going to start doing every bodypart 5x a week

[Madcow2]

how come current bodybuilders get so jacked using supercomposition?

How come cattle get big and thick without touching a weight? How come 1980's BBers who almost never squatted or deadlifted and used mainly machines with all kinds of exotic rep schemes looked fabulous? Take enough juice, get enough food, and even a shitty training stimulus is enough to progress. It becomes a question of optimality, how can you get the most gains? When you are already a very advanced lifter, how can you continue to make progress. The main issue is that when it comes to hypertrophy with absolutely no performance criteria, people who don't have to be tested and have no qualms about using copious dosages on a constant basis can just use more drugs and compensate for bad training. If you wonder why BBers know tons about anabolics and diet yet very little about training theory - this is the answer. It's also why you hear, "it's 95% diet" - for these people it is, but that's not to say that they couldn't get more out of a cycle at a constant dosage by using a better training program.

 

[Madcow2]

I was going to keep the same workout.. cos i usually never get sore after a workout, i guess i recover pretty well. So saying that i thought it would be okay to have 5 day weeks.

DOMS (soreness) has no correlation to an effective workout. Some get sore, some don't. Generally infrequent, high volume to failure sessions are a good way to get sore but a bad way to grow. You can't make a call on tolerance using soreness. If you are making good progress, it's an indicator that the current load isn't too much. See how you do with the increase. If your weights start dropping accross the board, that's a sign of an issue.

 

[Mithrandir]

someone give him Karma..I can't -- I have even been spreading it around and it stil will not let me --KARMA TO MADCOW!

I do not have a pciture of you madcow, but will paint your name on a large sheet of paper and nail it above my comp !!

Mith

 

[Elite_Fry]

someone give him Karma..I can't -- I have even been spreading it around and it stil will not let me --KARMA TO MADCOW!

I do not have a pciture of you madcow, but will paint your name on a large sheet of paper and nail it above my comp !!

Mith

done

 

[UA_Iron]

How come cattle get big and thick without touching a weight? How come 1980's BBers who almost never squatted or deadlifted and used mainly machines with all kinds of exotic rep schemes looked fabulous? Take enough juice, get enough food, and even a shitty training stimulus is enough to progress. It becomes a question of optimality, how can you get the most gains? When you are already a very advanced lifter, how can you continue to make progress. The main issue is that when it comes to hypertrophy with absolutely no performance criteria, people who don't have to be tested and have no qualms about using copious dosages on a constant basis can just use more drugs and compensate for bad training. If you wonder why BBers know tons about anabolics and diet yet very little about training theory - this is the answer. It's also why you hear, "it's 95% diet" - for these people it is, but that's not to say that they couldn't get more out of a cycle at a constant dosage by using a better training program.

not every bodybuilder is stupid, I am sure some have tried more HST style or DFHT - none has said much about it though. The BB world is shrouded in mystery - I think there's a heavy reliance on drugs, but come on - 300lbs on stage and something must be going right.

 

[WalkingBeast]

I was going to keep the same workout.. cos i usually never get sore after a workout, i guess i recover pretty well. So saying that i thought it would be okay to have 5 day weeks.

If you never get sore after a workout I wouldnt question your recovery ability but whether or not youre training hard enough to begin with. I doubt you recover immediately.

 

[Madcow2]

not every bodybuilder is stupid, I am sure some have tried more HST style or DFHT - none has said much about it though. The BB world is shrouded in mystery - I think there's a heavy reliance on drugs, but come on - 300lbs on stage and something must be going right.

The real key to competitive BBing is not so much getting big in the first place but maintaining as much muscle as possible while lowering BF to rediculous levels (symmetry, low water but full muscles, all kinds of other stuff too). Of course, there's a lot more to it but really, think about the late 1980s BBers - not much in the way of free weights at all with very few squating and no one deadlifting (squats and pulls were maligned because "they make your waist bigger", most trained on a 3 on 1 off schedule with even some doing AM/PM workouts. I think just about everyone would agree that's a pretty horrible way to try to get big, yet look at the pictures they were huge and ripped - much better than they had been in the 1960s or 1970s. How does one explain that? If they were doing anything right then to warrant their muscularity how come so much has changed in training over the past 10-15 years?

