Author: Stuart McRobert

ASIN: B008CHJHBQ

Great book on strength training. A classic.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The most important exercises are the core movements, i.e.,:

• squat,
• bent-legged deadlift (usually referred to as “the deadlift”),
• sumo deadlift (arms held between the legs), stiff-legged deadlift,
• leg press,
• bench press (flat and incline),
• parallel bar dip,
• shrug variations,
• pulldown,
• row variations,
• pullup (pronated grip) and chin/chinup (supinated grip),
• pullover using a machine, and
• overhead press.

Hardly any gym members, even very experienced ones, have built enough muscle mass to be concerned with detail isolation exercises. There’s even danger in using variety because you can lose focus and get caught up in an excessive assortment of exercises.

Training to failure” means taking a set to the point where you can’t move the bar any further against gravity [WITH GOOD FORM!]

Never train through injuries.

Never train if you don’t feel systemically rested from your previous workout.

Don’t train flat-out all the time. The bottom line is poundage progression. So long as you keep getting stronger in correct form, what you’re doing is working.

The very hard work will only yield gains if you fully satisfy your recovery needs, and avoid injury and overtraining. When your poundages stagnate or regress, you’re doing something wrong, even if you’re training full-bore.

Intensity heightening techniques such as forced reps, drop sets, and negatives are likely to do more harm than good.

Train hard, but avoid overtraining. Then when you leave the gym you’ll be tired and well worked, but not exhausted.

The accessory work can, if necessary, be temporarily dropped in order to keep progress happening in the big exercises.

Generally speaking:

• Once-a-week training for the biggest exercises is a good rule of thumb. Fine-tune your training frequency according to your individual recovery ability.
• Each abbreviated training routine usually has 2-5 core movements in it.
• 5 to 8 reps for most exercises; squats require higher reps.
• 1 or 2 (sometimes 3) work sets per exercise.
• 4 minute rest between work sets of core exercises, and 2 to 3 minutes between work sets of accessory exercises

I would have been trained very hard, and at times extremely hard. But I would never have been pushed so far that I would have become fearful of training; and I would never have been driven to vomiting during a workout. Poundage progression in correct form would have been the criterion for training success, not intensity per se.

I would usually have trained just twice a week. The deadlift and squat would usually have been trained just once per week. The three other major exercises would usually have been trained twice a week or three times every two weeks. But I wouldn’t have hesitated to train each exercise only once a week in order to provide increased recovery time when needed. At such a time I would have done two of the mighty fivesome at one workout, and the other three on the second workout each week.

The need to be your best at a certain date and place will dramatically focus your attention, and force you to be more efficient with your time. Without a definite where and when to be at your best, human nature makes most people casual with their time.

Keep accurate records of each workout, each day’s caloric and protein intake, how much sleep you get, muscular girths, and your body composition. Then you’ll remove all guesswork and disorder from your training program. But if you track only one or two of the components you won’t have the full story.

Don’t do extra training on your planned rest days. Because you’ll always have the training equipment at hand, it may be tempting to visit your home gym and get in some extra training. This is a road to ruin.

Never bemoan the discipline that must accompany serious training. Never bemoan the discipline that must be applied to your nutrition and other components of recovery. To have the opportunity to apply all this discipline is a blessing. Appreciate it, and savor every moment of implementing that discipline. You won’t be able to train forever. Eventually you won’t be able to apply dedication and determination to anything, let alone your training, nutrition and recovery. So be sure you make the most of the present!

EXCERPTS

Achieving your potential for muscle and might demands extraordinary discipline and dedication. There’s no place for half measures, corner cutting, laziness or lukewarm enthusiasm. If you don’t train well, rest well, sleep well and eat well, you’ll get nowhere or make only minimal progress. And you need the full package on an unrelenting basis if you’re to make the fastest progress possible. There’s no room for compromise!

You alone are responsible for your dedication and discipline.

While your training and related activities should not obsess you to the detriment of your health, family and career, you have to be addicted to the iron, sights and sounds of the gym, the challenge of “one more rep,” and the accumulation of small bits of iron on the bar. You need to almost worship the soreness you suffer on the days after a hard workout. And you need the required patience in order not to rush and ruin your progress. You must find training to be heaven on earth and, when in the gym, live to train.

You will have serious setbacks. You will get injured. You will overtrain for long periods. You will get misled. You will have sustained periods of desperate frustration. Family, education, personal and career concerns will get in the way. Through all of this you must maintain your zest for training.

