| Casino Classic Best Online Casino! Get $500 free on the house! | Shared Movies Over 80 Million Movies and TV-Shows No Charge per movie, No download limit! | Antidepressant Medications Handle stress, elevate the mood, treat anxiety disorders. | Weight Loss Supplements Natural supplements that burn body fat, suppress appetite and support a healthy diet. |
|
Posted at September 25, 2013, 7:38 pm: The sport board here at bb.com has changed alot since a year ago. Luckily we have retained most of the knowledgeable, smart guys who were there before, while picking up a lot of new members. Back then, I wrote a guide to setting up a routine for people who had no clue when it came to training and eating right (you can see it in one of the sticky's up top). It worked quite well, cutting down the number of repetitive posts asking the same old thing over and over. Unfortunately, it has been lost to the back pages, and I see the same problem occuring once again. So consider this a general guide to setting up a training and eating program. It probably won't be nearly as good as RBEliminator's detailed programs, but this will probably be alot more accessible than RB's time since he is a college football stud. So here we go: The basics The following tips and instructions can be applied to pretty much any sport, and any other fitness goal you have. I will be covering: -Resistance Training (sets/reps, weight, rest times, tempo, programs, addressing weaknesses) -Nutrition (good/bad foods, nutrient timing, liquids, cutting/bulking, harris-benedict formula) -Supplementation (proven supplements, money management, myths and unproven supplements) -Other training aspects (recovery, conditioning, stretching, rehab, prehab) -Miscellaneous topics such as genetics, rehab situations, and lifestyle I have broken it down into friendly standard outline form. Every roman numeral represents a totally new subject, every regular capital letter represents a new part of the topic. If you have a question, critique, or general comment, either PM me, or post it on this thread. Enjoy. I. Resistance Training: An Absolute Must If you want to excel in sports, you must use resistance training. Without it, you will have a hard time improving your strength. Why you ask? If you just do cardio and bodyweight exercises, you will not gain a significant amount of muscle. You might see good gains in the beginning, but soon results will diminish and you will plateau. That does not mean you should never incorporate bodyweight exercises. Many can be beneficial if made tougher than usual. We will cover that later. A. Compound vs. Isolation lifts This is the debate that always comes up with inexperienced athletes. They LOVE their vanity exercises like curls and flies, when they should be doing compound lifts targeting multiple muscles, and moving the body in a certain direction. Its been proven that compound lifts: make you stronger, induce more stress on muscles, allow you to accomplish more in less time, and burn more calories than isolation lifts. B. Isolation exercises have their place Don't worry, there is a reason to do isolation lifts, just not the ones you think are good. In my opinion, isolation is good in two areas: addressing weakness, and rehab. These two can be intertwined, called prehab. First, lets talk about weaknesses. Everybody is different when it comes to weaknesses, but generally, most high school athletes have weaknesses in their rotator cuffs, posterior chain, core, and ankle area. You'll notice that most of these areas are not "mirror muscles". Most athletes adapt the mantra "If I can't see them, I don't need to train them". Big mistake. Bringing these body parts back up to par with the rest of the body will not only make you a better athlete, but also more injury proof. If you strengthen the rotator cuff, you are helping prevent injury, called prehab. C. Compound Lift breakdown: Movement plane Now that you are keen on doing compound lifts, you must learn their movements in order to make a complete program and a balanced program. Lets start with the upper body. There are 4 movement planes. Vertical push and pulling, and horizontal push and pulling. That is pretty complicated, so lets just reduce it down to upper body push and pull. An example of a push would be the bench press. An example of a pull would be a BB bent over row. It is important to balance your push and pull exercises, so you do not develop an imbalance between your push and pull muscles. Now on to lower body. Leg exercises are divided into two groups: quad dominant, and hip dominant. An example of a quad dominant exercise would be a squat. An example of a hip dominant exercise would be the deadlift. Most athletes emphasize the quad dominant exercises, which creates a terrible imbalance between the quadriceps and hamstring. It is better to over-emphasize the hamstrings until they are of equal strength so you can avoid a leg injury. A special note needs to be brought to attention about the hamstrings. They have two movements, knee flexion and hip extension. A Leg curl is an example of knee flexion, while a deadlift or romanian deadlift is an example of hip extension. Hip extension will generally strengthen your hamstring more, as long as you use heavy compound lifts like good mornings and deadlifts. D. The smart way to go about setting up a routine, incorporating certain lifts. If you are a beginner, basic compound lifts are the way to go. Its probably best to start out with total body workouts, and as you gain experience and gains, you can begin to do "splits" (not the gymnastic movement, but splitting up the exercises onto different days). If you are doing a 3 day full body workout, I suggest having one upper body push exercise, one upper body pull exercise, one quad dominant exercise, and one hip dominant exercise. Pretty simple. After that, you can add on any other COMPOUND lift you desire (as long as you do not go over the desired set total, which I will talk about later). There are other ways to go about splits for 3 day splits. Day A could be upper body push/pull, Day B could be Lower body quad/hip dominant exercises, and Day C could be