I don't want to lump every single BBer into that group but 99.9% fit the mold and pretty much all of ProBBing. I'm pretty careful of making hasty generalizations but this one is well earned. I'm always happy to see someone learning what's behind HST or reading Science and Practice or Managing the Training of the Weightlifter but the bottom line is that at this point, it is still a very small minority of the BBing population - and that's actually what I'm trying to fix.

 

[Mithrandir]

I don't know, today is day one of week three on the 5x5 program and the only day I was sore was the first day (quads from squats and front delts from bench) and that first wednesday (hams from daedlifts)--I am making and breaking records and I feel great the next day, like I could do it agian.

 

[swordfish151]

would doing the muscle group twice a wk lead to "overtraining" ..whats up with the myth about doing a body part only once a week...

so say currently your doing this:

Mon: Chest
Tues: Back
Wed: Legs
Thurs: Shoulders
Friday: arms

And you start doing this:

Mon: Chest/back
Tues: legs/shoulders
Wed: arms
Thurs: off
Fri: chest/back
Sat: arms...

Damn im confused..how would you hit a body part twice but if you only took one day off??

Mon: Chest/back
Tues: Legs/shoulders
Wed: arms
Thurs: chest/back
FRi: Legs/shoulders
Sat: arms
Sun: rest??

do you believe if a body part is lagging you should hit it twice a week?

 

[Madcow2]

would doing the muscle group twice a wk lead to "overtraining" ..whats up with the myth about doing a body part only once a week...

<snip>

Damn im confused..how would you hit a body part twice but if you only took one day off??

Mon: Chest/back
Tues: Legs/shoulders
Wed: arms
Thurs: chest/back
FRi: Legs/shoulders
Sat: arms
Sun: rest??

do you believe if a body part is lagging you should hit it twice a week?

There's just so much more to it than organizing a split that determines which muscles on which days. Consider squatting 2 sets of 5 reps at 30% of your 1RM (so a 300lbs squatter doing roughly 100lbs). You could do this 5x per week indefinitely. Consider squatting 12 sets of 5 reps at 90% of your 1RM (so a 300max doing 270 now). Most people probably can't handle that more than once per week and even then will likely overtrain assuming a reasonable amount of other volume on other lifts being trained at reasonable intensity (overtraining has a lot more to do with the CNS and systemic recovery than it does with an individual muscle group).

Granted these are extremes but extreme scenarios serve to illustrate the point that frequency alone doesn't determine anything. When most people think about hitting a bodypart 2x per week what they basically end up doing is taking their existing workout and doing it twice in the same amount of time. So let's just say that they handle their existing workout okay - can they handle double the volume okay? I don't know, that's a damn big increase to pull on someone suddenly. A better way is to split your volume and distribute it using the frequency (so 6 sets of squats with working set weight becomes 3 sets 2x per week). Now a lot of people might find they can increase volume a bit because they become better conditioned with increased frequency and can tolerate more but it would be pretty dumb to start doing 6 sets 2x per week rather than 3 and double it up. Maybe increase by 1 set in each of the 2 workouts or some such other alteration, anything that's less severe than a 100% increase.

So the primary factors at play are volume (the total workload over a period), intensity (a given weight's % of your 1 rep max), and frequency (the allocation of volume). It's also important to realize that the idea that a muscle is trained, recovers fully and is enhanced, and then gets trained again in a similar process workout to workout is a really nice logical way of looking at things but not really how this stuff works. For a novice, it won't make any difference but as one progresses what were once nuances in training theory and not really important can really hurt or stop gains completely (plateau). This is actually the whole reason for periodization in training. You might check out the links under 'Dual Factor Theory - Why This Works' on this page: http://www.elitefitness.com/forum/showthread.php?t=375215