Again is training to failure the magic bullet? I know I train hard. I see what the crowd is doing in the commercial gym I go to. I see the incredible delusional cheating of the mob doing partial everything so they can use a "man's" weight when in reality physics 101 dictate that a weight moved a greater distance is more work. On another side note Olympic lifters and Power lifters rarely train to failure. Normally at the end of their training cycle are their failure reps.
Gurus of HIT like Jones, Mentzer, Darden, and Viator all were adamant about training body parts three times a week. Mentzer and Viator both won the Mr. America contest doing whole body routines three times a week. Darden preached body parts three times a year for a long time. Jones eventually said as you progress twice a week is best.
In the end the whole a stronger muscle is bigger muscle is not the entire truth. Many have found including most professional bodybuilders that training for endurance in the form of muscular endurance not to be confused with aerobic endurance builds muscle the best. Is the guy doing a bench for 225lbs for failure at 8 reps doing more work than a guy using 185lbs for 5 sets of 8?
Lifting again will never be rocket science no matter how many snake oil sales men would want you to believe. It's literally picking stuff up and putting it down like the commercial says.
Well, I believe that there is a difference if you are training just to get larger muscles, and if you are training Olympic lifts, or just strength like power lifters. I believe that whole point is that you have to choose what you want from your training, and optimize your training for that. Other thing, we are talking about natural bodybuilders, not juiced to the gills power lifters etc. These gurus were juiced so can you use them as an example for natural bodybuilders? Completely different world, you see. That's why it is so important to understand, that if you want results, you have to twise as hard than juiced guys. Most common mistake people make, is just what you say: "Lifting will never be rocket science ".. "just pick things up and putting it dow", you say. That could be the reason why you seem to be so bitter, you see, rocket science has different meaning for different people. Some understand it without any sweat, some doesn't. What I point out earlier, was a list of facts which were the guiding line for bodybuilders from Steve Reeves up to Lee Haney. I didn't invent any of this, I just point it out, because people seem to forgotten what this sport is all about. Not just lifting things, but knowing how to do it, how it should feel in the muscle, what you have to do to get best outcome from it etc. If this is too much to understand, so what? Just keep lifting up things and putting them down, and you will be all good.
You see, stronger muscle doesn't have to be bigger muscle, but there is always more strength if muscle grows larger. That's why the weight lifted doesn't really matter, but what will matter is how deep exhaustion you can deliver to the muscle. By that exhaustion your muscles grow bigger and stronger, so used weight will increase anyway by time. Also this people see other way around, they think that they have to use overload always and in every exercise. Then they use partial reps, cheats, forced reps to move it, while good reps till the end with lesser weight would give more results. Which is better: One rep with one rep max, or 15 reps with 70% of one rep max? Completely different things, and different results. By less weight & more reps you can maintain stress longer in the muscle, and therefore you can get it exhausted more completely. When muscle is completely exhausted, it need days to recovery, and therefore you cannot train it more than once per week. No rocket science, just simple facts. If you don't get your muscles completely exhausted, do you think they grow faster or slower? Just like in the mathematics, if you change some variable in the equation, the result can't be same. That's why those old time bodybuilders write those rules in every fking magazine which has published about this sport before year 2000. Then came the insulin and modern drugs, and you can build muscles just by sitting on the bench and taking grazy amount of juice. Then came the new gurus of the internet like Rich Piana etc. and they replaced the old ones, whose create this sport, not just earn money by talking about it. But if the times change, do it mean that facts of the matter change also? Modern natural human flesh needs different kind of training than before? This is where those snake oil sales men are waiting for you..They are called personal trainers, aka PT.
