Progressive overload: more thoughts...

When I was younger the only way to train was to train heavy. Heavy was the key word and experience driven "pedal-to-the-metal" by overinflated young egos. When I stepped into the gym I would see my peers loading up the bar - which was an experience in itself - to the very limit of their abilities. And often times beyond. "Cheating" (which translates swinging and jerking up the weight to complete the set when you can't simply admit that the weight is too heavy) was a common thing to do. Of course it would be - it was promoted by the Trainer of Champions himself as a way to break through a plateau - how could he be wrong?! The correct form was more of an "old fart's" advice than a necessity. Plateau was also a mysterious thing - kinda like flu - everyone experienced it but no one really knew what caused it.

But I digress. Ok, maybe not. Back to the principle of progressive overload. One thing that I think was forgotten back in those days (and even more so today) is the fact that it is not the heavier poundage itself that causes the growth - not directly anyways - it's the growth that results in increased ability to lift heavier poundage! Again, let me rephrase it, because I think it's important. It is widely believed that constantly adding weight to your lifts is what causes body to grow (I mean growing muscle, of course). It's not. It may appear this way, yes, but it's not. Not directly anyway. It's a very simplistic way of looking at it whereas the process is more complex. The problem is, it shifts the emphasis from growth to weights whereas in fact it should be the other way around!

Here's what I think happens. Weight simply exemplifies resistance, a stimulus, which - when applied against the muscle triggers certain metabolic processes in the body, which are mostly of catabolic nature - including breakdown of muscle cells and release of certain hormones. That's where the role of the weight is pretty much complete! The nature and mode of the lift and amount of weight only affect the intensity of the breakdown and a relative combination of hormones released into the blood - that's it! The rest has nothing to do with the amount of weight you lifted in the last session - outside, like I said, the intensity of "damage" sustained by the body from working to overcome resistance.

What happens next is quite simple (without going into much detail). The hormones flooding the body trigger a set of chemical and physiological reactions that aim to repair the damage. This is where nutrition comes into play. Just like with a construction team materials (concrete, cement, limestone, bituminous mix, paint, etc.) are required to do the job certain nutrients are needed to provide the body with proper elements to do the repair. No matter how skilled and efficient your building team is insufficient or poor quality materials can hinder the process and adversely affect the outcome. Usually a certain combination of protein, carbohydrates and fats is needed to make repair efforts more efficient.

Now that your building team is engaged all you need to do is to provide sufficient supply of materials and allow enough time for the team to complete their job. If you don't supply materials - it will affect the team's dedication; they are going to get frustrated, lazy and eventually have people transfered to other projects. If you don't allow enough time - team will become overwhelmed, overstressed and will not be able to deliver at full capacity. In terms of physical training it means rest and recuperation. Eat well, sleep well and let the body take care of itself. Simple, huh? Well, from my own experience, it's much easier said than done.

So why is that? Why is it so difficult to simply rest and eat and let your "building team" take care of the repair? Well, the biggest challenge - as surprising as it is logical - is our mind. Our mind functions within the paradigm of rules. Statements and beliefs that we grew up with, learned at school, read in the books, heard in the media, etc., become rules by which we choose to live by. Often self-imposed (actually always self-imposed), although usually those are notions adopted from external sources (media, parents, friends, internet, religion).

Let's say, you come to the gym for the first time and a big guy on a bench next to you shows you a biceps curl. He also says that it's the best way ever to build big guns. Hmm, this guy is so big - he could be on to something. You take a mental note. But so far it's simply an opinion. Then you hear it again from someone else and you say "yeah! that's the way to train!"; now two people said the same thing. Then again. And again. Then you read a book or an article in a popular muscle building magazine that says that you should be training every other day and sometimes two out of three days your - and this is when your mind makes a conclusion that this is the way it should be. It's written in a book, after all, isn't it? And what if it comes from, say, Arnold the Governor or Joe the Trainer of Champions since 1936! People who made bodybuilding the sport it is today. And if the statement is souped up by a glossy image of a model with ripped abs? Chances are you not only will take it as an opinion - it may well become your truth, i.e. the rule you decide to live by without questioning its validity. It becomes one of the ten commandments to you. That's why advertising is such a powerful tool...

If for years and years you have been hearing that unless you train every other day - 3-4 times a week - you are not doing it right - even if your body is screaming "I'm tired! Give me a break!" what are the chances that you will listen to its plea? That's right: next to nothing! Why? Because your mind is conditioned to stick to the rules. Rules are the framework within which it operates.

