Principles of bodybuilding training, part I

Training principles are the fundamental concepts underpinning sports science and training methodology.

As an educational process, sports training is governed first and foremost by general teaching principles, which capture the essential features common to all education and personal development. Whatever the particular characteristics of sports training, it must always rest on fundamental teaching principles: setting high expectations while respecting the individual, taking individual characteristics into account, fostering understanding and active participation, using demonstrations, working systematically, and so on. Coaches must consistently follow the general principles of teaching and personal development, creatively adapting them to the specific demands of sports training.

The principles of sports training broadly reflect the objective laws governing training and show coaches and athletes the main routes to progress. These laws describe the objective relationships between the effects of training and an athlete’s condition. Several biological, educational and psychological sciences study these relationships. Their findings form the basis of the laws that govern sports training. When training for bodybuilding, you need to keep the general principles of sports training in mind.

General principles

The principle of all-round development. As a general rule, developing your physical abilities to their full potential requires you to increase your body’s functional capacity. However narrow your specialization, progress in any sport depends on comprehensive physical preparation. This naturally applies to bodybuilding too. One-sided specialization runs counter to natural development. It may promote progress temporarily, but it offers no long-term prospects and may even lead to pathological changes.

Bodybuilding exercises primarily develop the muscles, placing fewer demands on the internal organs and systems, including the cardiovascular and respiratory systems. It is therefore essential to include cyclical activities in your training that stimulate these organs and systems.

Most sports prioritize the development of the muscle groups or individual muscles used in competition. For example, weightlifting requires considerable strength in the legs, back and arms, while jumpers need considerable strength in the leg extensors, and so on. You must not neglect other muscle groups, or your body will develop unevenly.

The aim of bodybuilding is to develop the entire musculature. This also ensures balanced development of the internal organs. Intense exercise stimulates the development of the cardiovascular, respiratory and other systems and improves metabolism. A well-balanced musculature also supports good posture.

Bodybuilding does not, however, require you to give every muscle group equal attention. Its primary purpose is to correct weaknesses in your physique and bring underdeveloped areas up to the same level. If your upper body is well developed but your legs are not, you still need to train your upper body, but considerably less than your legs.

The principle of individualization

Your training needs to be structured to deliver the greatest possible benefit under your particular circumstances. Avoid unnecessary interruptions between workouts and minimize losses in fitness during phases that necessarily involve a reduction in training volume and intensity. This is the essence of the principle of continuity in sports training.

Daily workouts, or even more frequent sessions (up to 3 times a day), have become the norm in modern sport. Bodybuilders have adopted this approach too, making sports training a truly continuous process. Daily or more frequent workouts without causing overtraining are possible because the body’s various functional capacities recover at different rates after training. However, this requires you to vary the components of training—exercises and other training activities, methods, volume, intensity and rest intervals—while accounting for how recovery and adaptation differ with different training loads. Continuity in training therefore does not mean repeating workouts as frequently as possible.

The principle of training cycles and wave-like changes in training load. Sports training is cyclical, and bodybuilding training is no exception. Training cycles are relatively self-contained units of the training process that follow one another in a recurring sequence. Each new cycle partly repeats the previous one while differing in its exercises and other training activities, methods, and the magnitude and composition of the training load. The entire training process is structured around the following cycles:

• short cycles, or microcycles (a week)
• medium cycles, or mesocycles (a month)
• long cycles, or macrocycles (a year)

Cycles provide a universal framework for organizing training. Applying the principle of cyclical training means:

• systematically repeating the main elements of your training while continually changing the training objective in line with the logical progression of phases and periods.
• placing exercises, other training activities and methods appropriately within the structure of the cycles: any exercise, training activity or method loses its effectiveness if it is not used at the right time and in the right cycle.
• setting and adjusting your training load in accordance with the principles governing the progression of phases and periods.

Training load must increase gradually in a wave-like pattern. Increasing training load in a straight line soon leads to a decline in performance capacity. Wave-like fluctuations in training load are characteristic of all training stages and periods. These waves are classified as small, medium or large, reflecting the cyclical nature of the training process.

