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Well, I ain’t
that old, but I am just a little. So, in doing this four-part series on
bodybuilding training methods, I had to reconcile in my own mind what
spurred this strange form of narcissistic bar room cum circus
exhibitionism to undertake the travails of organized sport, and how it
became the legitimate, science-based sport it is
today.
THE SCIENCE OF BODYBUILDING IS THE SAME AS THE SCIENCE FOR ANY
OTHER FORM OF SPORTS TRAINING
First, to refresh your memories on the focus of this four part
series, Part One looked at the current plethora of training systems,
identifying their weaknesses and strengths relative to the seven "grand
daddy" laws of training science. Part Two looked at one in particular --
the strangely ritualistic, "pagan religion" called the "HIT" system, which
preaches (through several similar "denominations") a one-set-to-failure
sort of program for everyone, regardless of experience, training
objectives or individual differences. Part Three looked at the Soviet
concept of training periodization for sports, and how it can be tailored
for use by bodybuilders.
Recall that in each part, my discussion
centered on the seven laws of weight training from most sport scientists’
perspectives. I recommend that you re-read Part One if this synopsis isn’t
enough. Here they are again:
1.
The Law of Individual Differences: We all have different abilities,
bodies and weaknesses, and we all respond differently (to a degree) to any
given system of training. These differences should be taken into
consideration when designing your training program.
2.
The Overcompensation Principle: Mother Nature overcompensates for
training stress by giving you bigger and stronger muscles.
3.
The Overload Principle: To make Mother Nature overcompensate, you
must stress your muscles beyond what they’re already used
to.
4.
The SAID Principle: The acronym for "Specific Adaptation to Imposed
Demands." Each organ and organelle responds to a different form of
stress.
5.
The Use/Disuse Principle: "Use it or lose it" means that your
muscles hypertrophy with use and atrophy with disuse.
6.
The GAS Principle: The acronym for General Adaptation Syndrome,
this law states that there must be a period of low intensity training or
complete rest following periods of high intensity training.
7.
The Specificity Principle: You’ll get stronger at squats by doing
squats as opposed to leg presses, and you’ll get greater endurance for the
marathon by running long distances than you will by (say) cycling long
distances.
HOW IT USED TO
BE
In the beginning -- during the mid- to late
1800s and on into the beginning of the current century, there was no form
of organized bodybuilding. That the great strongmen of yore were "buffed"
was merely a happenstance of practicing to perform feats of strength,
which they exhibited at circuses, taverns and dance halls as a form of
"entertainment" for the paying customers. In the early world of sawdust
and midnight train rides there was no science to physical training.
"Practice" was generally restricted to doing these same feats over and
over. Then, as each feat was mastered, they’d try to do more weight or
perform more difficult and imaginative feats.
These early pioneers
of the new and unexplored kingdom of Irondom loved to talk about Milo of
Crete. I know this because the story was repeated in all the old
weightlifting literature. When he was a boy, Milo was wont to lift a calf
and carry it some distance and for some inexplicable reason. In fact, he
did it daily. Over the months the calf grew to bullock then bull
proportions. Milo kept on lifting the beast daily and carrying it
someplace.
Young Milo must’ve been an ANIMAL! Consider that calves
grow to bullocks in a year or so, then becomes a fully grown bull in three
or so. Ya gotta wonder what he was on! At some later date, as the story
goes, Milo killed and ate the bull, probably because he needed more
protein. But, that’s not the point. This cute little story, repeated over
and over from the early 1900s, gives vivid testament to the fact that the
early lifters had more than a mere rudimentary appreciation for the
importance of progressive resistance training as outlined in the age-old
overload principle. But they had little else.
But it was among the
Olympic lifters, in the dank lifting dungeons prowled by these explosive
beasts, that big-time muscle was developed to proportions far advanced
from their circus strongman predecessors. It was from the ranks of these
early lifters that the practice of modern bodybuilding was sired and
born.
