| Greg Sushinsky Bodybuilding Fitness, Nutrition & Health |
|
| WELCOME TO BODYBUILDING |
| by Greg Sushinsky |
So now that you’re bodybuilding, what is it? What is it that
you’re doing? Okay, so you’re training with weights now, where
you weren’t before, and you’re hearing a lot about diet and
nutrition. So what is that exactly that you’re doing and why?
People mean a lot of different things when they say the word,
“bodybuilding.” For many, it means getting as big and strong
as you can, and the muscle is secondary. These are strength and
power men and women. Some of them are huge, or get huge, or
try to, and they build a lot of muscle along with their
strength and power, which is their first concern. Then there
are people who don’t even like the term bodybuilding, who just
like to work out a little bit to shape up, they aren’t
interested in building a whole lot of muscle—they’re more like
the casual trainers. Then there are fitness people, who work
out, as the term suggests, to stay fit; then there are “abs
people,” who want abs, and on and on. All of these people or
groups do or don’t consider themselves bodybuilders, and often
they don’t consider anybody else who does something that they
don’t do a bodybuilder.
This doesn’t even address the fact that there are lifters,
particularly powerlifters or strongmen (and women) who consider
all bodybuilders—and anybody that doesn’t do what they do—
sissified wimps, pencil necks unworthy of their respect or
consideration.
What does all this mean? Not much, except it causes a lot of
animosity and confusion when everybody gets thrown together
uncomfortably in that group, “bodybuilders.” And this is not
to even address the ongoing thirty or fifty years war, cold or
otherwise, between bodybuilders who use drugs and those who
don't.
While it would be nice if people got along and respected each
other—“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Hemingway once wrote—you
can forget that for now and maybe forever. People love to
fight, they love conflict over cooperation, and the fractious
history of bodybuilding has proven that so: long on conflict
and enmity, very short on cooperation.
So, where does that leave you when you pick up a weight,
particularly for the first time? What are you getting into?
Just a thought: bodybuilding can be yours, you can put your
personal stamp on it. You can do it for your own reasons—
whether you want to compete or be strong or add it to a sport
or whatever reason you can dream up. And you don’t have to
accept what somebody else insists is the way you should do it
or think about. There’s a freedom there. Nobody owns
bodybuilding, nobody has a monopoly on the idea. Bodybuilding
belongs to those who do it, who claim it.
If you want to do bodyweight calisthenics, and you consider it
bodybuilding, fine. If you lift weights to get “toned” and
build a little muscle, but are turned off by the pro
bodybuilders’ physiques and don’t consider yourself a
bodybuilder, that would seem your right as well. If you want
to build muscle and compete, and choose not to take drugs,
that's a choice as well, and that’s what this activity is all
about, choice. The idea that some federation or magazine or
supplement company or gym or trainer or website or anybody can
claim that they are laying down the last word as to what
bodybuilding is, well that seems like something you can just
bypass.
Your Training, Your Nutrition, Your Bodybuilding
With all that said, it still might help you to figure where you
are in this confusing realm of bodybuilding, simply to be able
to get the most out of what you want to do. If you are going to
train to be a competitive lifter, that requires a different set
of talents and learned skills, as well as a different approach
to diet and training, than does a competitive bodybuilder, or a
cross-training athlete from another sport or a fitness model or
whichever choice (or combination of choices) you make. And
yes, sometimes we’ll be guilty of lapsing into that catch-all
term,bodybuilding, when we should be more precise and explain
what we mean.
Finding a Workout
One thing that can help you is to find or develop or learn the
most appropriate workout for whatever you’re doing. We see
casual trainers who have signed up for what amount to intensive
regimens that really only an experienced bodybuilder who’s
aspiring to competition should be on. So you can waste your
time and get no results, get injured, and generally just have a
really unpleasant experience. You certainly have the freedom
to change your mind, but if you can figure out what it is
you’re training for, and what you want, you will stand a better
chance of meeting those goals (if they’re not completely
unrealistic), and you might not end up miserable from doing
something you don’t want to do.
Eating
If there is a tyranny and confusion about working out, there is
even more of this when it comes to eating. We’ve seen
virtually every type of diet—many of them mutually exclusive—
which its proponents insist are the only or the best ones.