Deliver this grit and character and become the best that you can. Don’t compare yourself with others. It’s bettering yourself that matters, not stacking yourself up against others. Focus on bettering yourself—again, and again, and again.

Rational bodybuilding keeps appearance at the forefront. This is good. When appearance matters, overeating is out, and bodyfat isn’t allowed to exceed about 15% (for a man). When health is the number one concern, cardiovascular work isn’t neglected, and nutrition isn’t just about protein, protein and more protein. An excessive focus on animal products is unhealthy.

Rational bodybuilding is about selecting exercises that are best for you. While this should always mean a focus on the big basic exercises, it doesn’t mean a rigid adherence to a fixed prescription of exercises.

The number one priority for any exercise is that it does you no harm. For example, squat darn hard if you know how to squat, and if you’re at least reasonably well suited to the exercise. But if you truly have knee and/or back problems, or if you’ve a terrible structure for squatting, then to battle on with the squat is foolish.

Don’t focus on what you’ll never be able to do well. Instead, focus on what you can do better.

Whether categorized as a bodybuilder, strength buff, or any other type of weight trainee, the bottom line of productive weight training is the same—a focus on basic exercises, abbreviated routines, hard work, and progressive poundages.

Use a rep count for a given exercise that best suits you, get as strong as you can in exercises that suit you and which you can perform safely, keep your bodyfat levels to below 15% (or below 10% if you want an appearance that’s stunning—assuming that you have some muscle), eat healthfully, perform cardio work, stretch regularly, and then you’ll have the full bodybuilding package.

Not only is tempered enthusiasm for training a healthier approach than an obsessive enthusiasm, over the long term it ends up being more productive. I don’t want you to avoid obsessive enthusiasm just because it creates a seriously imbalanced life. I want you to avoid obsessive interest because only then will you actually have the chance to achieve your natural physique and strength potential.

As a teenager I cut myself off from everything I thought would have a negative effect on my bodybuilding. I became a recluse. I enclosed myself in a bodybuilding shell. I lost interest in my academic studies. I swallowed all the training and dietary nonsense that abounded at that time (in the mid 1970s). I was very gullible and knew of no one who could keep me on the training straight and narrow. I was at the mercy of whatever literature I found, but I couldn’t distinguish between good and poor instruction. If it was in print, I believed it.

Most people train too much. Not only is this counterproductive for short-term results, it produces the overtraining that wears the body down and causes long-term structural problems. All this assumes that you actually keep training over the long term. An obsession leads to burnout because it produces poor results for most people. It causes so much frustration that most people give up training after a year or few, or they turn to drugs.

The right way doesn’t mean being obsessed. It means being highly dedicated but while remaining critical and discriminating, and while keeping a balanced approach that doesn’t neglect the more serious aspects of your life.

The biggest champions are the unsung heroes who applied years of dogged determination in order to build themselves up against the odds, without ever using drugs, without seeking or finding publicity, and without divorcing themselves from the rigors and responsibilities of everyday working and family life. Genetically gifted and drug-enhanced super achievers who have near-perfect training conditions and lifestyles can’t hold a candle to the real heroes of the training world.

The most important exercises are the core movements, i.e.,:

• squat,
• bent-legged deadlift (usually referred to as “the deadlift”),
• sumo deadlift (arms held between the legs), stiff-legged deadlift,
• leg press,
• bench press (flat and incline),
• parallel bar dip,
• shrug variations,
• pulldown,
• row variations,
• pullup (pronated grip) and chin/chinup (supinated grip),
• pullover using a machine, and
• overhead press.

These core exercises are the primary ones you must focus on (only a select few in each routine) in order to develop bigger and stronger muscles. Each abbreviated training routine usually has between two and five core movements in it.

Hardly any gym members, even very experienced ones, have built enough muscle mass to be concerned with detail isolation exercises. Some of these, however, may be appropriate for rehabilitation purposes following injury or accident.

On the surface, beginners don’t have the need for cycling that experienced trainees usually do. This is largely because beginners have yet to develop the ability to train very hard, and are using only very light weights relative to their ultimate potential strength. Despite this, beginners should never push themselves hard until they have learned correct form, and slowly built up their weights while maintaining correct form.