By the mid thirties some ironheads had begun looking in the
mirror in a more serious vein than simple narcissistic pride, and Charles
Atlas had won a mail-in photo contest. There still wasn’t any organized
bodybuilding, however, and hence no definitive bodybuilding science. If
they followed any training routine at all it was one of the early courses
sold back then as wall posters to accompany a youngster’s newly purchased
barbell set.
These early poster workouts for beginner-through
advanced levels who eagerly bought into the ads to "expand your chest" or
"build he-man arms" developed in scientific sophistication such that by
the end of the thirties, guys around the country had developed an interest
in getting huge. The first Mr. America contest was staged. Such contests
were tacked on to the end of weightlifting shows which typically ended in
the wee hours of the morning. The guys would pose in front of a small
handful of folks on top of a table with a light bulb dangling over their
head.
Bob Hoffman, York Barbell’s power broker in the world of
weights, saw to it that the US Weightlifting Federation, a member of the
then-powerful AAU, was the governing body for the fledgling sport. There
was a strong fear on the part of the Hoffman AAU cronies that bodybuilding
would cause a severe talent drain from weightlifting. Their fears were, of
course, prophetic.
Joe Weider, then a Montreal teenager, had his
upcommance in this atmosphere. But, hell, instead of me rambling on about
what Joe said, let me tell his story as he told it to me. All the other
old timers have long-since died.
IN THE
BEGINNING
"I was a weightlifter. I just wanted to lift
heavy weights. When war broke out, there was no more weightlifting in
Canada. All the guys were gone. Since I couldn’t compete any more, I
turned to bodybuilding. I started Your Physique in 1940, and had a section
on weightlifting in the muscle mag until Hoffman got me kicked out of all
the shows. Hoffman thought they were losing these powerful local guys to
bodybuilding, so he began to attack bodybuilders. From there I went ahead
and developed bodybuilding shows. My brother and I started the
IFBB.
"In the 40s nobody followed any bodybuilding routine because
there really wasn’t any. They were all weightlifters (?) trained basically
for technique. Go through the Hoffman magazines from those days. There are
no assistance movements mentioned. Around that time Charlie Smith did a
lot of writing, and I remember discussing this with him. As a
weightlifter, I asked him, how am I going to build overall power if all I
ever do is the three lifts? I figured that by incorporating some
powerlifting movements into my routine, I could lift more weights. So we
did boxes, we did partial cleans , we did all kinds of movements to build
power. It was a natural progression. When boxes didn’t work anymore, I had
to find a different tactic that worked. All the lifters did.
"A lot
of guys all around the world were going through the same thought process
back then. You see, it’s very funny, a guy in the middle ages in England
developed the long pole, let’s say, and in Australia, at the same time
historically, someone else gets the same idea. We were working on an
atomic bomb and the Germans were working on a bomb at the same time. So
who got the idea first? When something happens in the evolution of
scientific development, it rarely happens in isolation. The rest of the
world is equal to you in their science, and the chances of someone hitting
upon the same idea are great.
"The point is that I’ve never claimed
that the basic science behind each of the Weider Principles is mine. Its
not that I was suddenly struck with divine revelation in the evolution
going on in lifting. But I did have an open mind, unlike Hoffman who was
only interested in promoting Olympic weightlifting, and I had a magazine
to write these new bodybuilding training ideas in."
THE WEIDER SYSTEM
The Weider System
has been in existence for fifty years or so, and has grown over the years
to incorporate other great training ideas as they came along. It’s
actually not a "system" in the strict definition of the term, but rather a
"guide" to aid you in developing your own personal system based on your
own unique recuperative ability, experience, goals, strengths, weaknesses,
and ---well -- "guts" to go the distance.
