Q&A, three part post: Lifting, lifestyles, nutrition, etc. **LONG**

[TxRedMan]

I wasn't kidding when I said I reccomend muscle milk, and i'm also going to really gear down and lose another 10 pounds in the next 6 weeks, i'm really close to having abs again:



here's a shot of what i'm taking:






This is the third time I've tried to do this thread. I cannot begin to tell you how frustrating it is to type out an hour long thread only to have the software not accept it when I hit submit, reaching a page that says 'form is no longer valid', presumably b/c these forums have some sort of time length in place for how long you can take to create a post. Please fix this, it's a terrible software error.

That aside, I'm going to give you guys a lot of information in this thread. A lot of you have PM'd me, and I copied and pasted your ?'s into the first thread but I'm too lazy to do it again, so anyone who wants to ask specific questions can feel free to do so in this thread. Please read the entire thread first. I'm not going to answer ?'s like 'how can i gain 15 lbs of muscle fast?' or 'i want to lose 20 LBS, what's best?'. If you have a mundane question read this thread or any of the other fitness threads that have been done in OOT, or make yourself familiar with google. However, if you have a ? that is specific to weight lifting, dieting, or the overall lifestyle, feel free to ask.

E.G.'s 'why pause reps for bench press?' or 'proteins before bed/during the middle of the night, why?' or 'how do i avoid burnout' etc.

The advice I will give in this thread comes from personal experience. I've had my knowledge on these subjects doubted and ridiculed by a few posters here because of one specific reccomendation I made regarding one specific lift, but I'm the only one who's shown myself and my abilities, and my advice is solid even when it differs from what an undocumented self proclaimed authority might otherwise like you to believe. The bottom line is that I'm going to share with you what I have seen work in my eight years of training, body building, powerlifting, dieting, and learning how the body works and responds.

I'd like to start by saying the following:

Steroids are for trained individuals who have tremendous self discipline and who wish to push their bodies past their natural genetic abilities in muscular development. I would estimate that 90% of the guys I know who have taken steroids do not look like they ever did, and ultimately wasted their time, money, and compromised their health because of non-education, lazy work ethics, and an attitude that the drugs would do the work for them. I first started using steroids when I was about to turn 18, 2 years into serious training, and although I was educated, I was nowhere near my natural genetic potential.

Now then.

Let's talk about lifting weights. Lifting weights has a lot of societal stigmas attached to it. Maybe there's some women that will read this thread (yo fluffpop), and say what I've heard 100's of women say in the past "i don't wanna get all big and bulky".

This is the second biggest myth about weight lifting. Getting big and bulky comes from eating. I challenge anyone here to attempt to gain weight while in a negative caloric state. The only way you can gain weight, whether it be muscle or fat, is to eat more calories than you burn. On top of that, you gain muscle by the ounce, not by the pound. I tell girls all the time that if they did the same routine that I do (assuming they're of a slim build) that within a years time they would be looking much more like a fitness model with toned legs and a firm stomach, and they wouldn't look a thing like a bodybuilder. It is very very hard to grow muscle tissue. I promise you this. I've spent 8 years lifting weights, half of which I used steroids, and I've added what I estimate to be 35 LBS of true muscle tissue. Please do not avoid lifting weights because you think you'll blow up into some sort of Hulk.

The second biggest myth in weight lifting:

"lift heavy to get big, do reps to get ripped"

When a noob would come into the gym and say this in our circle, we used to give him untold amounts of [censored] forever about this remark.

Folks- again, you cannot 'get big' simply by lifting heavy. The truth in that statement is that lifting heavy in most cases will build more muscle tissue than lifting lighter weights for more reps assuming you eat enough to let your body grow, i.e., you're in a positive caloric state.

Doing reps will not make you ripped unless you're in a negative caloric state, but I'm going to let you in on a little secret, a secret that is fact: your muscles already have shape. Your genetic code made your muscles what they are. You can add new muscle to the existing muscle, but you cannot change the shape of your muscles. Want biceps peaks like Arnolds? Tough [censored]. Want tear drop quads like Branch Warren? Sorry bro.

And furthermore, if you can't see the definition in your muscles, guess what? It's because there's a layer of fat on top of them that obscure and hide the definition that lies beneath.


If you're going to lift weights, you need to lift free weights. Machines have specific purposes, and should be incorporated into your workouts, but free weights should generally consist of 80% of your total sets. Why free weights? Because you get more bang for your buck. Learn perfect form and never stray from it, and you won't get hurt, and you'll develop strength in a lot of supporting muscle groups underneath and around the muscle groups you intend to work.

e.g.- when you're doing incline dumbell bench press with free weights, you have to pick the dumbells up off the rack, walk over to the bench, kick them up onto your knees and then hoist them up to your shoulders to perform the lift. This creates balance, agility, and develops smaller muscle groups as well as the deltoid/pectoral/tricep muscles that do the most of the work during the exercise.

Machines are good for people who have injuries, or people who just want to exercise their muscles while burning some calories, but aren't concerned about real muscle growth. There are some exceptions to this, however, as some machines imitate real movements very well and some allow you to isolate certain muscle groups. But the bulk of your routine needs to consist of bare knuckle lifts with dumbells and barbells.