Now back to training. I'll talk about the philosophy of rules in one of my other posts.

So we have established that rest and recuperation are a step critical to ensure that muscle is not only repaired but repaired exceedingly. In exercise physiology this is called supercompensation. Not only the body repairs the damage caused by stress in the form of resistance but it strengthens existing fibers and builds some extra ones in "anticipation" of an increased demand. This results in increased ability of the body to overcome resistance. This is a temporary condition, in a sense that unless this increased demand is imposed to the body the recruited fibers will gradually lose their ability to work against load. And it makes sense, the construction manager is not going to keep his entire team on the job unless there's enough work for them simply because the costs of keeping them there will not be justified. However, if the higher demand is applied again within that timeframe it will trigger the same processes and the body's ability to withstand higher resistance will increase yet again. There you have it. It's the theory of training.

To sum it up:

Step 1. Resistance is applied to the muscle (stress phase).

Step 2. Muscle is forced to work against resistance it is not accustomed to (overload), which results in temporary disruption of normal muscle cell metabolism and causes certain damage to the fibers (catabolic phase).

Step 3. A chain of chemical and physiological reactions is triggered and certain hormones are released into the blood to repair the damage and promote the healing process (anabolic phase).

Step 4. Damaged fibers are repaired with excess which means they attain a temporary state of higher capacity that allows them to handle higher levels of stress (adaptation and supercompensation).

Or put it simply:

Train well.

Eat well, sleep well and rest well until supercompensation occurs and you feel stronger than before.

Increase your working resistance a little.

Repeat steps 1 to 3 over and over again until you grow as strong and muscular as you want.

Of course there's more to it, but that's it in a nutshell.

So the key to progressive overload is to apply increased resistance (stress) but ONLY when the body has recovered enough to be able to handle it! Not until then. Consistently pushing yourself harder before your body is fully recovered from the previous session is the reason why there's much less muscle in the world than it is called for! So if everyone had focused more on growth than on the amount of weight lifted the world would have been a more muscular place in just a few short months.

Now, having said that, the question still remains: how long does it take for the body to repair the damage and supercompensate? And that's a million dollar question.

(...to be continued)

Principle of progressive overload: my thoughts

Reading Stuart McRobert's books made me think and re-think the principle of progressive overload, which seems to be one of the key principles behind weight training. Unfortunately enough this principle seems to have become almost buried under a host of programs and training techniques and marred to an extent where everyone knew that it existed but nobody really cared for it. The essense of the principle is that for a muscle to grow it needs to be stimulated with gradually increasing resistance.

However, looking back at my years of training I realized that except for the first few months of training I never really consciously used the principle - not successfully anyways. In hindsight I realize why it happened the way it did. The thing is that in the initial few months back in 1987 when I first started I didn't really know my body and didn't have the feeling for the weights. However after 6 or so months I apparently was able to build some muscle (although back in those days I didn't really bother weighing myself so I can't even tell how much muscle I actually built) and learned a bit about weights. So after those few months whenever I would start a new program or exercise I would immediately jump into heaviest weights I could handle at the recommended number of reps and go full-bore into training right off the bat. I would follow it religiously burning my muscle and - now I realize - my CNS to a point of overtraining (sometime very severe) very quickly. But I didn't know it was overtraining. I was diligently trying to add pounds to my lifts every time - pretty much grinding every set to failure but to no avail. I didn't know why I wasn't growing, why I was constantly feeling tired and sluggish despite eating everything in sight. There was no one around to knock some senses into me - everyone was working out hard, hard, and harder. There was no internet back then - I was turning to Joe Weider's and Arnold's books for answers - but all I could find was "train more, train harder, train till you puke", shock your body, surprise your body. And I was doing forced reps, cheating, fighting for those last reps like crazy. I couldn't understand why nothing was happening. Except that I was feeling more and more tired and hating the guts of that gym. That seemed to be the only way to do it. I was doing it for 20 years. Up and down with none to marginal growth, I kept pushing and pushing. Madness...

Stuart's books were the first ones that made me realize a few things. First, that it wasn't lack of training that kept me away from the body I wanted. On the contrary, it was TOO much and TOO frequent. For the first time in my life the light came on and I realized that 3-4 times a week with 30 sets done to failure was a road to Hell. Maybe not for Arnold, not for Haney, not for Coleman - but for me it certainly was. My body was trying to tell me, heck, scream at me at the top of its lungs "give me a goddamn break!!" - but I wouldn't listen. Heck, no! I was under a spell. Arnold and Joe and all the glossy magazines he published couldn't be wrong - my body was. I thought. In all my years of training I can count days when I felt energized! If that's not madness, then I don't know what is.

