35 = middle age. No wonder you have more wisdom than all the kids posting here.
Good point, so true...and do you want to know why those kids have this lack of wisdom? It's not the age, but instead of that, it is the fact they think they already knows better. This hamster wheel goes around like this: In teenage you are full of the natural testosterone, but you don't know shit about bodybuilding, so you read some forums and magazines. With the teenagers intelligence you pick out all the dumplings what you are fond of out from that soup, and that will be your guideline no matter how silly and impossible it could be. Then you are lifting weights, and wondering why most of the adults think you are doing it poorly. You are gaining age more than the muscles and when you reach your adulthood, you find yourself wondering why you don't get nowhere no matter how much you are lifting. It take a while to understand that all what you have hear is true, bodybuilding is quite simple sport, but it need some kind of brain functions as well as protein and lifting. You see, the muscle itself has no brains, so you must have, and with your brains you should understand few points:
1. amount of exercise has to be in relationship with the size of the muscle. For example, I see every day how guys do 20-60 sets for the bicep, which weights something like 2 lb. What that means, is that instead of growing your bicep, you are burning it a way with too much work.
2. you have to know your muscles and what they do. You can do old school sit ups but crunches are far more effective, because crunch is what your abdominal muscles are made for. You can do pull downs for your latissimus and lean back as far as you can, but the natural range of motion will benefit you more. Your ancestors were apes, they didn't lean back while doing chins.
3. you have to eat and you have to rest enough, to give your muscles time to recover before the next training session. It is common to go to gym at least four times a week, some of us trains every day, and why? They have read that pro's do like that, and that is quite ok, if you are one of them. On the other hand, if you are a natural bodybuilder, you don't recover as fast as those guys who pump gear in their system, because what gear does, is speeding up your recovery. If you take big pills from the bottle which has picture of the horse in the label, you recover overnight no matter how hard you have been training, but if not, it takes at least three days.
It is really as simple as that. You don't need books, magazines and forums, you have to listen your own body and understand how it works. You have to outsmart your muscles work harder than they can, and how difficult that could be, while your muscles have no brains at all. You just lift until it hurts like hell in the muscle what you are training. No matter if you are doing bench or the squat etc., what you need is right amount of weight to meet your pain barrier with 8 to 10 reps, and do 10 to 12 reps.
