion out there about it, so I'm going to keep beating.  I've also seen quite a few videos (like when I check the channels of my subscribers) regarding "changing things up" and "trying something new and radical" in order to get the results that haven't been achieved using other methods.  There are a few issues that will prevent the "shaking it up" from working super well in most cases and I'll talk about those in a minute.  But ultimately, HIT absolutely works!  If it's not working, you're not doing it right!  There's a reason most huge bodybuilders gravitate towards the same type of training in the end--if you look at the splits, rep ranges, and general training principles being used by most pros, you will see that they are largely the same.

Pump It Up

I've kinda talked about pumps before, but let's go into a little more detail this time.  

Firstly, what is a "pump"?  Many individuals can train for months or years before experiencing one.  Seasoned lifters can grow so accustomed to them that the pumps themselves go largely unnoticed.  But what the hell is it?  Mechanically, the "pump" is a profusion of blood in the target muscle caused by the body's natural reaction to muscular contractions.  In addition to cleaning up the cell damage caused by catabolism, your body is also constantly replenishing ATP stores in order to power your muscles.  This causes a major influx of blood to the target muscle, creating mild congestion, e.g. swelling, slight numbness and tingling, as well as a slightly engorged appearance.

Muscular contractions (such as those performed during weight training) originate as conscious effort from the brain.  Basically, an electrical charge innervates the muscle fibers, causing a cascade of effects which ultimately leads to a contraction.  Within each innervated muscle fiber are myofibrils surrounded by sarcoplasm--a calcium rich plasma--within each myofibril are thin filaments formed by actin and myosin.  The electrical impulse from your brain depolarizes the inner portion of the muscle fiber, activating voltage-gated calcium channels which react with calcium-release channels.  These channels react with the sarcoplasmic reticulum (an organelle regulating calcium concentrations in the muscle), allowing the release of calcium, which binds to the actin containing filaments.  This in turn allows a modulation of proteins along the actin chain, allowing the previously blocked myosin filaments to bind to the actin filaments.  In the absence of calcium, this is not possible.  This binding pulls the bands together, resulting in contractile force.  Then, ATP (remember this guy?) binds to the myosin, weakening its binding state to actin and thereby releasing it--resulting in a relaxation of the muscle fibers.

So during muscular contractions, your body is required to replenish oxygen and ATP, as well as remove waste--all of which are done through the bloodstream.  So why have some people not experienced a "pump"?  Muscular contractions are not all equal.  The complete activation of all muscle fibers will require more bloodflow than a contraction where only some fibers are activated.  In a muscle where overload is not being experienced, there will also be less demand for blood.  This is why people who train light or people who don't train well will often go pump-less.  Once again, this is why isolation, overload, and proper form are absolutely necessary.  

How important is a pump in muscular hypertrophy?  There is absolutely no evidence to indicate that muscular pumps in any way correlate directly with growth.  Meaning, just because your quads got hella pumped,  you may not have initiated hella adaptive response (on a strictly acute basis).  Ya feel me?  However, muscular pumps are an excellent indicator of isolation and should definitely be sought in each workout, and are highly effective as a long-term benchmarking tool as well.  It goes without saying that fully activating each muscle--each fiber--will absolutely net you greater gains.  In many cases, this will result in a ridiculous pump as well.  In my personal experience, pumps are a thing of practice and effort; recognizing the sensation aids in isolation and also acts as a reminder to continually improve form.  I also find that those who do not use a HIT approach will have a harder time getting and maintaining pumps (this was me when I first started). 

Additionally, there are some who feel the stretching aspect of a pump to be a desired effect in and of itself.  These folks argue that the fascia (the sheath surrounding your muscle) becomes stretched as the muscle becomes more and more pumped, or engorged with blood.  This is the basis for Fascia Stretch Training-7 (FST-7).  This program involves doing 7 sets per exercise, usually 2-3 sets performed progressively heavier, followed by the remaining sets performed progressively lighter and also in a more rapid succession.  Arguably, this maximizes the pump in the target muscle, literally stretching the fascia by packing more and more blood into the muscle.  The argued benefit from FST-7 is basically that by stretching the fascia out, you are allowing for additional muscle volume to be present.  I've used this in the past as a sort of modified "drop-set," but it's a take-it-with-a-grain-of-salt type thing like everything else.

Muscular pumps can be enhanced by nitric oxide products, i.e. SuperPump, Jack3d, etc.  For my review of NO products, read this.

Tiny Repping = Not So Tiny Failing

One of the biggest crimes people commit against their bodies, in the gym anyways, is performing exercises with too much weight.  Most commonly, this leads to form breaking down and non-performance of full repetitions, or tiny repping.  Although I've espoused the benefits of heavy weight training many, many times, it is important to note that "heavy training" and "training with a lot of weight" are not necessarily the same thing--in fact, they are often not.  The weight used during training is only one aspect of the overload as perceived by your muscles--making the exercise more difficult, i.e. making the exercise feel heavier, can also be done by improving form, increasing the number of reps performed, and most importantly, using a full range of motion.  In many cases this requires a significant reduction in weight.  There are other techniques for increasing difficulty as well, such as pre-exhaustion, but those are pointless if you can't do the elementary stuff.  

State of Nature

You may be able to see in color, hear in stereo and solve long division in your head, but your body is as unaware of its surroundings as that house plant you can't quite kill or keep alive.  Do you think that because you wear shoes your feet know they aren't touching the ground?  You think because you sit down at a table to eat with a fork and knife your body digests meat any differently than it did 10,000 years ago when you killed it yourself?  You think your muscles know they're lifting steel plates off a stack instead of repairing your shelter or killing prey? You think that's air you're breathing?

Get Freqy

Part one and two of this discussion involved training splits and training intensity.  The next piece of the puzzle is training frequency!

Training frequency affects everyone, and it affects every part of your training regimen.  Train too often and you will fall victim to chronic overtraining, tendonitis and tendonosis, and fatigue.  Last week I discussed the impacts and benefits of high intensity training, but training frequency necessarily limits your intensity level too--you can only train at max intensity for so long.  We've all gone too hard and suffered the consequences at some point.

Epic Fail

Perhaps one of the most overlooked, yet vital, aspects of training, especially weight training, is training intensity.  This is one of the areas that can be the most difficult to progress in, yet yields the greatest returns.  It's also one of the most misunderstood aspects of weight training.  It's not enough to just train each muscle--it's not even enough to train each muscle well--you have to train each muscle intensely.  Harnessing and improving your training intensity is easily the most effective way to get consistent improvements, period.  

Splitting the Difference

Recently my training partner and I had a little discussion.  It went from pre-exhaustion theories to training splits to bio-mechanics.  Example: you'd think that pre-exhausting the biceps before a back workout would be a good way to help isolation, but I don't use that technique, do you?  Or training back and biceps together: makes sense and a lot of people do it, but I never do.  Why not?