The wave-like pattern of training load is determined by the following factors:

• the distinct phases and differing rates of recovery and adaptation processes
• periodic fluctuations in the body’s performance capacity (biorhythms) and general environmental factors
• the relationship between training volume and intensity

This wave-like pattern allows training load to increase through the alternation of three phases:

• a phase in which total training load increases
• a phase in which some parameters temporarily stabilize so that others can increase significantly
• a phase in which training load is relatively reduced

Using these phases allows substantial increases in volume and intensity, thereby maximizing improvements in training status.

Specialized principles

The instinctive training principle. All the world’s top bodybuilders consider this the most important principle. It is the overarching principle on which all the others rest. One of the most important secrets to success is getting to know your body and how it responds to different approaches to training and nutrition. Trial and error is the only way to determine how best to influence your body and its physiological systems. By trying hundreds of approaches to training and nutrition over the years, you learn how your body responds to each of them. Developing the ability to train instinctively takes years.

Beginners are advised against applying this principle, as an inability to judge your own strength often leads to overtraining. First, you need to learn to exercise correctly and allow your body to adapt to intense workouts. The instinctive training principle can therefore be introduced later, once you have reached a certain level.

To succeed, you need to use your own system; copying other people’s training systems does not guarantee success. You need to decide whether to train every day or follow a different system. You must take regular body measurements and know what benefits you most. No one can predict how your body will respond to different stimuli. Bodybuilding is an ongoing process of experimentation in which you need to try one method after another to discover which has the best effect on your body. Only you can say what suits you best. A coach or experienced bodybuilder can recommend available techniques and methods, but you need to try them out and assess them yourself. You must learn to recognize your body’s biofeedback signals. Knowing how to respond to these signals and interpret them correctly demonstrates mastery of the instinctive principle. The ability to train instinctively is invaluable to a dedicated bodybuilder, as it saves time and energy that would otherwise be wasted on misguided experiments throughout the training process.

Keeping a training diary is very important for mastering the instinctive training principle. Reviewing your notes helps you understand the advantages and disadvantages of different exercises and training regimens. Without an accurate record of your training and nutrition, it is difficult to decide how to train in the future. Keeping these records helps you master the instinctive training principle more quickly. Awareness of how your muscles feel and visual observation help develop your training instincts. You can assess a muscle by its condition.

You must learn to recognize and interpret the following biofeedback signals:

1. Greater muscle soreness than usual. Changing your training methods and exercises stimulates your muscles more intensely and strongly, indicating that these changes have a positive effect. Greater muscle soreness than usual typically follows a workout that is too demanding. Excessive training volume is often harmful. For maximum results, train each muscle or muscle group enough. You must determine the volume instinctively.
2. Excessive fatigue and/or loss of motivation to train. Performing too many sets in each workout can cause chronic fatigue, indicating that you have overtrained. Once you are overtrained, progress also stops.
3. Feeling the muscle contract during an exercise. There is an optimal level of mental focus that ensures muscle growth. Without a sense of the muscle contracting, you may fail to concentrate fully and therefore miss out on optimal gains in muscle mass and quality.
4. A significant increase in the weight used in a basic exercise. Because there is a direct linear relationship between strength and muscle mass, your muscles grow larger and stronger as a result of exertion. The stronger a muscle is, the greater its potential to grow. The weight used in training usually increases relatively slowly.
5. Increases in body part circumference. Since training is not accompanied by an increase in fat tissue, these increases reflect muscle growth. Measure the circumference of your body parts periodically. This provides useful feedback on the training you have done
6. Posing in front of a mirror. This gives you a very clear picture of changes in your appearance, which are undoubtedly the result of your training. If you have gained excess fat, however, you must start burning it off immediately.
7. Relative energy levels. If you have enough energy for your workouts and the rest of your day, your eating and sleeping habits are optimal. If you feel tired for a while, you need to change your diet and rest routine.
8. Mood fluctuations. Frequent low moods slow your progress. You must try to reduce stress and avoid situations that cause emotional depression.