Training to failure” means taking a set to the point where you can’t move the bar any further against gravity [WITH PROPPER FORM!]. (Some people call this “training to momentary failure.” There’s no universal agreed definitions of “failure” in its different contexts. This causes confusion.) At that point of failure you lower the resistance to a safe resting place, or a training partner helps you to complete the rep. In practice, most people could extend their “to failure” sets by several reps if they were well supervised and motivated.

Bodybuilding and strength training are almost laughably simple; but simple doesn’t mean easy. All that really matters is focus, and progressive poundages in correct form. Pick a handful of the biggest and best exercises for you and then devote years to getting stronger, and then stronger still in them. You can use variations of the basic movements for variety, but you don’t have to. There’s even danger in using variety because you can lose focus and get caught up in an excessive assortment of exercises.

Especially in the beginning and intermediate stages of training, a dislike of change, and being old-fashioned and stubborn, are desirable characteristics. Only once you’re already big and strong should you explore “new” opinions, if you have the time to risk wasting. But even then, once you are advanced, if you venture too far into the myriad opinions about training you risk losing sight of what matters for most typical people. But at least by then you should be able to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Most trainees get so little out of their own training largely because they’re preoccupied with the achievements of others.

Ever-increasing weight on the bar in good form isn’t the only type of progression. For pure strength training, poundage increase is far and away the most important form of progression. For building muscular size, however, there’s more to consider than just poundage progression—as will be made clear later in this book—but still, poundage progression is very important.

Although the biggest muscles aren’t the strongest, and the strongest aren’t the biggest, for the great majority of people there’s a very strong relationship between strength and muscular size, provided that strength isn’t built using specific strength-focus techniques like very low reps, partial reps and low-rep rest-pause work.

Few people have the perseverance to stay the course (drug-free) before “seeing the light.” Nearly all of them will give up training, or resort to “staying in shape.” There’s nothing wrong with training to “stay in shape,” if that’s what you want. But if big and strong muscles are what matter to you, to resign yourself to “staying in shape” is a disaster.

Getting muscularly bigger and stronger isn’t complex. While finding the fine-tuned interpretations that work best for you can take time, and involve some trial and error, the essence of how to get bigger and stronger is simple enough. But if you’re not willing to work hard at most of your workouts, you’ll never be able to develop big and very strong muscles. Fortitude, determination, persistence and dedication are needed in abundance.

If you’re not developing bigger and stronger muscles, it’s the basic combination of your training, rest, sleep and food consumption that’s at fault.

Women who want to get bigger and stronger should train in the same way that men should.

It’s not the training equipment that matters. It’s what you do with it that counts.

I knew so much about that which I didn’t need, but I knew so little about that which I needed. Therein lies the plight of most bodybuilding junkies.

See abbreviated training as the first resort, not the last resort. Don’t waste years of your life trying anything and everything else before finally trying abbreviated training.

Be sure to use correct exercise technique. Training to get big and strong doesn’t mean using loose form and getting injured. Make correct exercise technique the creed that you train by, with no compromises!

Never train through injuries. If an injury doesn’t clear up quickly by itself, see a training-orientated injury specialist. Investigate the probable trigger of the injury (incorrect training), correct it, and don’t let it happen again. And when you get an injury, investigate non-invasive and non-drug therapies.

About two thirds of your body’s total muscle mass is in your thighs, buttocks and back. Your shoulders, chest, abdominals, arms and forearms make up only about a third of your muscle mass, so don’t give those areas in total any more than one third of your total weight-training attention.

Keep your ultimate goals believable (but challengingly so), but don’t get carried away and expect too little of yourself. Demand a realistic lot of yourself, and you’ll get a lot.

Few people train hard. There’s a lot of grimacing and noise making in gyms, but only a little of it comes from true hard work. The rest is acted. An irony here is that those few who can deliver full-bore work may produce it in too great a volume, and with too great a frequency.

Never train if you don’t feel systemically rested from your previous workout. While some local soreness may remain, you should be systemically rested, and mentally raring to go for every workout. If in doubt, train less often.

Muscle doesn’t atrophy if not trained within 96 hours. The 96 hours falsehood has caused untold harm because it has produced so much excessive training frequency, and overtraining. Some exercises trained in some ways, at least for hard gainers, need more than 96 hours of rest for systemic recovery, and then some more time for the body to grow a bit of extra muscle (i.e., overcompensate).

All body parts don’t need the same recovery time. For example, you need much more time to recover from a hard squat or deadlift session than from hard calf or abdominal work.