This Weider System
"guidelines" comes in the form of a series of training methods collected
(and in most instances named) by Joe Weider personally over many years,
which became widely known as the Weider Principles. In fact, of the Weider
Principles that were developed by Joe personally, one in particular had a
major impact on the world of bodybuilding. That was the concept of
splitting your workouts to train specific body parts. The split system,
double split system and triple split system, as they became known as, are
Joe’s unique contribution to bodybuilding science.
There are three
broad categories of Weider Principles:
1. Principles To Help You Plan Your
Training Cycle
2.
Principles To Help You Arrange Your Exercises In Each
Workout
3. Principles To
Help You Perform Each Exercise
It’s easy to discern whether this
orderly collection of training methods, both in the aggregate and
individually, adhere to the seven grand daddy principles (laws) spoken of
throughout this four-part series. The simple truth is that individually
they do not. But when you look at them in the aggregate, and the
guidelines as to when and how to apply them, they most certainly do!
Here’s why:
·
The fact that you are training at all assumes that you know 1)
you’re going to grow (Overcompensation Principle), 2) you are going to
train regularly (The Use/Disuse Principle), and 3) weight training is the
most efficient method of doing 1) and 2) as opposed to (say) riding a
bicycle (Specificity Principle);
·
Both the type and amount of adaptive stress each of the Weider
Principles deliver to the organism can be manipulated very efficiently and
effectively (S.A.I.D and Overload Principles respectively);
·
Each method listed in the Weider System has its strengths and
weaknesses in regards to the specific muscle components it targets
(S.A.I.D. Principle), so you must use your instinct and experience in
discerning when to apply each, or whether to apply it at all (Individual
Differences Principle); and
·
The list of methods is totally flexible. Within the instructions
for each are listed guidelines to aid you in discerning whether to use it
and how often to employ it in your day-to-day training microcycles (G.A.S.
and Individual Differences Principles).
The three categories of principles discussed
in the Weider System are listed below with a brief explanation of each.
One of the principles appears in all three categories. That’s the
Instinctive Training Principle. Folks, it’s simple. Use your own training
experience and knowledge of how your body responds to exercise stress when
planning and carrying out a training program! This must take place on a
cycle-to-cycle, day-to-day and quite literally a minute-to-minute
basis!
WEIDER PRINCIPLES TO HELP YOU PLAN
YOUR TRAINING CYCLE
1. Cycle Training Principle (Breaking your
training year into cycles for strength, mass or contest preparation you
help avoid injury and keep your body responsive to
adaptation)
2. Split System Training Principle (Breaking
your workout week into upper versus lower body training, for example,
results in more intense training sessions)
3. Double or Triple
Split Training Principle (Breaking your workout down into two or three
shorter, more intense training sessions per day)
4. Muscle
Confusion Principle (Muscles accommodate to a specific type of stress
("habituate" or "plateau") when you continually apply the same stress to
your muscles over time, so you must constantly vary exercises, sets, reps
and weight to avoid accommodation)
5. Progressive Overload
Principle (The basis of increasing any parameter of fitness is to make
your muscles work harder than they are accustomed to)
6. Holistic
Training Principle (Different cellular organelles respond differently to
different forms of stress, so using a variety of rep/set schemes,
intensity and frequency will maximize muscle mass)
7. Eclectic
Training Principle (Combining mass, strength or isolation-refinement
training techniques as your instincts dictate into your program often help
you achieve greater progress)
8. Instinctive Training Principle
(Eventually, all bodybuilders instinctively attain the ability to
construct diets, routines, cycles, intensity levels, reps and sets that
work best for them)
WEIDER PRINCIPLES TO
HELP YOU ARRANGE YOUR WORKOUT
1. Set System Training
Principle (Performing one set per bodypart was the old way; the Set System
calls for multiple sets for each exercise in order to apply maximum
adaptive stress)
2. Superset Training Principle (alternating
opposing muscle group exercises with little rest between sets)
3.
