Things I wish I had known when I started bodybuilding…
One morning I got to thinking about my 21 years of training. I thought that if I could go back in time and teach myself the things I know now, I would probably have reached my current level in half the time. A serious, reflective start to the morning, isn’t it?
Anyway, so that you can spend your time in the gym as sensibly as possible, I’m sharing my thoughts and conclusions in this article. These are the lessons I would definitely teach my sixteen-year-old self.
Use as many different rep ranges as possible in your training
Many lifters have a favorite rep range. Some do better with a low rep count and strength development. Others are bigger fans of the pump and high rep counts. Whatever your preference, know that every rep range influences the direction of muscle development in its own way. If you want to get the most out of your training, bring as many different rep ranges as possible into the mix. A good rule of thumb: 1/3 of your sets or training time should go to the 2 – 6 rep range, 1/3 of your sets or time to the 7 – 12 rep range, and 1/3 of your sets or time to 13 reps and more.
This philosophy guarantees that you cover every possible direction of muscle growth. Myofibrillar hypertrophy, which comes from short sets, is taken care of. So is sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, which is the result of long and medium-length sets.
Don’t train to failure all the time
You have probably heard that hard work pays off and bears fruit. We have heard many times that the last reps of a set pushed to failure are the ones that drive progress. That is mostly true, but my training mantra is still “it is more useful to train smart than to mindlessly beat yourself to pieces.”
Training to failure is undoubtedly necessary and beneficial, but we must also not forget that this style of training is very taxing on both the body and the nervous system. Let’s remember that the benefits of training to failure are rather the development of the muscle’s endurance qualities and sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. When it comes to specifically training for strength gains, training to failure is far less beneficial. Accordingly, if you train with weights that you can lift for up to 6 reps, you can safely end the set 1 – 2 reps short of failure. If you do sets longer than 7 reps, take the last 1 – 2 working sets to failure. The longer the set, the more the muscle is affected specifically in a metabolic way.
In general, going to failure is a concentrated stimulus, which means the body experiences a great deal of stress in a very short time. You shouldn’t go to failure all the time and on every set.
Put squats in your program
Squats aren’t only for powerlifters. A bodybuilder’s program should also include the squat essentially year-round. The benefits of this exercise are numerous. The strength gains that come from squatting don’t show up only as a better result in the squat itself. A better squat means progress in other movements too. To give an example straight from the gym: if you squat a lot, you will also be able to leg press a lot of weight, but if you leg press heavy, that is by no means a sign that you can squat significant weights.
Translator’s note: viewed as a whole, the squat involves so many joints and the muscles that move them that, when we compare almost any lower-body exercise against it, that exercise can really be seen as a segment (part) of the squat. That is where the squat’s large overlap effect comes from.
The squat’s large carryover effect is the main reason to do squats almost always. The squat also works a great many muscles at once, including muscles that hardly get loaded without it.
You have surely heard it said that because the squat demands a lot of strength and energy and recruits many muscles, it should always be the first exercise on leg day. That approach certainly holds true for powerlifters, but the squat definitely doesn’t always have to come first in a bodybuilder’s program. A bodybuilder can easily put squats dead last in the session from time to time. If you do it that way, the benefits of the squat don’t go anywhere.
So whether you like the traditional squat, the front squat or the safety bar squat… do this exercise, because its benefits are both cosmetic and functional.
Keep a record of your workouts and personal records
When a cook makes a cake that tastes great, they keep the recipe so they can make a great cake again in the future. If you don’t write the recipe down, you won’t know how to make that delicious cake again. A bodybuilder should act like a cook. Whether it is something you read about or developed yourself, over a training career you will certainly collect quite a few worthwhile exercises, methods, workouts or splits that worked brilliantly for you. Sometime in the future you will surely want to try some good old thing again. That is why everything has to be written down very precisely. Write down all your sets, reps, the order of the exercises and so on. At first this may seem pointless, tiresome and time-consuming, but in reality, writing down each set takes no more than 5 – 6 seconds.
At the end of a workout, it is also worth noting down, in a few keywords, things like what your body weight was (if you weighed yourself in the morning), how motivated you felt to train, what injuries you currently have, and so on. Learn to record what you do: years from now these will be invaluable notes that give you an overview of what worked and what didn’t.