This is even more wrong than saying there is only one way to
work out, or one best way. Again, you’ve got to use some
common sense and take some personal responsibility in finding
what is good nutrition and what works for you.
Some Tips for Beginners:
--seek out a reliable trainer: This can be difficult, but try
to talk to a couple of prospective trainers, tell them your
goals if you know them, and see what they tell you. You need
to be matched up temperamentally with a trainer you at least
tolerate if not like, and somebody who’s not going to hurt you
or disrespect you.
--begin learning: Teach yourself everything you can. After
all, it’s your body and your life, why not learn for yourself?
It looks like an intimidating, confusing process, but it can be
done.
--apply yourself: The cliché is that nothing worthwhile comes
without effort, and that’s true in working out and eating. You
don’t have to train like a pro athlete or competitor if you’re
not, to gain health and fitness benefits, but you’ve got to put
something of yourself into it.
--be patient: We’re an impatient species in an impatient
world. Who wants to wait until tomorrow? Whether you want to
lose 50 pounds, or bench press 300, build up your arms two
inches bigger, or make the football team next fall—you’ve got
to put in the time, the work, and, sorry to say, you’ve got to
have some patience. Most of the stuff that tells you you’ll
get fabulous results in a ridiculously short period of time is
untrue. But you know that deep down, don’t you?
--have a life: Just because you’re working out, if you happen
to fall in love with the activity, don’t neglect school or your
job or your family or your personal growth or development in
other areas. This is an old message, but still worthwhile.
--enjoy the work, enjoy the results: If you hate exercise, at
least you can enjoy whatever positive results you get. If you
like working out, you are ahead then. You will doubly enjoy.
Enjoy and appreciate whatever health and fitness you have, it
is a gift.
For Advanced Bodybuilders: Experiment
Moving along to advanced men and women who are into serious
muscle-building, some of you may even compete, you are looking
for any edge you can get, preferably a natural, drug-free one.
Then don’t get stuck in that rut you’re in! So often,
bodybuilders will say, “I’ve found the perfect workout for me,
I’m not gonna change it,” which is fine, if you are making
infinite gains, which nobody is. But a suggestion: try other
workouts. What do you have to lose? If you have what you
consider is a “perfect” workout (usually months later they
won’t say that workout was so perfect, after they change it
anyway), you can always go back to it after you try other
ways. Too often, heavy-only trainers will refuse to change,
stubbornly clinging to their methods of grinding out the
heavier and heavier stuff, despite burning out, getting
injuries and not making progress. Or moderate weight trainers
won’t try a briefer, heavier workout. Change. Try to come up
with new stuff. People in our sport say there’s nothing new,
but if you haven’t tried it, it’s new to you. You might get
additional gains from a method you have previously scorned.
The body has its own ideas.
New Training and Nutrition
As for those who say there is nothing new in training and
nutrition, there is this to consider: we may know much more in
a theoretical way about the human body, how it grows muscle and
sheds fat, than we have actually applied or been able to apply
in a gym. Something in a laboratory, in a Petri dish, is not
necessarily the same thing as taking place in your body at home
after you have completed a chest and back workout that rocks.
Also, as much as we know about the human body, for example in
medicine and nutrition, there is a huge amount we don’t know.
Why would it follow that we know everything there is to know
about training and nutrition then? What other sport but
bodybuilding says, “Oh, just lift heavy weights and eat this,
don’t eat that, and that’s all there is to it.” No, the truth
is, bodybuilding stopped growing as a discipline not only when
steroids took over, but when people felt they knew everything
there was to know and so stopped learning. Imagine if medicine
or engineering, two applied sciences, had that attitude. But
then ignorance often rules; years ago there was a contention
that science had disproved there was such a thing as a
curveball in baseball, though you sure couldn’t convince the
major league hitters of that who couldn’t hit one. Take ideas
and test them for the practical results, the real-world
consequences.
So the lesson is, keep experimenting, keep learning, and keep
applying new ideas to training and nutrition, and use new
combinations of old ideas that worked and improve upon them.
Other sports do this all the time. Only bodybuilding doesn’t
because its emphasis has been entirely on grabbing the latest
drug out of a lab or even the latest supplement that people
feel will mimic drug-like results.