After a year or two of learning to recognize and interpret your body’s feedback signals, you can develop the intuition needed to maximize muscle development while avoiding overtraining and injuries.

The principle of periodization. In bodybuilding, as in any other sport, athletes cannot maintain peak condition for very long. Reaching and maintaining peak condition is particularly difficult in bodybuilding, where high-intensity contest preparation is combined with a strict diet. Athletes can tolerate high-intensity training for only a couple of months a year. How long a training load can be sustained depends on the body’s current reserves for adaptation. The body cannot keep responding to a training load with positive adaptations indefinitely. Once it has exhausted its energy potential, further training causes negative changes (overtraining develops). How long, then, can a training load be sustained without exceeding the body’s capacity to adapt? For elite bodybuilders, this may be nearly 3 months. A recovery break is then needed to activate compensatory processes.

This makes it necessary to organize training loads over time into cycles and phases that deliver the planned improvements in sport-specific physical preparation and progressively improve the athlete’s condition.

Training loads can be distributed evenly throughout the annual cycle or concentrated in certain phases. Intermediate athletes can use either approach successfully, but only the second approach brings success for advanced athletes. Concentrating training volume produces deeper functional changes in the body and greater shifts in sport-specific physical preparation.

This principle began to be applied in bodybuilding about 35 years ago and has enabled many bodybuilders to maintain a very high level of athletic condition for decades. Previously, many bodybuilders trained year-round without achieving success. They developed chronic overtraining, suffered injuries or burned out in competition. Organizing training into cycles made it possible to avoid these problems.

Today, bodybuilders mainly use three training cycles:

1. off-season, or general preparation
2. pre-contest, or specific preparation
3. rest cycle

Objectives of the off-season cycle:

• increase muscle mass
• bring up lagging muscles
• improve body proportions and symmetry

The length of the off-season cycle can vary. For elite bodybuilders who compete once a year, it lasts about 9 months, followed by a pre-contest cycle of 3 months. Less advanced bodybuilders are advised to compete twice a year, at 6-month intervals. In this case, the cycles last approximately 4 4.5 and 1.5-2 months. Lower-level bodybuilders often compete too frequently, which requires continuous pre-contest training and dieting. This makes it impossible to increase muscle mass. You cannot increase muscle mass or do specialized training for a lagging muscle (or muscle group) during a pre-contest cycle when you are training at high intensity and dieting. Make sure your body weight does not rise more than 10 kilograms above your competition weight. Indiscriminate eating increases unwanted fat, which is very difficult to burn off later. You should therefore follow a diet during the off-season cycle as well. Keep your calorie intake only slightly above what you need to make progress. To increase muscle mass, consume relatively large amounts of protein and simple and complex carbohydrates, which, combined with hard training, will ensure new muscle growth.

When you begin preparing for your next competition, train with moderate training loads for the first 3-4 months, but make sure these are higher than those used in the corresponding cycle last time. Then steadily increase volume and intensity. Some bodybuilders also include specific strength-building phases lasting 4-8 weeks, using heavy weights and low reps to ensure strength gains. Heavy weights and rep count are directly related to increases in muscle mass: the more muscle mass you have, the heavier the weights you can train with, and vice versa. This period mainly involves compound exercises that engage large muscle groups and allow you to use heavy resistance. Resistance is progressive, meaning that the rep count in compound exercises gradually decreases with each set while resistance increases.

The aim of the pre-contest period is to improve the quality and proportions of the new muscle mass gained during the preparation period. Training intensity is at its maximum. The principle of increasing training intensity is applied alongside a diet. During the pre-contest cycle, the diet is calorie-restricted and as low in fat as possible. Carbohydrates are also restricted. By consuming fewer calories than you need each day over a period of time and following a specific pre-contest training program, you will begin to burn subcutaneous fat. This also involves a small, unavoidable loss of muscle mass, but the result is greater muscle definition. More isolation exercises are used during the pre-contest phase to bring out every detail of the muscles. To maintain muscle mass, at least one compound exercise is used for each muscle group, with lower reps and heavier weights than in isolation exercises.

