rymoz wrote:Why lift when it's all about the face?
GOAT post.
Beas wrote:yes, alex is saying a lot of things right...he just going about it wrong and being an ass for no reason. But there are some things alex is saying that he is wrong about.
Feel free to elucidate. I'm open to being wrong so long as there's actual counter-
evidence.
Jstampz wrote:I'm still wondering as to why my workout is so "suboptimal". My workouts are focused getting the greatest pump possible. I pre-exhaust the muscle with movements that stretch the muscle fibers and force tons of blood into the muscle, then jump into compound movements, followed by more muscle focused workouts.
So if I were to workout chest and tris...
A few things:
1) If you're getting 225 pounds on bench for eight reps after doing a chest exercise prior, then why do you need to come here for advice? If you're TRULY lifting that weight, which in all honesty is great for someone your age, then you should have zero problems developing mass
irrespective of what the rest of your routine looks like. If you're not, then you're simply not eating enough and need to incorporate more fat-dense foods to compensate. When you are gaining mass, you can take some of the focus off protein; a high calorie diet will naturally get you sufficient protein. If you aren't gaining then I would focus way more on fat.
2) The problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanisms of muscle gain. It's tough NOT to gain strength and/or mass so long as you lift regularly, but it's a question of making optimal gains. The underlying goal is maximizing protein synthesis as much as possible from a temporal standpoint. That is, to have protein synthesis elevated to the point of anabolism for as long as possible every day/week/month. You seem to be approaching this from the perspective that is INTENDED for lifters who use steroids (i.e., hit each muscle group less times/week, but at a greater volume each time). For these individuals, you can lift once per week and stimulate protein synthesis for anywhere between 5-10 days depending on dose. As such, for them, lifting once for any given muscle group means you do not need to touch that muscle group again for ~1 week. The whole "hit one muscle group with a billion lifts in a single day" routine was made
for steroid users. Period. Any natural lifter who tries to adopt that routine is misunderstanding the physiological difference for non-steroid lifters and will not be working at an optimum rate.
So if the goal is to maximize protein synthesis and steroid users do so by taking steroids to synthetically raise those levels, what do natural lifters do? Simple, they hit their muscles across more days in a given week. Hitting each muscle group 3x per week > 1-2x per week whether you're going for mass OR strength. So this highlights a trade-off between of two options:
a) Greater volume of lifting across fewer days (e.g., hit chest 1-2x per week, but do 5 exercises each time)
b) Greater frequency of lifting across more days (e.g., hit chest 3-4x per week, but do 2-3 exercises each time)
For natural lifters, option b has clearly been shown to be better for two reasons:
1) Already explained above, frequency = key. You will elevate protein synthesis MORE than with option a. Protein synthesis in natural lifters peaks after 24-48 hours, and after that time if you are not lifting again, then you are not gaining anymore. So frequency helps in gaining muscle throughout the week rather than confining it to 3-4 days total.
2) The argument AGAINST favoring volume is the diminishing ROI for each lift. That is, for every time you hit a given muscle group in a given session, the next lift you do for it will be exponentially less meaningful in terms of stimulating protein synthesis. So if protein synthesis operates on a scale of 0-100 (high - low protein synthesis stimulation), your first chest exercise will be 100 (ideally if we're talking compound lifts). Your next chest exercise will be 80. After that, 50. After that, 20. Etc. Clearly I picked arbitrary numbers, but solely to illustrate that this is an exponential decrease and not a linear one: the difference in muscle stimulation you get between lifts 1 and 2 is smaller than the difference between lifts 3 and 4. That is, as you continue to hit a given muscle group in a single session, the amount of "good" you are doing goes down pretty massively with each lift.
So in the frequency vs. volume debate, frequency wins hands down. You don't get protein synthesis peaked as much as with the volume-based routine, but that is offset
and then some by greater frequency. Going by the numbers above:
Volume: 100+80+50+20 across 2 days = "500"
Frequency: 100+80 across 3-4 days = "540" - "720"
If you have all day to lift and are a natural pro bodybuilder, then you can collapse these two and do heavy volume and frequency. But for most of us in the real world who aren't paid to do so, we typically have to trade off between these.
The other thing to note as that "feeling a pump" isn't all that meaningful in terms of actual muscle gain. How you FEEL is less important than what's happening at the molecular level of actual protein synthesis. What we seem to know based on physiological data is that incremental weight increase in terms of the amount of weight you are lifting is far more predictive of muscle (and strength) gains than feeling a pump. Pay less attention to how your muscles feel and more attention to whether you are adding weight to the bar each week or not. Feeling a pump without adding weight to the bar for a year means very little. Feeling no pump while continually adding weight to the bar for a year means a **** ton.
Compound lifts are better and you should favor those more than isolated movements. Again, this is important for natural lifters because it leads to greater muscle stimulation and greater protein synthesis across multiple muscle groups.