Advanced Techniques
Learning to get more out of a given rep or set of exercise has
always been the quest of any serious trainer, no matter what
your goals. To that end, there’s a lot of talk about slowing
down reps, even counting the cadence, with time under tension
or load being buzz words for this. There’s a drawback,
however. When you are counting these seconds, or slowing down
the rep, you may not be concentrating on the contraction or a
pause and squeeze at the bottom or top, or even on the muscle,
you can just be thinking only about lifting the weight. To
explain this further, you can lift a weight slowly, while
releasing a lot of tension, so that someone watching you would
only observe that you have strict form (what we’d call more
precisely “strict external form”), yet you haven’t stressed the
muscle with the amount of force of the contraction or tension
which you originally intended. That desired contraction could
be called “strict internal form,” or the kind of tension we
seek to place on a muscle continuously in a bodybuilding set
(different than force training or strength/power tension).
So, you may be trying to achieve something with what you think
is a super-strict technique, a much slower rep, when you are
actually neglecting the contraction, pause and squeeze that
you might have wanted to include. Sometimes you can try to put
too many techniques into a given set or rep. Figure out what
you want to do and use the appropriate technique, don’t try to
include every technique in a rep, set or workout, and check
your body for feedback. It tells you a lot.
The Future
Many will say that the future of athletics or bodybuilding is
in drugs, and drugs only, yet those of us who practice drug-
free training (our folly?) and nutrition, implicitly believe
otherwise. Where is the future of working out going to come:
one place is from other sports. Combining techniques and
information about the body we derive from other activities,
some seemingly unrelated to bodybuilding’s concerns of building
muscle, will hold larger application. Also, getting away from
the simplistic nature of intensity vs. volume (a false either-
or debate) will yield significant neglected and even new
workout approaches. The study of recovery, which we seem to
equate only with laying comatose on the couch over the weekend
(or for three weeks if you’re an HIT trainer—you’ll know what I
mean), will become as important a discipline as studying about
the actual workout. The Russians have studied and developed
recovery techniques that bodybuilders might learn, adapt and
use; so too have other American sports. The days of natural,
drug-free trainers simply following a watered-down version of
drug-training will one day, we think, end.
The future of natural bodybuilding waits to be written.
--Greg Sushinsky
www.gregsushinsky.com
Copyright © 2006, Greg Sushinsky All Rights Reserved.
you’re doing? Okay, so you’re training with weights now, where
you weren’t before, and you’re hearing a lot about diet and
nutrition. So what is that exactly that you’re doing and why?
People mean a lot of different things when they say the word,
“bodybuilding.” For many, it means getting as big and strong
as you can, and the muscle is secondary. These are strength and
power men and women. Some of them are huge, or get huge, or
try to, and they build a lot of muscle along with their
strength and power, which is their first concern. Then there
are people who don’t even like the term bodybuilding, who just
like to work out a little bit to shape up, they aren’t
interested in building a whole lot of muscle—they’re more like
the casual trainers. Then there are fitness people, who work
out, as the term suggests, to stay fit; then there are “abs
people,” who want abs, and on and on. All of these people or
groups do or don’t consider themselves bodybuilders, and often
they don’t consider anybody else who does something that they
don’t do a bodybuilder.
This doesn’t even address the fact that there are lifters,
particularly powerlifters or strongmen (and women) who consider
all bodybuilders—and anybody that doesn’t do what they do—
sissified wimps, pencil necks unworthy of their respect or
consideration.
What does all this mean? Not much, except it causes a lot of
animosity and confusion when everybody gets thrown together
uncomfortably in that group, “bodybuilders.” And this is not
to even address the ongoing thirty or fifty years war, cold or
otherwise, between bodybuilders who use drugs and those who
don't.
While it would be nice if people got along and respected each
other—“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Hemingway once wrote—you
can forget that for now and maybe forever. People love to
fight, they love conflict over cooperation, and the fractious
history of bodybuilding has proven that so: long on conflict
and enmity, very short on cooperation.
So, where does that leave you when you pick up a weight,
particularly for the first time? What are you getting into?
Just a thought: bodybuilding can be yours, you can put your
personal stamp on it. You can do it for your own reasons—
whether you want to compete or be strong or add it to a sport
or whatever reason you can dream up. And you don’t have to
accept what somebody else insists is the way you should do it
or think about. There’s a freedom there. Nobody owns
bodybuilding, nobody has a monopoly on the idea. Bodybuilding
belongs to those who do it, who claim it.