Training a single exercise or body part three times a week is too much other than for beginners who are acclimatizing themselves to working out, or for rehabilitating after an injury. Twice a week per exercise, or three times every two weeks, is a better maximum standard. Once-a-week training for the biggest exercises is a good rule of thumb. Fine-tune your training frequency according to your individual recovery ability.

Don’t train flat-out all the time. Cycle your intensity to some degree. How you interpret cycling depends on your age, recuperation abilities, motivation, tolerance to exercise, out-of-the-gym lifestyle factors, quality of nutrition, poundage increment scheme, supervision (if any), and style and volume of training, among other factors. A very few people can train full-bore most of the time. Others can only do it in short, infrequent spurts. Most people are somewhere in between. The bottom line is poundage progression. So long as you keep getting stronger in correct form, what you’re doing is working.

Just pushing yourself to your absolute limit in the gym won’t in itself make you bigger and stronger. The very hard work will only yield gains if you fully satisfy your recovery needs, and avoid injury and overtraining. When your poundages stagnate or regress, you’re doing something wrong, even if you’re training full-bore.

Intensity heightening techniques such as forced reps, drop sets, and negatives are likely to do more harm than good. Ordinary straight sets pushed all the way to muscular failure, or near to it, are the way to go for nearly all your training.

Unless you wake every morning feeling fully rested, and without having to be awoken, you’re not getting enough sleep. And even if you are making gains in the gym, more rest and sleep could substantially increase your gains.

Dependable training for typical people with regular lives is about doing things slowly, safely, steadily and surely. It’s not about trying to do in two months something that needs half a year. It’s about patience and knowing that getting there slowly is the quick way, in the long run, because the chance of injury and mental or physical burnout is much less. Quick gains bring a higher chance of injury and burnout.

Patience is one of the primary qualities needed for training success.

When gains dry up, investigate radical alternatives with the general view that less is best (without taking it to the extreme and giving up working out), and that harder training is better than easier training.

Train hard, but avoid overtraining. Then when you leave the gym you’ll be tired and well worked, but not exhausted.

At this stage, the accessory work can, if necessary, be temporarily dropped in order to keep progress happening in the big exercises.

No matter how much good advice you’re given, only you can implement it.

“You never know how important good health is until you no longer have it.”

Avoid seeking the “perfect” training routine. Once on that slippery slope you’ll join the mass of trainees who are buried in all the peripheral, downright irrelevant or even destructive aspects of training.

If I’d chosen the squat, deadlift (both the bent-legged and stiff-legged variations, although not both in the same cycle), bench press, seated press, and the pulldown (or a row with my torso supported), and dedicated myself for five years to progressive poundages on those five core movements as the linchpin of my training, I would have gotten near to realizing my full size and strength potential before I was but 20 years old. I would have been better off if I’d never heard of any other exercises. (A different fivesome of core exercises may be more appropriate for you.)

I had no interest in the leg press, falsely believing it to be an exercise only for people who were looking for an excuse not to squat. My imaginary mentor would have known better. I should always have given the squat much higher priority, but I should have realized the assistance value of the leg press.

With progression being the key I wouldn’t have gotten myself hung up on sets and reps. I would have stuck with the rep number I preferred at the time for each exercise, changing it from cycle to cycle if I felt like it. Generally speaking, 5 to 8 reps would have been used for most exercises; but squats and accessory movements would usually have used higher reps.

With adding poundage in correct form being the sovereign priority, the number of sets used would have been secondary. So long as I added a little iron to the bar each week or two, all would be well. Most of the time I would have done one, two or at most three work sets per exercise, reducing the number of sets at the end of a cycle when intensity was at its highest. Periodically, and usually for no more than just two of the exercises included in any given cycle, I would have been directed to use a six sets of six reps format with a fixed poundage for all sets, and a rigid one minute rest between sets. This cumulative-fatigue training would provide a variation in growth stimulation, and help keep me from growing stale.

My workouts wouldn’t have been rushed—about four minutes would have been taken between work sets of core exercises, and 2 to 3 minutes between work sets of accessory exercises.

I would have been trained very hard, and at times extremely hard. But I would never have been pushed so far that I would have become fearful of training; and I would never have been driven to vomiting during a workout. Poundage progression in correct form would have been the criterion for training success, not intensity per se.

So long as my strength was increasing, I was training hard enough.