Compound Sets Training Principle (alternating two exercises for one
bodypart with little rest between sets)
4. Tri-Sets Training
Principle (Doing 3 exercises for one muscle group with little rest between
sets)
5. Giant Sets Training Principle (Doing 4-6 exercises for one
muscle group with little rest between sets)
6. Staggered Sets
Principle (injecting 10 sets of boring forearm, abdominal or calf work in
between sets for (say) chest or legs)
7. Rest-Pause Principle
(using 85-90 percent of your max, do 2-3 reps and put the weight down.
Then do 2-3 more, rest, 2-3 more and rest for a total of 3-4 rest-pauses.
The short rest-pauses allow enough time for ATP to be resynthesized and
permit further reps with the heavy weight);
8. Muscle Priority
Principle (Work your weaker body parts first in any given workout;
alternatively, work the larger muscle groups first, while you’re fresh and
energy levels still high)
9. Pre-Exhaustion Principle (example:
superset flies, a chest isolation exercise, with bench presses, a compound
exercise involving triceps and chest, in order to maximize chest
development by pre-exhausting the triceps)
10. Pyramiding Training
Principle (start a bodypart session with higher rep/low weight and
gradually add weight (and commensurably reduce the reps), ending with a
weight you can do for 5 reps or so)
11. Descending Sets Principle
(lighter weights from set to set as fatigue sets in --0 called
"stripping")
12. Staggered Sets Training Principle (stagger
smaller, slow-developing body parts in between sets for larger muscle
groups)
13. Instinctive Training Principle (Eventually, all
bodybuilders instinctively attain the ability to construct diets,
routines, cycles, intensity levels, reps and sets that work best for
them)
WEIDER PRINCIPLES TO HELP YOU
PERFORM EACH EXERCISE
1. Isolation Principle (All muscles
act as stabilizers, synergists, antagonist or protagonist. By making any
given muscle the prime mover in any given exercise you’ve "isolated" it as
much as possible, and therefore the stress applied to it)
2.
Quality Training Principle (gradually reducing the rest between sets while
still maintaining or increasing the number of reps performed)
3.
Cheating Training Principle (swing weight past the sticking point at the
end of a set in order to add stress)
4. Continuous Tension
Principle (maintain slow, continuous tension on muscles to maximize red
fiber involvement)
5. Forced Reps Training Principle
(partner-assisted reps at the end of a set)
6. Flushing Training
Principle (Doing 3-4 exercises for a bodypart before moving to another
bodypart)
7. Burns Training Principle (2-3 inch, quick movements at
the end of a set
8. Partial Reps Training Principle (Because of
leverage changes throughout any given exercise, it’s sometimes helpful to
do partial movements with varying weight in order to derive maximum
overload stress for that bodypart)
9. Retro-Gravity Principle
("Negatives" or "eccentrics" as they’re called, make it possible to get
more muscle cells to respond because you can lower about 30-40 percent
more weight than you can successfully lift concentrically);
10.
Peak Contraction Principle (holding the weight through maximum contraction
for a few seconds at the completion of a movement);
11. Superspeed
Principle (compensatory acceleration of movements to stimulate
hard-to-reach fast twitch fibers);
12. Iso-Tension Principle
(method of practicing posing, tensing each muscle maximally for 6-10
seconds for up to a total of 30-44 flexes in a variety of posing
positions);
13. Instinctive Training Principle (Eventually, all
bodybuilders instinctively attain the ability to construct diets,
routines, cycles, intensity levels, reps and sets that work best for
them)
CONCLUDING
COMMENT
Over the years, many talented and
training-savvy folks have developed systems of their own. Often, the
motivation to do so came from a desire to engage in some marketing project
or another. Sometimes the motivation was to expand the body of knowledge
about training or to simply take their body beyond what current systems
allowed. All are justifiable motivations. But the acid test as to whether
their newly created "system" is worthy of adoption by anyone of
Irondom...is SCIENCE.
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Frederick Hatfield PhD