Madcow or anyone in the know

[mdm1]

Hi,

I've just about finished my first cylce of the 5*5 and I am really impressed with the results. After doing a Mentzer-style HD routine for over two years it has been a real wake up call!

I just have a couple of quick questions:

My arms (in particular my triceps) really lag behind my other bodyparts. Do you think it is enough to continue getting strong on compound lifts to solve this problem or is it advisable to insert some direct arm work into the routine?

My main concern is that direct arm work will mess with my gains on the big lifts. If you do advise their use, what exercises would be best and how can I fit them into the program?

Thanks in advance,

Mdm

 

[Anthrax Invasion]

Stick with another cycle or two of the 5x5 routine. Driving up the compound lifts (in this case bench and overhead presses) will set you up with more tricep girth. Throw in 1-2 sets of isolation work 2x a week for 12+ reps to get some sarcoplasmic hypertrophy in there. It'll make 'em look purty, and you'll likely feel better. Vanity is great, yeah?

 

[BiggT]

Yeah, on Friday just toss in some direct triceps work, somewhere around 40 total reps should be just fine.

At times, when I use the M-W-F setup, I make Saturday a "Gay Day" and I go to the gym and do bis/tris/calves. Just a nice little 30 minute run through, 40 total reps for everything.

Neither one of these hurt your recovery, just don't turn it into a full-fledged "arm workout"...pick one exercise and do 4x10 or 3x12 or whatever and get out, don't do skull crushers, kickbacks, pushdowns with 37 diffrerent attachments, and every triceps machine in the gym.

One more suggestion is with the new cycle, you can always make close-grip bench or dips one of the core lifts.

 

[nelmsjer]

At times, when I use the M-W-F setup, I make Saturday a "Gay Day" and I go to the gym and do bis/tris/calves.
.

Freaking classic.

 

[Madcow2]

Glad you enjoyed the results. Indulge me for one second before I get to your arm question which was for the most part answered above. I've just had a lot of interaction lately with some HIT people who seem to be the ultimate in closed minded (you are not included in this obviously because you are actually open to different things) but I do want to give you a bit of a frame of reference around all of training so you can see it from a good vantage point and understand programming at its essence (i.e. it's hard to see the mountains and the sea if you are in a deep forest).

I will say coming from HIT, the best thing to do with training is not to segment it into "HIT" or "Mentzer" or "High Volume" but to think about workload, progression, and programming. You have frequency, intensity (%1RM), and volume to play with and the goal is always to increase capacity in lifts that matter. Granted most HIT favors low frequency, low to moderate intensity (%1RM not preceived effort at failure), and low volume. The method of progression is to add weight or reps as often as possible. If that gets you to your goal, great, it's a plan of progression and there's nothing wrong with it. I however advise not to seek identity and unnecessarily limit oneself to a certain mix of variables even if you have good results with them. As you've seen, a lot of things can work and if you know much about failure being neural (think nervous system fatigue) and not muscular you'll see why that mix of variables come out how it does. Anyway, point being, sometimes it makes sense to have a low volume period where you are pushing up the weights/reps, sometimes that's not what you need. Develop a comprehensive understanding of training that includes all the variables (and therefore training styles) and program for progress from there. Also consider that most people do very well on this program after coming from a low volume one and that many times a higher rep lower volume program can work very well after it (and hence we arrive at some of the basics of periodization and planning.

Just my rant because for some reason (and you are not included in this) people build a whole identity around HIT training and basically adhere to a belief system (which has changed massively over the years) checking their brains at the door. HIT is a mix of variables and a progression system based on failure, nothing more and neither good nor bad. If you are a fan of football this is probably a really useful analogy: http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?p=7989488&highlight=vertical+offense#post7989488

Anyway, for the arms. You can definitely do direct arm work, it says so right in the program description. The idea is that you don't want it to interfere with performing your core lifts and ability to scale those. Usually that might be Friday at the end of your workout, choose 1 exercise and do it for the training cycle. If you want to do more, split that volume and do it at the end on M/F. Now the real issue would be if your triceps were a limiting factor in your bench or dealing with a weak point somewhere. This is where planning is more important as well as selecting exercises that have real carryover into the core lift. Maybe that's Tate Presses for tris, and maybe you'd even have more than one movement. This requires planning and thought - granted you don't do this if you there isn't a current need and certainly not for some basic aethetics during a pure bulking training cycle. Anyway, you get the idea.