I would usually have trained just twice a week. The deadlift and squat would usually have been trained just once per week. The three other major exercises would usually have been trained twice a week or three times every two weeks. But I wouldn’t have hesitated to train each exercise only once a week in order to provide increased recovery time when needed. At such a time I would have done two of the mighty fivesome at one workout, and the other three on the second workout each week.

Only you can find how far you can go by actually going as far as you can go.

For drug-free typical bodybuilders, the muscular girths of the competitive elite are light years removed from our reality, including our reality even after years of sound training. Draw motivation from elite-level accomplishments, but get your feet firmly back to earth when it comes to designing and implementing your own training program. If you don’t do this you’ll tread the same road to training ruin that millions have already travelled.

Get each day right, each workout right, and each week right, and then you’ll get the months right; and then you’ll keep knocking off your poundage-gain goals.

Don’t try to get very defined (under 10% bodyfat) while you build yourself up. But at the same time don’t get fat.

The limiting factor is in the mind. Expect little from your body and that’s what it will deliver. Expect a lot from it and that’s what it will deliver.

John McCallum’s formula, based on wrist measurement. This provides a challenging yet realistic guide for indicating full-size potential of male hard gainers. Here it is again: chest: 6.5 x wrist hips: 85% x chest waist: 70% x chest thigh: 53% x chest neck: 37% x chest arm: 36% x chest calf: 34% x chest forearm: 29% x chest

David P. Willoughby’s “optimum ideal standard” for men, in inches; from, IRON MAN November 1979—“delt” refers to delt width. (Table 1)

At 10% bodyfat, physiques in line with these bodyweights will be very impressive by drug-free standards. At a lower bodyfat, the physiques will be even more impressive. Start with a base of 5-0 height and 100 pounds bodyweight. Then add 12 pounds per inch for a heavy bone structure, 10 pounds for a medium bone structure, and 8 pounds for a light bone structure. Above 5-9, cut the increments in half. Structure Wrist (inches) heavy 7.5 to 8.0 medium 6.75 to 7.25 light 6.0 to 6.5

Recognize your individualism and then exploit it to the full.

Find what you like, find the exercises that work best for you, find what you can do safely, and find what you gain on. Then with those factors in order, pour in the effort.

Repetition-conversion tables for upper-body exercises, based on the formulae of Maurice and Rydin. See text for an explanation.

Lower-body exercises Repetition-conversion tables for lower-body exercises, based on the formulae of Maurice and Rydin.

To use one of the charts, look in the left column to find the rep number you have been performing (i.e., your current reps). Move across the row until you are under the rep number to which you wish to project your performance (i.e., your desired reps).

For example, if you have been bench pressing for 10 reps, and want to try 6 reps, you would multiply your best 10-rep poundage by 1.13 to estimate your best 6-rep poundage. Similarly, if you have been squatting for 6 reps and now wish to try 20 reps, you would multiply your best 6-rep poundage by 0.81 to estimate your best 20-rep poundage.

These tables aren’t presented as valid for everyone. A minority of trainees, at least in some exercises, are terrible at high reps relative to their low-rep achievements. Conversely, some people are excellent at high reps but can’t produce the corresponding low-rep poundages that would be expected. Despite this shortcoming, the tables can still be useful once you become familiar with using them in the best way for you.

Competitive athletes have a major advantage over non-competitive ones—the motivating, focusing, pressurizing and concrete-goals-creating effect of competition. The need to be your best at a certain date and place will dramatically focus your attention, and force you to be more efficient with your time. Without a definite where and when to be at your best, human nature makes most people casual with their time. You may take years to get to where you could have gotten in just six months had you been nailed down to a rigorous schedule to get things done on time.

Deadlines are often imperative for making people take action, in all areas of life. Consider how many things you need to do but have been procrastinating for weeks because you don’t have a fixed deadline to do them by. But give something a deadline and urgency, and it usually gets done.

Nail yourself to long-term deadlines. Make your goals specific by writing down numbers and deadlines, for example. Then nail yourself to the daily must-dos in order to keep on schedule for reaching the long-term goals.

Have your photos taken this week, to display all your physique in a given number of well-lighted poses. No matter how happy or unhappy you are with how you look, get the job done so that you have a photographic record of your current condition. If you’re too embarrassed to have a professional do it, get your spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend or sympathetic relative to do it. But have it done seriously and as well as possible.

Set a six-month target, and give your all to improving your physique as much as possible, with the litmus test being the next photo session. Then, with proof in photographic print, you can see what you did with the previous six months of your life.