Translator’s note: I recommend doing the same with your records. It is great to look back on what you have done years later, to have an overview of how you progressed, and to compare your progress and its course at different ages with other lifters. Again, I myself started writing things down relatively late. I remember bench pressing 125 kg for the first time in 1999 in the army, and squatting 150 kg in 2000 at the Jakobi Street gym in Tartu. My deadlift at the university entrance tests in 1999 was 120 kg. I pulled with such technique that… Oleg Andla could tell you about it. Admittedly, the weight was next to nothing. But… that pull was the first deadlift of my life. Genetics obviously has nothing to do with it here, since there are probably more than enough people who pull 200 kg or more for the first time. All the more meaningful, then, is my 300 kilogram record.
Aim to maintain a certain level of strength
Training for appearance can raise some questions: how do you even set training goals, or what does a bodybuilder need strength for? It’s clear that bodybuilding doesn’t measure strength or endurance, but managing the training process and progress by body weight and the mirror alone becomes, to put it mildly, abstract. Although strength is certainly not a goal in itself in bodybuilding, reaching a certain level of strength is important for building a significant amount of muscle mass. There are basic lifts in which progress very likely means progress in muscle mass and appearance too.
In my opinion (the article’s author), the most important exercises in which a bodybuilder should maintain or improve their strength level would be the following:
Horizontal presses (with barbells and dumbbells)
Rows (with barbells and dumbbells)
Vertical presses (with barbells and dumbbells)
Vertical pulls (pull-ups and their alternatives)
Exercises involving hip extension (squat and deadlift, or variations of them)
In addition, the following are definitely important for a bodybuilder:
Biceps curls, “Skull Crushers”, cable pushdowns, leg curls.
Why is this necessary? Why is it important to keep pushing forward in the exercises? An analogy explains it well. You can’t build a house on soft, sandy ground either. In the same way, you can’t build a massive, muscular body on a weak frame and on frail, feeble movements.
Do yourself a favor and build a solid strength base. If your strength level in the indicator exercises starts to drop, changes in appearance are very likely to follow soon. Or the other way around: to get back your former look, bring your base strength numbers back up.
From the translator: at this point I’m once again interrupting the translation of the original to wrap up the article with a thought of my own.
Try different programs and training techniques, don’t stick only to “3 x 8 – 12” schemes
Exactly. In my early years of training, I stuck only to typical bodybuilding training. Weider’s concept of bodybuilding training is undoubtedly thorough, but certainly not perfect and not “the one and only”. A large share of Weider’s principles actually mean going to failure, but when it comes to a natural lifter and constant training to failure, a major conflict arises sooner or later. I can confirm from my own experience that constantly “grinding” to failure, which I’ve done for most of my career, has led me into serious overtraining. Some may tolerate it for an entire career, others can’t. For me, it has all piled up into serious overtraining by now, and its main outcome is low motivation and little desire to train, even some fear of a long set and of big effort. Looking back, I think that if I hadn’t found my way to various powerlifting programs and methods, I would very likely have already quit training. The heavy emphasis on training to failure that comes from Weider’s training principles thoroughly fries both body and mind. While training to failure alone works quite well at first, I dare say that from a certain point on, even a bodybuilder has to partially incorporate some powerlifting program into their training plans. The same 5 x 5 is enough for the basic exercises. The key is to be creative. Longer sets and going to failure will no doubt remain the cornerstones of a bodybuilder’s training program, but to refresh your mind, and also to guarantee myofibrillar hypertrophy, I recommend that even a beginner borrow methods from powerlifters. There are plenty of options:
Westside, 5 x 5, 3 x 3, using different training volumes in the basic exercises and progressing by them, the Russian system, …
You can apply a powerlifting method partially alongside your usual training, and for certain periods you can just as well apply an entire split or program from powerlifting.
It has often been said that someone starting out in training should, in the first year (or first few years), follow purely powerlifting methods. I fully agree that a beginner should first grow on powerlifting systems and only then start experimenting with other things. At the same time, I’ll quickly add that I’m afraid this can only hold for a non-competing beginner. A competing bodybuilder, including a competing beginner bodybuilder, can’t do entirely without long sets taken to failure.
Author: Janar Rückenberg (translation)
Come and train! ArtGym