If you want to do bodyweight calisthenics, and you consider it
bodybuilding, fine. If you lift weights to get “toned” and
build a little muscle, but are turned off by the pro
bodybuilders’ physiques and don’t consider yourself a
bodybuilder, that would seem your right as well. If you want
to build muscle and compete, and choose not to take drugs,
that's a choice as well, and that’s what this activity is all
about, choice. The idea that some federation or magazine or
supplement company or gym or trainer or website or anybody can
claim that they are laying down the last word as to what
bodybuilding is, well that seems like something you can just
bypass.
Your Training, Your Nutrition, Your Bodybuilding
With all that said, it still might help you to figure where you
are in this confusing realm of bodybuilding, simply to be able
to get the most out of what you want to do. If you are going to
train to be a competitive lifter, that requires a different set
of talents and learned skills, as well as a different approach
to diet and training, than does a competitive bodybuilder, or a
cross-training athlete from another sport or a fitness model or
whichever choice (or combination of choices) you make. And
yes, sometimes we’ll be guilty of lapsing into that catch-all
term,bodybuilding, when we should be more precise and explain
what we mean.
Finding a Workout
One thing that can help you is to find or develop or learn the
most appropriate workout for whatever you’re doing. We see
casual trainers who have signed up for what amount to intensive
regimens that really only an experienced bodybuilder who’s
aspiring to competition should be on. So you can waste your
time and get no results, get injured, and generally just have a
really unpleasant experience. You certainly have the freedom
to change your mind, but if you can figure out what it is
you’re training for, and what you want, you will stand a better
chance of meeting those goals (if they’re not completely
unrealistic), and you might not end up miserable from doing
something you don’t want to do.
Eating
If there is a tyranny and confusion about working out, there is
even more of this when it comes to eating. We’ve seen
virtually every type of diet—many of them mutually exclusive—
which its proponents insist are the only or the best ones.
This is even more wrong than saying there is only one way to
work out, or one best way. Again, you’ve got to use some
common sense and take some personal responsibility in finding
what is good nutrition and what works for you.
Some Tips for Beginners:
--seek out a reliable trainer: This can be difficult, but try
to talk to a couple of prospective trainers, tell them your
goals if you know them, and see what they tell you. You need
to be matched up temperamentally with a trainer you at least
tolerate if not like, and somebody who’s not going to hurt you
or disrespect you.
--begin learning: Teach yourself everything you can. After
all, it’s your body and your life, why not learn for yourself?
It looks like an intimidating, confusing process, but it can be
done.
--apply yourself: The cliché is that nothing worthwhile comes
without effort, and that’s true in working out and eating. You
don’t have to train like a pro athlete or competitor if you’re
not, to gain health and fitness benefits, but you’ve got to put
something of yourself into it.
--be patient: We’re an impatient species in an impatient
world. Who wants to wait until tomorrow? Whether you want to
lose 50 pounds, or bench press 300, build up your arms two
inches bigger, or make the football team next fall—you’ve got
to put in the time, the work, and, sorry to say, you’ve got to
have some patience. Most of the stuff that tells you you’ll
get fabulous results in a ridiculously short period of time is
untrue. But you know that deep down, don’t you?
--have a life: Just because you’re working out, if you happen
to fall in love with the activity, don’t neglect school or your
job or your family or your personal growth or development in
other areas. This is an old message, but still worthwhile.
--enjoy the work, enjoy the results: If you hate exercise, at
least you can enjoy whatever positive results you get. If you
like working out, you are ahead then. You will doubly enjoy.
Enjoy and appreciate whatever health and fitness you have, it
is a gift.
For Advanced Bodybuilders: Experiment
Moving along to advanced men and women who are into serious
muscle-building, some of you may even compete, you are looking
for any edge you can get, preferably a natural, drug-free one.