The transition phase falls between the off-season and pre-contest cycles. A common mistake is moving too quickly from the off-season cycle to the pre-contest cycle, with abrupt changes in diet, training methods and principles, volume and intensity. Such a sudden shift can shock the body, causing undesirable reactions. To avoid this, a 2-3 week transition period is usually needed to bridge the two cycles.

The transition period is characterized by the following:

• the number of workouts must increase
• the number of workouts per muscle group each week stays the same
• rest intervals between sets begin to shorten gradually
• the number of sets per muscle group increases gradually
• concentration increases
• training intensity begins to increase gradually

The pre-contest cycle ends with a competition, where the results of the preceding work are assessed.

Applying the principle of cyclical training is the fastest way to develop your physique to a championship level. The first years form one continuous preparatory cycle of training and diet, aimed at building enough muscle mass to enter your first competitions.

Training muscles in isolation. A defining feature of bodybuilding is training muscles in isolation, focusing primarily on working an individual muscle or muscle group. This principle can also be applied in training for other sports, but with consideration for how the target muscles work together with other muscles. In bodybuilding, this does not need to be taken into account. The main focus is on working all the major muscles in isolation. The aim is to exclude muscles that are not being targeted, allowing the target muscle to develop more intensively. Of course, complete isolation of a muscle is impossible. Other muscles are always active during an exercise, either contributing directly to the movement or helping maintain the required body position. In bodybuilding training, this assistance must be kept to a minimum. Correct exercise technique is essential, especially for beginners, as an exercise can lose almost all its effectiveness if stronger neighboring muscles are recruited to help during the more difficult phase of the movement.

Conscious muscle contraction. When performing an exercise, you must focus on the process of muscle contraction itself, rather than the result or the weight. Muscle contractions must be deliberate; resistance serves only as an additional means of regulating strength and movement. Willpower plays a very important role in exercise. The brain develops the muscles and can do as much as dumbbells, or even more. For beginners, the greatest challenge is learning to focus so intently on their muscles that they gain absolute control over them. This control develops gradually. The brain issues a command, the nerves receive the impulse and relay the signal to the muscles. Through willpower, you can work your muscles even without weights.

The adaptive effect of training load. Bodybuilding training primarily involves working at near-maximal muscular tension for multiple reps (usually 6-12). Each set is taken to failure. The same muscle group is trained again during the supercompensation phase following the previous workout. The principle of bodybuilding training appears to lie in organizing training so that changes to external load parameters (weight, rep count and exercise variation) create the conditions for maintaining the strongest possible adaptive stimulus for as long as possible as fatigue builds. This fundamental approach shifts the main emphasis from the amount of strength work performed (overall volume) to continuous improvement in the functional capacity of the muscular system. Let us illustrate this with an example.

In conventional strength endurance training, you might perform 10 sets of 10 reps. In this case, the first 5 sets provide little adaptive stimulus. It is the final reps of the last 5 sets that stimulate adaptation: the last 2 reps of the sixth set, the last 3 of the seventh, the last 4 of the eighth, and so on.

An equivalent sequence of sets based on the bodybuilding principle is performed as follows: the first 2 sets are taken to failure with a weight that allows 10 reps (the repetition maximum load), followed by 2 sets to failure with less resistance, and so on, until you can no longer perform the exercise. When you train this way, 70-80 % of the work stimulates adaptation, compared with the usual 20 %.

Putting this into practice prolongs the effective action of the adaptive stimulus, significantly increasing the effectiveness of the entire training process. This principle can also be applied in sport-specific preparation for other sports.

The principle of increasing training intensity. Intensity rises continuously over the course of bodybuilding training. Each successive training stage is more intense than the one before it.

Let’s get started with bodybuilding! ArtGym

Related articles:
Principles of bodybuilding training, part II

Author: Bodybuilding I J.Loko summarized by MM

Source: WHO – physical activity.