nclifter6feet6 said:
yes but you can argue that your pretty much wasting your life on this net too
Where are you in NC? I'm in Gastonia (I know, I know...).
I have a lot of thoughts here because I
do have some time to waste
, but I hope it won't be wasting my life as it should give you some food for thought. That is the point of the internet for me...to learn and to try to give back. I emphasize "try," LOL.
Anyway, I don't think your analogy holds up, bro. Posting a message on an internet forum--hell, reading five threads and posting a message to each one--might take what, 30 minutes? That doesn't constitute wasting an entire life. Just maybe 30 minutes or so
, depending on whether or not you and/or others gained something from the exchange.
When something is a "waste" it's more than just a function of the time spent doing it. Not many people would say that working to earn a million dollars is a waste of time
by itself. But you have to put that into context. If you spent all of that time earning money
at the expense of being with your wife and kids, etc., then it could very well be a "waste."
Similarly, what Louden means is that such training is wasteful because
there are more efficient ways of doing it. Might training all day in addition to regular lifting work? Maybe, but it would have to work
far better to justify spending endless hours on such training.
And from what you said, that is not the case. You mentioned that Thai kickboxers have impressive lower bodies, and that they spend hours with bodyweight-only style training. Sumos do thousands of free-hand squats daily too and probably have good quads if we could see them under those mountains of lard.
But I digress. In the same paragraph, you mention that kickboxer legs could easily compare with bodybuilders' thighs. (Having seen a no. of kickboxers' legs first-hand, I would contend the most genetically gifted guys might have legs somewhat on par with a regional-level NPC lightweight. Yeah, they're cut and proportioned. They look good. But stand them next to a good light-heavy or bigger, and you'd see their thighs are significantly smaller than they might appear.) Well, that answers your question: bodybuilding yields similar results with far less time.
Could you improve upon that by trying to get "the best of both worlds"? It's impossible to say, since the kickboxers you mentioned typically don't do heavy squats, leg presses, et al. If they did, it's possible that they
wouldn't have the energy or capacity to recover from all of the calisthenics. We simply don't know.
Here's something for you to consider: gymnasts. Top Olympic gymnasts have awesome-looking upper bodies. They're really lean, so their thickness is all the more apparent. Their training involves a tremendous amount of very high repetition-style movements.
Should, therefore, bodybuilders try to train heavy *and* adopt gymnast training to improve our physiques? I'd say probably not, since again, you're looking at gymnasts out of context...compare them to a good bodybuilder at the same height, and the bodybuilder will make the gymnast look like a shrimp. The bodybuilder's already well past the gymnast's development (and the training that took the gymnast to that level), so doing lots of iron crosses and such would be taking things a step
down.
Another thing someone shouldn't fall prey to is the "overeating compensates for overtraining" idea, which is the reason why we see lots of fat bodybuilders who lift the same weights year after year. Whenever I hear a bodybuilder say shit like that, like Mike Matarrazzo has from time to time, I want to glue their lips shut. It's a goofy idea, and Matarrazzo's physique bears it out...he hasn't changed in years, always placing dead last at big shows like the Olympia.
I am more of the line of thinking, "How can I maximize growth with as little lifting as possible?" The less you can get away with lifting in a given workout, the more often you can *repeat* that workout. With a smaller but more intense workload, it's easier to measure what you're doing, too...I don't know how someone could keep track of thousands of push-ups, freehand squats, etc. day after day.
You could try it, but I honestly think these training styles are a dichotomy: either you pretty much exclusively lift heavy and grow that way, or you stick purely to lots of very light but extremely repetitive movements and try to grow.
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