It’s easy in bodybuilding and strength training to mull away time, go through the motions, and lose track of the passage of time. Working in six-month slots gives tremendous focus, and you’ll have a photographic record of what you achieved over each six-month stretch.

Be meticulously consistent about the conditions used for each photo session. Consider if you have poor lighting, a hairy and untanned body, unkempt long hair, long baggy shorts, and poorly focused photos of amateurish and clumsy poses for one session. Then, next time, after a hair cut, you have excellent lighting and sharp photography, and a shaven and tanned physique posed professionally in a well-fitting swim suit. You’ll look dramatically better in the second batch of photos even if your physique is unchanged.

A much more realistic and fair type of competition is to set up something informal with a training partner, friend or pen pal. Make it bodyweight related for maximum reps for each exercise, e.g., squat 150% bodyweight, bench press bodyweight, and barbell curl 50% bodyweight. Set the date of the competition a few months away, structure a training cycle to peak on the meet day, gear yourself up for it, apply yourself with zeal to the preparatory training, and then give forth of your very best on the big day.

It’s not enough just to train hard. You need to train hard with a target to beat in every work set you do. The targets to beat in any given workout are your achievements the previous time you performed that same routine/workout.

Keep accurate records of each workout, each day’s caloric and protein intake, how much sleep you get, muscular girths, and your body composition. Then you’ll remove all guesswork and disorder from your training program. But if you track only one or two of the components you won’t have the full story.

The minimum equipment investment for a great variety of productive training opportunities is:

1. bar and plates, including little discs.
2. a reliable method of self-spotting and securely setting up a barbell in some sort of stands, e.g., a four-post power rack, a half rack, or sturdy and stable squat stands together with spotter/safety racks or bars.
3. a sturdy and stable bench.

As time goes by, add a trap bar or a shrug bar, an overhead pulley and/or an overhead bar, a pair of adjustable dumbbells, parallel bars for dips, a cambered squat bar, a few specialized items for grip work, a heavy-duty adjustable bench, and a 2-inch thick bar. Then you’ll have a gem of a gym.

At the most expensive end of the market are the elite Olympic bars, including Eleiko® and Ivanko®.

And if you buy something as a temporary measure, but plan to buy something of better quality later on, that’s probably going to be false economy.

If you have to load or unload a heavy barbell that rests on the floor, lift the end up and slip a disc underneath the inside plate. The raised end will make plate changing much easier.

Be careful that you don’t get so overwhelmed with the convenience aspect that you lose your regularity of training. Because you can always train tomorrow doesn’t mean that you should become a procrastinator. If it’s training day today, and so long as you feel well recovered from your previous workout, train today.

Don’t do extra training on your planned rest days. Because you’ll always have the training equipment at hand, it may be tempting to visit your home gym and get in some extra training. This is a road to ruin.

A belt may help to prevent injuries to the lower back, especially if you have previously had problems there, but it can’t help you much unless it’s very tight. A tight belt is uncomfortable, so it can’t be used for medium- and high-rep work. Strong torso musculature, especially the midsection, is your own natural belt. Train your midsection seriously and progressively.

Use a belt very selectively—for low-rep squats and deadlifts, and overhead presses—or not at all. Otherwise, you’ll become dependent on it to generate the necessary intra-abdominal pressure you need to protect your spinal column during heavy lifting; and without that armor you’ll be a shadow of your usual self.

Never bemoan the discipline that must accompany serious training. Never bemoan the discipline that must be applied to your nutrition and other components of recovery. To have the opportunity to apply all this discipline is a blessing. Appreciate it, and savor every moment of implementing that discipline. You won’t be able to train forever. Eventually you won’t be able to apply dedication and determination to anything, let alone your training, nutrition and recovery. So be sure you make the most of the present!

This is the lot of most typical gym members who, in their hurry to make short-term metamorphoses, turn short-term failure into long-term failure, and add more names to the endless roll of those who’ve trained but yet got little or nothing to show for it.

Yes, you have to work very hard but you do have to work within your ability and capacity to recover before your next workout

While you should push yourself to the limit for most of your workouts, “most” doesn’t mean “all.” Learn not to push yourself to the limit during some periods. This is difficult to do if you’ve been locked into the “hard all the time” philosophy.

The first stage of a cycle, following a layoff for 7 to 10 days in order to get fully rested and recovered from your previous cycle, has you using weights 10 to 15% lighter than your most recent best working poundages.