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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Feldman who wrote (80349)	5/2/2000 5:46:00 PM
From: Knighty Tin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Dave, If you are really building new muscle, then you have to be traumatizing the old muscle cells and tearing them down. There is absolutely no way to do this without experiencing some degree of soreness. The reason most folks who lift more often have less soreness is that they are not really building anything, unless they are genetic superstars and/or steroid/growth hormone junkies. I will give you some rationale below, but I suggest you go to my sources for better stuff. mikementzer.com One on this site is Dr. Doug McGuff. Read his "Dosage" articles part one and part two. On the same site, read Mike Mentzer's three part series "Actualize Your Muscular Potential In One Year." Now, a warning, you have to wade through a lot of Mike's quotes about Ayn Rand and his sliming of Kant, but it is worth it to get at the gems. As a former multiple times Mr. Universe said, "Mike Mentzer has a lot of knowledge to impart when he isn't quoting some dead chick philosopher." <g> Basically, I believe that the great majority of weight trainees overtrain. A lot of them get hooked on the comaraderie of the gym atmosphere. Others feel as though they are not doing enough. You know, if one aspirin makes my headache feel better, the whole bottle will make it all well. <g> Another reason for overtraining is that it works when you first start out. For the first 3 months to two years, a lot of your work is muscle, tendon and brain learning rather than building. In other words, an experienced trainee can go in and train on full squats until his muscles cannot do another one. A new trainer is more likely to fall from lack of balance than from muscle failure. So, as the new trainers muscles learn, the "strength" seems to be growing rapidly. And your muscles learn technique better with more frequent training. They grow better with less frequent training. Clarence Bass, in the book I recommended, combines the high volume and high intensity philosophies. He has an endurance phase, a combination endurance and strength phase, and then a strength phase. Uniquely, he also cycles his aerobic workouts with these strength phases. Clarence also recommends working out three days a week for the first 12 weeks of a beginners program. McGuff would disagree. I come down on the fact that you have to work with what works for you, and that may change over time. I go through periods where I change all of the exercizes (Per Tesch's book that I reviewed is good for choosing some of the exercise pairs), change the reps (I have gone as high as 25 reps and as low as 3), etc. The main key for me is to make progress. It doesn't matter if that progress is bench pressing a heavy weight for 3 reps that is 2 pounds heavier than what I could do last week or pressing a much lighter weight for 25 reps when I could only do 24 reps last week. Since I am always keying on progression of some sort or another, periodization doesn't work for me. But, as far as soreness goes, buy some Icy Hot, teach your wife or girlfriend some nice massage techniques, and learn how to look cool while gritting your teeth. (Hey, it worked for the young Kirk Douglas <g>). I simply do not believe that you get muscular growth without some soreness. I am not talking about so sore you can't pick an apple off a tree, but sore enough for you to say, "Hey, I've got muscles there!" You also may want to look at Richard Winnet, Ph.d's Web Site, "The Master Athlete." Richard has joint problems and has started to use the super slow protocol to help with that. It might work for your situation, too. He, like Clarence Bass, tends to take a helping from the volume camp and a helping from the high intensity camp.