Bill Starr's 5 x 5 program... Variation per Madcow2 (thanx) So here it is! K up now!

[Czar87]

I read it and now i know smithing is bad, but any idea how can i squat anyway with freeweights ... there are several bars in my gym but they are low, approx. hips lenght ... what if i bring it to my shoulders with handsm, i know i loose lot of energy and cant do it with much weight but is it better idea than smithing ?

 

[siamesedream]

Will my Q's get answered or should I direct them elsewhere?

 

[Guinness5.0]

2.) Are there actually plausible studies that show that the length of a workout actually matters? A lot of bodybuilders and other programs say that if a workout lasts longer than 40 minutes to an hour, the entire training session is detrimental to your progress thanks to a major decrease in test levels as well as skyrocketing cortisol levels. Is this actually scientifically verified information?

I'm sure that hormone levels do change during the course of the workout, but does it matter? I doubt it. As soon as you eat everything gets going toward normal again. So you're talking about a small window where you hormone profile is not ideal. In the scheme of things, it seems to make little/no difference. If you're worried, start sipping on a High GI carb drink and cortisol should drop rapidly. But honestly I don't think it amounts to much either way.

I doubt I've been in and out of the gym in less than an hour even once in the last 4 years or more and I have no complaints.

 

[blut wump]

BCAAs are supposed to combat cortisol and are fairly cheap.

I've often worked 1.5 - 2 hour workouts without apparent detriment. My typical workout is around 1.25 hours.

 

[Madcow2]

Re: Bill Starr's 5 x 5 program... Variation per Madcow2 (thanx) So here it is! K up n

My bodyweight hasn't been increasing, actually, as my goal is to have it slowly go down right now, so I'm not sure why my pull-up performance is going down as well. It may just be some major accumulated fatigue.



Anyways, madcow, I guess I have 2 questions now whenever you get around to it.


1.) (from above) Throughout my training, everything has been showing consistent gains with the recent training I've been doing except pull-ups. For a period of time, they were getting better and I was increasing the weight used on them for a while. Around 6 weeks ago, that exercise began to show regression so I ramped down and have been building back up. Oddly enough, my performance regression on pull-ups is still continuing even though I ramped down. I started decreasing the amount of weight I added each week on the pull-ups, and I'm still unable to perform with less weight what I could with more weight around 10 weeks ago.

Linear progression and deloading has been going great with everything except pull-ups, so I guess I'm asking what exactly is going on here. I highly doubt one particular muscle group of my body has somehow gotten to the point where it requires periodization, so is just a specific part of my body in an accumulated state of fatigue? It seems ramping down was not enough to dissipate the fatigue as my performance on that exercise has been going to crap, so should I start deloading on that one exercise for the next week or 2 by decreasing volume drastically and keeping weight consistent for that deloading period? It's odd to constantly be getting stronger on everything else while pull-ups have begun spiraling downward.


2.) Are there actually plausible studies that show that the length of a workout actually matters? A lot of bodybuilders and other programs say that if a workout lasts longer than 40 minutes to an hour, the entire training session is detrimental to your progress thanks to a major decrease in test levels as well as skyrocketing cortisol levels. Is this actually scientifically verified information?

1. change the exercise, change something, stop doing it for a bit, do pulldowns for higher reps - don't just beat a dead dog.

2. there's tons of studies - I'm sure it my training is exactly 33 minutes I will shit gold. Hormones are regulated in the body. There is a feedback loop so the body is constantly adjusting (i.e. this is why steroids shut down your natural test production because people use external means to raise it sky high and keep it far above baseline - it screws with this system). The main issue is that, as said above, this is a brief window and what you are doing is creating a long consistent process. And the feedback loop will compensate for the spike anyway and bring it back down to keep it in range. Basically, the positives to be had are so small that it's totally worthless to screw up your stimulus over this. Now I'm not saying traing for hours and hours like a moron but I'm saying, the significance is totally blown out of proportion. If you are really worried, split your sessions into A/B for the day.

 

[siamesedream]

Thanks for the responses guys.


About the timeframe issue, I'm not near worried enough about it to split my session into A/B or anything like that. I've heard it many times before and have paid no mind to it since most of the info is strictly from the bodybuilding world, but I've been seeing people beat that issue like crazy lately and I finally paid enough attention to it to actually be curious about the studies on it. I did a search on it and found quite a few university studies on it, but the interpretations of it and the control factors varied so much that is was hard to know what on earth to even make the study.

Crap like this: http://www.worldhealth.net/p/257,6728.html

doesn't even list types of exercises done or anything that can even make the study useful yet they draw the conclusion that more time = less progress. The closing statement "The university's Health and Exercise Science Unit looked at male recreational weight lifters over eight weeks with some doing three times as much exercise as others." makes it obvious that study specifically assumed that more time = more exercises, rather than looking at more time meaning more resting time in between sets to account for heavier weights or something different. To sum it up, studies as such seem to be completely useless but much of the bodybuilding world swears that less time = more progress.

As such, it begs me to conclude that either there are more studies out there that actually are useful that I can't find, or that the bodybuilding world is nearly entirely consistent of theories built on shoddy science.

 

[Madcow2]

What the bodybulding world is full of is everyone trying to extrapolate these magical pieces and do fifty thousand things at once to arrive at the perfect workout, perfect split, and perfect supplement list (and perfect stack of anabolics when they can't get that to work). The problem is that unless something is really off, all that stuff together means very little while the big blocks - getting stronger and better at big exercises while eating enough are totally butchered. It's just moronically inefficient to focus on the 2% crap when the big 90% block is screwed.

 

[Czar87]

Does military press equals the same with dumbell shoulder press, is dumbells shoulder press as good as military ?

 

[~Troy~]

ive been using this program for 1 month and love it..

 

[Protobuilder]

Alright guys -- squat trouble. I'm in week 13 of the single factor 5x5. Got 5x190 w/ unusually good form. Next session, went for 195 and got 3, but my form sucked pretty bad. The next day, I ran. My legs were tired and running was more dififcult than usual. Long story short, my knees started aching (right below the kneecap). Hurt for 3 days (2 were scheduled off days). Today, no aching so tried squatting again. I got one rep at 195 and my form sucked really bad. There was no way I could get a 2d rep. I rested, and did one more single. Form wasn't any better (glorified good morning basically).

Anyways, I need to adjust something obviously. I hope the running and not the squatting made my knees ache. I have a suspicion it was the running but maybe I was dive-bombing my squats or something. Anyways, I'm thinking about just reramping my squat weigths. I'm still progressing on everything else so don't think it's time to take a week off or anything. But this is new territory for me.

Any suggestions? Should I just reramp my squat weight? Should I do a week of high reps to help my knees, or do a week of low volume on squats or something?