Then don’t get stuck in that rut you’re in! So often,
bodybuilders will say, “I’ve found the perfect workout for me,
I’m not gonna change it,” which is fine, if you are making
infinite gains, which nobody is. But a suggestion: try other
workouts. What do you have to lose? If you have what you
consider is a “perfect” workout (usually months later they
won’t say that workout was so perfect, after they change it
anyway), you can always go back to it after you try other
ways. Too often, heavy-only trainers will refuse to change,
stubbornly clinging to their methods of grinding out the
heavier and heavier stuff, despite burning out, getting
injuries and not making progress. Or moderate weight trainers
won’t try a briefer, heavier workout. Change. Try to come up
with new stuff. People in our sport say there’s nothing new,
but if you haven’t tried it, it’s new to you. You might get
additional gains from a method you have previously scorned.
The body has its own ideas.
New Training and Nutrition
As for those who say there is nothing new in training and
nutrition, there is this to consider: we may know much more in
a theoretical way about the human body, how it grows muscle and
sheds fat, than we have actually applied or been able to apply
in a gym. Something in a laboratory, in a Petri dish, is not
necessarily the same thing as taking place in your body at home
after you have completed a chest and back workout that rocks.
Also, as much as we know about the human body, for example in
medicine and nutrition, there is a huge amount we don’t know.
Why would it follow that we know everything there is to know
about training and nutrition then? What other sport but
bodybuilding says, “Oh, just lift heavy weights and eat this,
don’t eat that, and that’s all there is to it.” No, the truth
is, bodybuilding stopped growing as a discipline not only when
steroids took over, but when people felt they knew everything
there was to know and so stopped learning. Imagine if medicine
or engineering, two applied sciences, had that attitude. But
then ignorance often rules; years ago there was a contention
that science had disproved there was such a thing as a
curveball in baseball, though you sure couldn’t convince the
major league hitters of that who couldn’t hit one. Take ideas
and test them for the practical results, the real-world
consequences.
So the lesson is, keep experimenting, keep learning, and keep
applying new ideas to training and nutrition, and use new
combinations of old ideas that worked and improve upon them.
Other sports do this all the time. Only bodybuilding doesn’t
because its emphasis has been entirely on grabbing the latest
drug out of a lab or even the latest supplement that people
feel will mimic drug-like results.
Advanced Techniques
Learning to get more out of a given rep or set of exercise has
always been the quest of any serious trainer, no matter what
your goals. To that end, there’s a lot of talk about slowing
down reps, even counting the cadence, with time under tension
or load being buzz words for this. There’s a drawback,
however. When you are counting these seconds, or slowing down
the rep, you may not be concentrating on the contraction or a
pause and squeeze at the bottom or top, or even on the muscle,
you can just be thinking only about lifting the weight. To
explain this further, you can lift a weight slowly, while
releasing a lot of tension, so that someone watching you would
only observe that you have strict form (what we’d call more
precisely “strict external form”), yet you haven’t stressed the
muscle with the amount of force of the contraction or tension
which you originally intended. That desired contraction could
be called “strict internal form,” or the kind of tension we
seek to place on a muscle continuously in a bodybuilding set
(different than force training or strength/power tension).
So, you may be trying to achieve something with what you think
is a super-strict technique, a much slower rep, when you are
actually neglecting the contraction, pause and squeeze that
you might have wanted to include. Sometimes you can try to put
too many techniques into a given set or rep. Figure out what
you want to do and use the appropriate technique, don’t try to
include every technique in a rep, set or workout, and check
your body for feedback. It tells you a lot.
The Future
Many will say that the future of athletics or bodybuilding is
in drugs, and drugs only, yet those of us who practice drug-
free training (our folly?) and nutrition, implicitly believe
otherwise. Where is the future of working out going to come:
one place is from other sports. Combining techniques and
information about the body we derive from other activities,
some seemingly unrelated to bodybuilding’s concerns of building
muscle, will hold larger application. Also, getting away from
the simplistic nature of intensity vs. volume (a false either-
or debate) will yield significant neglected and even new
workout approaches. The study of recovery, which we seem to
equate only with laying comatose on the couch over the weekend
(or for three weeks if you’re an HIT trainer—you’ll know what I
mean), will become as important a discipline as studying about
the actual workout. The Russians have studied and developed
recovery techniques that bodybuilders might learn, adapt and
use; so too have other American sports. The days of natural,
drug-free trainers simply following a watered-down version of
drug-training will one day, we think, end.
The future of natural bodybuilding waits to be written.
--Greg Sushinsky
www.gregsushinsky.com
Copyright © 2006, Greg Sushinsky All Rights Reserved.
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