Working to failure. Now I don't believe that working to failure is necessary. Stuart introduced a concept that was new to me: small weekly increments - 1 to 2.5 lbs depending on the exercise. The key is to allow your body to adapt to a point where new increased poundage feels no heavier than the one from last week! That's it!! Instead of forcing your body to lift more through compromised form and cheating how about ALLOWING it to grow into it naturall? Literally! If you can't handle the expected weight without compromising the form, if the weight feels too heavy, it means that your body isn't ready yet. Give it a few more days and let this new weight feel as light as previous one!

Another great eye-opening notion was momentum gaining cycles. Its gist is as follows: when you start a new cycle DO NOT start with the same weight as the one you finished previous cycle with! Drop the weight by 25-30 % and build back gradually. Let the body gain the momentum. That was my most critical mistake all along. Whenever I started a new program I would immediately jump into heaviest weights possible, whatever the target rep was. Ultimately I was always working at a RM level be it 10RM, 8RM or 12RM. That means I was always working against maximum resistance forcing myself to the gym 3-4 times a week.

(...to be continued)

Stuart McRobert: bodybuilding for hardgainers

Those who know my philosophy about fitness, diet and bodybuilding (in a large sense - not just building muscle) know that I've been on a "mission" - my quest for a healthier body, search for an approach that would be based not on violence, but on "invitation". To coax, not coerce. Which means methods and practices designed to invite the body to change in the direction we want, rather than trying to violently force it to. Years of studying and practicing bodybuilding (mostly unsuccessfully - in a sense that I did not succeed in or even get close enough to building the body I wanted - even though I have always been in a fairly decent shape compared to many of my peers) and nutritional approaches made me realize that most conventional methods and techniques of altering your body are based on an ongoing fight against our bodies - usually by subjecting it to various forms of deprivation, over-exertion, extreme stress, etc.

When I first heard about Stuart McRobert I was in the process of arriving to a simple but painful realization that years of battering my body and following conventional and some less than routines (nutrition and training) in an attempt to make it change the way I wanted did not produce the results I wanted - no matter how hard I tried. I would always end up pretty much at the same weight (give or take), percentage of fat (give or take) and not any closer to where I wanted to be.

Stuart appears to be one of the pioneers who - through his own painful experience - first came to conclusion that a rate in which our body can grow muscle depends primarily on its ability to recuperate, when subjected to physical training. Second, he concluded that routines presented in most muscle-building magazines and books only apply to a relative minority of people blessed with favourable genetics - in terms of their ability to respond to exercise and speed of recovery. The rest of the population (which is most of us), he contended, are those whose bodies are less genetically blessed therefore take longer to recover and grow and can only handle a much smaller amount of training that they can respond to without becoming overtrained than is widely believed. He's the one who coined a term "hardgainer" and ran Hardgainer magazine for several years. I read four of his books. The one I liked best is "Beyond Brawn" simply because it - in my opinion - is more suited to a more experienced lifter. I found more answers to my questions in this book than in the other three combined.

His main philosophy revolves around several key points:

• A genetically average trainee should not copy training routines of more genetically blessed. Ironically those are the ones most magazines and books present to the public as the way to train. He believes that many trainees overtrain themselves badly when they try following those. In that sense I absolutely agree that, in a way, Joe Weider - although played a major role in popularization of bodybuilding in the last 40 years - may have caused a lot of damage to the training population by promoting champions' routines as the only way to train.
• Training frequency. He believes that 3 and 4 times of hard training a week is a definite overkill for an average trainee simply because it stretches their bodies' recuperative abilities too far.
• Correct form of exercise. Stuart preaches it with passion putting quite a heavy emphasis on it. Although I understand that it, in itself, is not going to grow more muscle but it goes a long way in terms of preventing injuries.
• Progressive overload. A principle of progressive load - which seems to have been a cornerstone of training since the beginning of times - surprisingly is not given enough justice in popular magazines. It often comes almost as a side-note as does "recuperation" by the way.

Although I certainly agree with Stuart on many accounts, some things still don't ring the truth to me. Too much emphasis is on genetic limitations, in my opinion - almost to a point where it becomes a negative mantra ("I can't grow as much muscle as I want because chances are I'm genetically challenged"). Thing is - you don't know until you try...

(...to be continued... possibly :)))