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/

daily dose of iron- 1

while Iron benefits the body in many ways including formation of hemoglobin, brain development and function, body temperature regulation, and muscle activity and metabolism, and not getting enough Iron will lead to Anemia. This is not the type of Iron I am going to talk about. the Iron I am referring to is a heavy barbell.



"that which is used is developed, and that which is not wastes away" this quote by Hippocrates explains well Wolff's Law and one of the benefits of strength training. Wolff's Law states that "bone in a healthy person or animal will adapt to the loads it is placed under.[1] If loading on a particular bone increases, the bone will remodel itself over time to become stronger to resist that sort of loading. The internal architecture of the trabeculae undergoes adaptive changes, followed by secondary changes to the external cortical portion of the bone,[2] perhaps becoming thicker as a result. The converse is true as well: if the loading on a bone decreases, the bone will become weaker due to turnover, it is less metabolically costly to maintain and there is no stimulus for continued remodeling that is required to maintain bone mass.[3]"

Osteoporosis is the thinning of bone tissue and bone density over time. According to health.google.com 1 out of 5 women over the age of the 50 have osteoporosis and half of all women over 5o will fracture a wrist hip or spine. Women need to be getting their daily dose of an iron barbell, to lead a strong long healthy less injury prone life, just as much as the meatheads out there do.

Bones get weaker over time, resistance training under heavy loads will cause bone to adapt and become stronger and denser. Seems pretty cut and dry, develop or else you will literally waste away.

YOU ARE?

This weekend Sara Cichorek and myself competed in USAPL's push/pull meet in Atlantic City, it was 4th meet of the year and 5th ever. I began to think, am I a "powerlifter" now? I could argue yes, I read about different techniques and ideas about programming and periodization, I plan for my meets and I've even trained a few friends to compete in a few powerlifting meets. I could argue no just the same, its only my first real year trying to compete, with mixed results.

This got me thinking, what makes someone a powerlifter? somebody that competes? i guess you can make that call, but that led me to think about internet "experts". There are a lot of "coaches" out there, a lot of "athletes" and "trainers" (especially in NYC).

To the coaches, if you do not train/coach anybody that does not compete, you are not a coach.

To the athletes, if you do not compete in whatever it is you are training for, you are not an athlete.

To the trainers, if you do not program for your clients you are not a trainer, you just make people sweat.

Competing does not make a person better or worse. But passing off a title that implies expertise is dishonest.

what happened?

quick rant. no spell-check just a quickie right down the middle. you know how i get down.

1-swithcing focus on this blog to something more maintainable for me. i'll put up links to other awesome articles and blogs i find, and i'll just babble on like modern Iraq.

on to my thoughts.

WHAT HAPPENED TO BEING A MAN IN THE GYM?
Since when is the pursuit of strength not at the forefront of every able-bodied, red blooded american male? its seems the Mustang has given way to the Prius.

people need to man and woman up!

women will not become bulky from getting strong, men you honestly have no excuse to not become strong unless you are a model and need to stay a certain size.

FITNESS PROFESSIONALS it is OUR responsibility to educate your clients on these things. Regardless of your goal getting stronger makes achieving said goal easier.

put down the BOSU ball the wobble board and get in the squat rack put a bar with appropriate weight on it on your back squat down get back up repeat! put some plates on a bar on the ground and pick it up.
That snippet too complex to understand then go and buy Starting Strength 2 by Rippetoe.
get in the gym and lift
I am stealing this from a t-shirt i saw at USAPL New Jersey State Power Lifting meet,
"7 days without lifting makes one weak"
side note, I am having trouble posting videos on here if you can figure this out show me the way.

cycles of cycles-part 1 Fresher than that prince

Randomly exercising is a guaranteed way to fail, like the saying goes fail to plan plan to fail. How do you plan your workouts? logging what you do is a good start but planning ahead is better. In designing your program all the variables can be confusing, you can get a good start by seperating your workouts into 5 phases

1-the actual training session

2- your training day

3-microcycle

4-mesocycle

5-macrocycle

maybe a 6th with the Olympic cycle if you are fortunate enough to be that elite of an athlete or train one.


1-The training session: Things to consider during your workout

fatigue is specific to the work you are doing. For example curls will fatigue your biceps (duh). the good news is, the specificity of the fatigue will allow you to do different exercise after fatigue has set it in from exercise A. Depending on the load this concept will reappear with other phases of training.


in strength training you want to do as much work as fresh as possible.

in programming your session consider these three things. 1- rest, 2- exercise sequence, 3 intensity. keeping with the thought of being as fresh as possible, when strength training, the higher the intensity of the load the greater the rest. workout density is not of great importance when it comes to strength training.


As far as sequence, you'd want to put the more coordinated and taxing on your neural output first or as rested as possible. Prioritize your exercises, if possible, dynamic and power moves before grinds, and larger muscle groups before smaller ones.


For intensity, if the maximum effort method is the most efficient and if you want to work as fresh as possible and put the most taxing on your neural output first then you'd put the biggest move and higher intensity first.




Training Day


Not just a Denzel Washington movie, its also the grouping of multiple training sessions. If working as fresh as possible is the golden rule and fatigue is specific to the activity performed it might be a good idea to perform multiple training sessions within the same day.


in fact an olympic weightlifing teams schedule may consist of multiple training sessions none lasting more than hour. However, this is the schedule of an elite athlete.





Microcycle


A microcycle can be described as a grouping of several training days. Factors to consider within a microcycle is the balance of adaptation versus accommodation. Proper rest and exercise sequence can be the difference between continued gains and overtraining and diminishing gains. We are at our strongest after we recover from a workout, according to the supercompensation theory, again we want to do something as FRESH as possible, as often as possible. Since what i said earlier about fatigue effects being specific to the activity, proper exercise sequencing is key to staying fresh. Rotating big movements while resting from the others can you allow you to continue to lift heavy while getting adequate rest throughout training days.



Not all movements are the same, different movements require different recovery time. Minor muscles like plantar flexors or biceps can be trained every day. Bigger muscle groups need more time to recover. For example its not uncommon to rest 3-4 days between heavy squat efforts.



to increase strength you should plan at least 3 heavy days in your microcycle (assuming your microcycle is a week long). With good rotation of of exercises you can recover one movement while training another.



to sum it all up, biggest movements and biggest efforts are most important, so prioritize a bit.
lift as often as possible as fresh possible.



see you next time with medium term planning

more on microcycle's, mesocycle's, and macrocycles