good read

Samurai Strategies for Strength

by Nate Miyaki

First, you must choose a goal before you can achieve it, and second, the more difficult and dangerous your goals is, the more effort you must put into achieving it. All achievement starts with goals, and Musashi emphasized that you should be ambitious in setting them.

— Samurai Strategies

Goal setting? I know what you meatheads are thinking right about now. Hold off on that thought for a minute, though, because despite trying to come off as intellectual and well-rounded through studying exercise physiology, nutritional biochemistry, philosophy, and sports psychology, deep down I'm just a pure, simple, fucking meathead like most of you.

I like training in the gym, of course, as well as football, MMA, fire, action movies with gun fights and explosions, porn (both in traditional video format and newer, internet options), Will Ferrell (the movies, not the guy — although he is rocking the mean, brown sugar chest hair), Jessica Alba (the girl, not the movies — although Good Luck Chuck was funny), the occasional whiskey, and when I grow up I want to be just like "the most interesting man alive" guy...am I missing anything?

Setting goals is for dudes with "man-ginas" right? It's for little girls and desperate housewives who, gosh-darn-it, are going to take control of their lives and empower themselves. It's for powerless office workers who can't get out of the grind or get their bosses to stop shitting on them. It's for cheesy, self-help seminars and gurus. It's not for the head of the wolfpack, the alpha males that roam the Testosterone site...or perhaps it is?

What if I told you that you've been setting goals — albeit most of the time subconsciously — all of your life? Hitting new PR's, reaching a certain level of body fat percentage or conditioning, rehabbing an injury, winning a competition, taking the hottest girl at the bar/club home for the night, etc.

What if I also told you that CONSCIOUSLY setting these goals, keeping them always in the forefront of your mind, and setting a definitive plan of action towards achieving those goals can be the difference between consistent mediocrity and consistent excellence?

for the rest of the article click the link

http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/most_recent/samurai_strategies_for_strength_1

variables

The human body is amazing and very resilient. No matter what challenge is thrown its way the human body will adapt to it. This is how the system works, the body is stressed, the body doesnt like that stress so it does whatever it needs to do to so the next time its stressed in the same way its less stressful. Now that the same activity is no longer as stressful, it will not elicit the same response. This is why newbies to lifting make gains more quickly than somebody who has been under the bar for quite some time, they arent as used to the stress. So thats the nature of beast, stress your body and your body will adapt to it, over time the adaptations become smaller as the stress diminishes, eventually leading to a plateau. To put plateaus off we must stay ahead of our adaptations and make said activity continue to be stressful.

This is also known as the overload principle, Vladimir Zatsiorsky and William Kraemer say this of overload-"To bring about positive changes in an athlete's state, an exercise overload must be applied. A training adaptation takes place only if the magnitude of the training load is above the habitual level."

That brings me to my topic, how do you manipulate variables to achieve overload? How do you make tomorrow, next week, next month, next macrocycle, harder than this one? What variable to manipulate to make your workout progressive depends on your goal. Some answers are obvious such as getting stronger, well one obvious variable to manipulate is weight make the next workout heavier. manipulating other variables will elicit other responses.

Volume, how would you manipulate that? more sets? more reps? more exercises in the workout?

Time, this is a fun one to manipulate- longer workouts? (might be counterproductive?), time your set; make yourself last x amount of time, shorter sets; make yourself maintain volume in less and less time or do more reps in the same amount of time

Tempo, slow down the eccentric, speed up the concentric, pause in between to minimize the effect of the stretch-shortening cycle forcing your body recruit more muscle fibers and rely less on stored energy, move a submaximal load as fast as possible.

All these are ideas to play with and I am certain i did not cover all possible variables, adding instability is another variable to play with, I just wanted to get ball rolling here. Lets avoid plateau's, train intelligently and manipulate what we can and want. Let's create a specific stress to produce specific adaptations.

Jorge Unigarro

great article

Training Women

October 15, 2010 by Bret Contreras

When I first started training clients full-time, I assumed that I’d specialize in training athletes. I bought all sorts of equipment from Elitefts including a huge power rack/platform with all the accessories (box squat box, step up attachment, monkey chin bar, dip bars, band peg attachments), a 45 degree hyper, glute ham raise, reverse hyper, competition bench press, incline press, deadlift lever, chalk bin, bands, chains, specialty barbells, etc. I situated the equipment in my garage and was in awe at how manly my gym appeared! I was well on my way to be the next Joe DeFranco.

What happened next was unexpected. A bunch of female friends and relatives of mine started requesting that I train them. At first, I told them, “I’m not sure, my equipment is more geared toward training athletes.” They’d say, “Cool, when can I start?” I quickly realized that women like this type of training and all of a sudden I’m training tons of women.

Next thing you know, I open up my own studio and within three months I have 55 clients; probably 45 of them were women. If you train a few women well, out of nowhere you’ll have tons of female clients through word-of-mouth advertisement as they love to tell their friends about their trainer. I’ve really grown to love training women over the past five years, and here are some things I’ve learned along the way:

for the rest of the article follow this link

http://bretcontreras.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/training-women/

starting out

In my career as a trainer I have learned there are many ways to get to the top of that mountain. Different trainers have different philosophies and approaches. I approach this blog with that mindframe. My goal is to share views and ideas from trainers ive met, worked with, been mentored by, managed by, and most of all respect. second i plan on sharing my own training towards my own goals, as well as that of my teamates at Team VJ with kettlebell sport and the 63rd street powerlifting crew.

I'm sure the upcoming content will be interesting to say the least, and hopefully very informative.



You stay classy and thanks for stopping by