Before I get into my rant, I want to give a little history on myself.
I first started lifting when I was around fourteen years old. My mom bought me a bench press station and a 110 lb weight set with a standard bar and dumbbell handles. For some reason the bar didn't have clips to hold the plates on the bar. Instead it used threaded clips which I had to screw onto the bar to keep the plates locked down. This really made setup time seem to take forever because each and every time I had to change the weight I had to spend a minute or two unscrewing the clips from the bar.
My first injury happened when I was sixteen. I was banging out a mean set of sixty five pound barbell rows, and then CRACK I slipped a vertebra disc in my lower spine and was bedridden for a couple days. I didn't know about holding your breath in to stabilize your lower back.
Incidentally my worst workout accident happened when I had the full 110 lbs of weight on the bar and it was resting on the uprights of the bench station. I stupidly unloaded all the plates from one side of the bar. This made the bar unbalanced and all the weight on the other side of the bar pulled the unweighted side off the uprights and the bar cartwheeled end over end into my bedroom window and shattered the glass.
Up until the age of thirty seven years old, I was seriously misinformed about a lot of things in strength training. I thought three sets of ten was the only way to get strong. I thought breathing in on the concentric part of the lift and breathing out on the eccentric part was how you breathe. I didn't know crap about maintaining tightness in the lift. I believed if you held your breath while lifting you would burst a blood vessel in your brain and die. I had no idea that animal protein consumption was the most important key to build muscle. And I thought all the freaks in those muscle building magazines at the supermarket magazine rack were completely natural and were totally being honest about how they got strong and muscular. And I also believed that they were being honest about the supplements they were taking and all the flashy ads where some big muscle freak is holding a bottle of some expensive supplement was actually the only thing he was taking to get strong.
You see, in many respects this blog is a revolt against those ways of thinking. I'm not very fond of the supplement industry. They're basically misrepresenting the ingredients on their labels a lot of times and for all I know there might just be anabolic steroids in the protein powder I consume. The supplement industry is basically unregulated and the only way they get investigated by the federal government is if not one person dies but three to five people actually die from taking their poison. For almost twenty years I was being duped by the quacks and snake oil salesmen.
One of the first quack books I bought was A Practical Approach to Strength Training. The author basically recommends using time under tension strategies to build strength. But of course this couldn't be any more wrong as you know if you've been reading this blog any length of time.
Then I stumbled upon Supertraining. It was the first book to formally introduce me to single rep sets. I read about fifty percent of the book. Of that I could only understand about seventy five percent. Most of the book is filled with incomprehensible graphs and esoteric strength training language. A lot of the book covers plyometrics which is mostly useless to strength training. It also discusses the concepts of speed strength and periodization which I also consider to be pseudoscience. But still I generously borrow a lot of strength training ideas from that book and you should be aware of that.
Where I branch off into my own research are the two basic building blocks of any successful strength training program. The first is the concept of translative exercises. This is where you use two or more complementary lifts to exercise and strengthen the same muscle group. SUPERTRAINING devotes a couple pages to this topic but it only talks about the strength building aspect of translative lifting. It doesn't talk about the fact that translative exercises are necessary for injury prevention as well.
The second thing of mine is the concept of using missed lifts to strengthen muscles. I generously utilize missed lifts in my training programming. I consider the missed lift in a single rep set to be the single most important key to busting plateaus and sticking points. And I can completely without a doubt claim that no strength trainer in the world uses the concept of rating one's missed lifts to assess strength progression. I count that as my own proprietary original idea.
Now for the rant.
I write this blog for many reasons. The first is that I'm actively trying to undermine all the quacks and the supplement industry. I consider them thieves.
The first set of thieves is the guys on YouTube. They're usually hawking some crap pre-workout powder or protein powder. They're saying that you absolutely have to take their specific brand of powder.
To date, I've only taken one kind of pre-workout and that was caffeine pills. I stopped though because they only last for thirty minutes and the rest of the workout my body crashed and I felt weak.
In fact, anybody who is trying to sell you their protein powder as a replacement for animal protein is trying to feed you a line of crap and you should be very suspect of their intentions.
The second set of quacks are the
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