explosive lifts (more on these later). You can also do 4 day splits, which I will leave to you to design, since you have the basics of split design down. All I remind you of, is to balance push/pull, quad/hip, and lower/upper body. It will help you develop a more balanced body and more balanced strength. E. Sets/Reps, periodization, tempo, overtraining Another one of the most asked questions on this board, is: What is the best set/rep for this situation... Here is the magical number of sets and reps, it is... no single combination. The key here is to switch it up. If you have been doing 3x10 for eight weeks, change to 5x5 or 8x2. If you keep switching it up, then it will give your body new stimulus to grow. Now that you know the general idea of sets and reps, lets move to the general rules: If you are going for HYPERTROPHY, you usually use 6-10 reps and 3-5 sets. This is a low intensity (50-80% 1RM), more volume oriented type of scheme. If you are going for STRENGTH, you usually work in the 1-5 rep range and higher amount of sets. This is a high intensity(80-100% 1RM), less voume type of scheme. If you are going for EXPLOSIVE/POWER, then you usually work in the 1-5 rep range and low sets as well. This is because lifts like plyometrics and olympic lifts are extremely taxing on the CNS, and lose their effectiveness if done too much or with sloppy form. It is good to periodize your set/rep schemes over the course of a year. If you have spent the last 4 weeks on hypertrophy/high volume type of workout, it would be excellent to switch to a strength/high intensity workout, just to provide a new stimulus to your body. Tempo is something of a strange animal. Manipulate it a certain way, and ordinarily easy lifts become extremely hard. Its impossible to prescribe a precise tempo for all lifts, but in general, be in control on the eccentric (lowering) and concentric (lifting) portions of the lift. If you are doing the bench press, don't bounce the weight off your chest, lower it in a steady and controlled manner, and press it back up in a controlled manner. This rule does not apply to explosive lifts like oly lifts. The concentric portion should be done explosively, and the eccentric should be done in a controlled manner to prevent injury. Overtraining is an oft-used word on this forums when describing a person's workout. First lets define overtraining: To engage in excessive training. When I tell someone they are overtraining, I usually see that they are doing a mind-boggling amount of sets or exercises, or a combination of both. Ian King (a great Australian strength coach) recommends for the average lifter, not exceeding 21 sets per workout. If you are doing heavy compound lifts, this will be plenty. There are exceptions when you might do a short microcycle with more volume, or you might have workouts with sets way below 21 because the intensity is much higher than usual. So when designing a routine, take into the account of how many sets you are doing, and how much intensity (% of 1RM) the exercises are in the workout. Considering # of days per week to workout, 4 is probably the max when talking about heavy taxing lifting. This does not mean you can do other aspects of training. You can do energy system work, prehab or other things, but as a general rule, have one day of complete rest. F. Rest times Rest times can influence your workout as much as the exercises themselves. Having a watch or timer of some sort is a MUST when training. It is imperative to keep track of your rest time. Generally speaking, if you are looking to burn fat, it is best to lower rest times to below one minute. This will add another element to your workout. You could even do supersets, which are two antagonistic exercises done back to back, with no rest inbetween. Another possibility is to do a circuit, which is 3 exercises or more in a row without rest. If you are doing a strength routine, it is better to allow yourself time to recover, so 2-4 minutes is optimal. Same with explosive movements. Original of the message was taken from http://forum.bodybuilding.com/ Replies:G.good post sticky, next. Oh silent I love you lol nice post Silent II. great thread. III. empty post Great post Silent should be worth a sticky You can always count on Silent for good posts. Thank you so much! Definitely sticky worthy. I like this thread. Thanks for the praise guys. I can see we think along the same lines toward nutrition. Silent, thanks for the help. Do your thing RB. I ran out of time. bump it was disappearing slowly. Great read. Shouldn't make a difference mate. I just say use it in your PWO shake as a means of convenience. Been pushed for time, sorry guys. bump for RB's portion of the article Good work again Silent_Impact! I still remember the first time you did... bump Not trying to toot my own horn here, I just think it would hel... I'll bump your bump. READ UP GUYS Anybody going to add flexibility and speed? Silent Impact???? Speed is not really my forte. that would be awsome if person did a spped part, his wealth of informa... I didn't read every line, but it looks to be quite informative and SHO... thanks alot I knew if I asked youd help out I just realized that I missed a couple topics I promised to write. Thanks Silent. http://forum. Hey guys, thanks for all the positive reviews. good for you buddy Nice man. Yeah I am working on that right now. A baseball specific workout in the offseason from exercises to sets an... Silent, I was wondering if you were still developing a workout that is... I might do some short 3-4 week programs. Thanks for the quick reply. awesome silent. I've got a series coming out this and next week. how can i build big calves without supplements Sprint and plyos should do plenty. this is an awesome article. Great thread silent, it really condensed all the stuff I've been readi... 1) Stretching is still pretty taboo with a lot of different methods. I started looking around for one that was soccer-specific, and I found... great thread good luck how are you going to grow. Great Thread im going on vacation for two weeks and wont be able to workout. yea you won't lose it just fromt aking time off. |