Anyway

 

[mdm1]

Cheers for the quick responses,

I'm thinking that Friday is the best day to do some arm work so I'll have the whole weekend to recover.

Now I just need to figure out which exercises to use. I was thinking either skullcrushers or cable pushdowns.


Mdm

 

[Anthrax Invasion]

Skull crushers due to the stretch imposed upon the muscle tissue.

 

[silver_shadow]

stretch or no stretch, cables suck ass for most things and skullcrushers are a pretty good exercise like AI says.

 

[mdm1]

Hey Madcow,

We must have been typing at the same time! Thanks for the tips.

When I refer to HIT in this post, please take it to mean low volume and frequency, single set stuff. Sorry if this is a little off topic, but some others might be able to gain from my experiences.

Believe me, I know all about the closed-mindedness of some HIT trainees: I was one of those people for a long time! I used to mock the training of athletes, and scoff at people in the gym who were bigger than me just because I had got it in my head that there couldn't be a better way. I put my lack of progress down to poor genetics, just as folk like Darden, Jones and Mentzer told me to.

After more than 2 years of trying every HIT routine in the book I finally made up my mind that I could make better progress than I was and there must be better routines about. Luckily at that time a guy on one of the HIT boards who had been doing HIT-style routines for 7 years with limited progress started posting about the gains he had been making on a dual-factor based program. I really liked what he had to say and he refferred me to this site where I found Bill Starr's workout that you had listed. The more I read about DFT in various sources the more sense it seems to make. Now when I think about HD it seems a bit ridiculous at times.

I appreciate now that HIT routines could be useful for deloading, but they simply don't produce the results that are claimed if they are used indefinitely. I was only able to continue making strength gains when I changed to a new exercise every couple of months.

So, because of my blinkered thinking I am now at a stage where I have been weight training for over 4 years and I am not even close to strong in any major compound movements. In a lot of my lifts, an untrained person with some natural strength could probably outlift me. Damn those Nautilus machines!!!

Anyway, I hope to put this to rights this year and I should to be moving some more respectable poundages by next January. Sorry about the rant, just wanted to get it off my chest!!

Take care,

Mdm

 

[Madcow2]

Regarding the changing exercises, this is something worthwile reading. A lot of times changing exercises and rep ranges give you a very false sense of progress and there can be little to no fundemental progress. This is a huge issue for people and a massive pitfall.

Progression is the key. The method is immaterial even if it's rubbing a frog on your balls before a set. Quantifying progression is important. This is why I look at best core lifts like the squat, dead, bench, row, overhead and a fixed rep number (best set of 5 or 8 or 10 - whatever just constant over time). This gives you something to compare and allows you to clarify and evaluate especially if one swaps exercises all the time.

Case in point, someone squats 225x10 and 3 months later does 250x10. That's improvement. If he only did 225x10 again, obviously something didn't happen there. This is most important over longer time frames or when exercises are changed. Meaning, I squat 225x10 and plateau, I then switch to leg press and proceed to increase my leg press 200lbs over the next 10 weeks. At this point, if the leg press materially impacted my overall power I should be able to start squatting again and within a few weeks of reacclimating to the squat, I should have no problem putting up a big personal record for 10 reps. If that doesn't happen, all that work on the legpress didn't fundementally make me any stronger, all I did was acclimate my body to a new exercise and not improve. This works the same way with rep ranges. I might have plateaued with 10RM but started working on my 25RM and I make all kinds of progress - if my 10RM doesn't move when I go back and reacclimate to it, the only thing I did was spin my wheels and acclimate my body to 25 rep sets. This is called changing the means of training and it can be useful but is also a giant pitfall that has claimed many many people. If you read Pendlay's interviews this is a big point for him, far too much
changing the means of training and not dealing with the problem directly

This is how people get fooled into thinking they are making progress and why having benchmarks are useful. You can guage the effectiveness of your training and the carryover from given exercises. Just align the benchmarks and rep ranges with your goals - generally free weights and constant established technique is best because it is less arbitrary.

EDIT - and feel free to rant, this is a major reason why I and some others have chosen to devote some time to BBing forums. There is a huge amount of ignorance and smart people who are working hard to better themselves are getting screwed over in a huge way by all the voodoo bullshit, drug monkies who can magnify the shitiest stimulus, and big bodybuilding/supplement business which benefits from people's frustration.