If you wanted to become better at something, you need to look at everything involved. Let's take bench press for example. If I were to ask most of you what muscle group is responsible for a strong bench press, you'd likely tell me the pectorals. Truth is for most guys, the deltoids and the triceps are responsible for their big bench press, as opposed to just the pecs. The wider the grip you use on bench press, the more the chest becomes involved, and vice versa for the triceps and shoulders. Some people have such dominant shoulders that they take over their chest movements.

A guy who has a strong bench press will have strong shoulders and strong triceps.

I used to really be nuts about bench press. It was my lift. There was no one at the gym who could do more than me raw.

My bench routine used to go like this

135x10
135x10
225x10
315x10
385x5
405x5
455x3
485x1
500 negative
405x3 pause reps
385x3 pause reps
315x5 pause reps
315x5 pause reps
225x8 pause reps

Now, I wouldn't do that routine every time, but I did it often, increasing the poundages as I moved up or down in strength. I'd wait at least two minutes between sets and i'd routinely be on the bench for over an hour. The point is, I focused on bench a lot. You can't do 4 sets of bench press and expect to get real strong at it.

After I did that routine I'd do something like this

incline barbell

135x15
225x10
315x6
225x 5 pause reps
225x 5 pause reps

Dumbell flys

4x12

Then I'd go on to triceps

Narrow grip bench press

225x10 pause reps
315x5 pause reps
315x5 pause reps

Triceps pushdowns
1x12
3x8
1x6

That's how I achieved a 500 LB bench press.

Something to note here, and it applies to all lifters, is that once you acquire "feel", you'll instinctively know what to do in the gym. It takes a long time to learn "feel". By feel I mean how your body reacts, how it recovers, what it needs both nutritionally and physically. It's like being able to listen to your body talk to you. I never sit down and write out a weeks worth of workouts. I used to get workouts from the owner of the gym, but once I had tried just about every exercise I could, and I'd had success and made progress lifting, I just knew what I need to do. I knew what I did the last time, and I knew what changes I needed to make to change things up so that i wouldn't become adapted to a single routine or motion. I always changed something in my workouts, still do, so that I'm not becoming stagant. I knew what worked for me, btw it took me three years to find out that the above bench press workout really worked well for me- and it might not for you.

I know this is long and wordy, but this isn't a concise subject, and I feel that elaboration is neccessary.

I built my bench press using the above routines, but something that really got me over the hump was the incorporation of barbell military presses into my routine. I was always shy of them b/c of the possibility of injury, but when done in front as opposed to behind the neck your chance of injury while lifting heavy is much less. I would camp out on the military press and do 8 sets, almost always with a spotter- which- a good spotter is worth a lot in the gym, believe me, and i'd use a similar scale as i did for bench press.

135x12

205x10

225x8

275x3

295x2

315x3 with assistance

225x5 pause reps

135x12

If you want to get strong in pressing movements, you have to do lots of heavy pressing movements.

And let me say this about pause reps:

A pause rep is a rep where when you reach the bottom of the movement, you pause, not resting the weight, but holding the weight, then when you go up you explode and drive as hard as you can into the weight. This helps build explosiveness at the bottom of a rep and it's crucial for someone who does powerlifting b/c of the importance of explosion and the fact that you have to pause for some lifts, like bench press and military press in many power lifting federations.

I highly reccomend pause reps once you have achieved perfect form.

So I built my bench press by doing lots of flat bench, lots of military, lots of triceps, and going heavy.

The key to working out for me is motivation.

I can't really tell you how motivated I was at some points in my life. I was probably dangerously motivated to be honest. I could put myself in a spot mentally, in a situation, that would make my adrenal glands go nuts. I still can. I used to say to myself, "if you could change (x), x being a certain situation in my life) by lifting this weight, how hard would you push?" I didn't yell, i didn't scream, but I was so mentally engulfed by what I was doing that I at times probably had watery eyes thinking about it before a lift. That kind of mental determination accounts for more than you would imagine.

It's like Arnold said 'be here, now'.

Staying motivated means staying in the gym, i.e., w/o motivation you're just going to show up and go through the movements and get in, get out.

I was fortunate to have a gym near me that was truly hardcore, with guys my age and older who were seriously into it. I've trained with numerous bodybuilders and powerlifters, and I'm friends with one of Ronnie Colemans occasional training partner. So we shared info, we fed off of eachother, and it was a fraternity of guys who wanted to get big, strong, and in better shape.


Atmosphere is huge IMHO. If you're trying to lift heavy next to a 45 year old woman who's doing rubber band exercises on some inflatable ball, WTF?

If you can find a real GYM, you'll be better off. A place that has iron weights, a [censored] up floor, chalk on hand and rock and roll playing.


Okay guys. I'm going to take a break, but I'm going to update this, probably later tonight, with more advice on training back, legs, biceps, dieting, and the overall lifestyle and the effect it has.


BTW- down to a 34" waist, arms still at 19.25 pumped, weighing 218, bench is down a bit but that's expected.


TBC

-Tex


note: if anyone wants to see the link to my gym, they have a myspace page in case you're curious. also, i hope this isn't spam or whatever, but if you need supplements we pretty much have the best of the best, and only carry what the members want/use, so i'd be happy to give you guys the contact info.