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No Myth Fitness - September 2007

Simple Shoulders

September 25th 2007 11:06
The training of shoulders is the topic for this edition. I find shoulder training the most taxing training of all the training I have done. There is no body part that is more trained than the shoulders and the price of over training them is chronic pain. It is the spectre of this training induced pain around which I organize my work.

It is easy to do too much for shoulders. You can do bent over dumbbell flyes, for instance, to build the rear deltoid muscle. The problem is that the rear deltoid is stimulated heavily when training back in rowing movements.You can do front raises with dumbbells to build the front deltoid, but the front deltoid is heavily stimulated when you do your bench presses and chest flyes. My point? You are asking for trouble,if you pile on work with the above movements.


The above paragraph begs the question:what can be safely done for shouldes? My answer is that the two basic shoulder movements that are essential are also enough. The lateral flye is a shoulder shocker of the highest quality.l find very few people who will do it on a regular basis. The machines that mimic it are a good way to compensate for a hesitation to do the real deal. I'll start a shoulder workout with lateral flyes and I have always tried to use the most weight possible with good form. I think a serious trainer can get up to 40-50 lbs on each dumbbell. That is, if he is willing to watch the cheating and hip swinging. Combined with its machine imitators this movement will add a size to the delts.

The other and obvious movement for shoulders it the good ole press. I use plated loaded machines to start my pressing and graduate to dumbbell presses with my back supported against a bench. The press seems simple to do, but it is simple to do incorrectly too. I stress keeping my hands wide apart and stopping the movement just be for the top. If you bring your hands too closetogether as you go up and push to the top you will be subtly shifting the load from shoulders to triceps.


A shoulder workout with my two favorites will do it. Your servant, as always.
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Think Reps

September 22nd 2007 12:14
Being the most important does not mean that a concept is the most apparent.In weight training,where the constant temptation is to make it easier, the most important element is the rep. All else is an elaboration. If your workout is not a series of focuses on each and every rep, you will ultimately be expending more energy for less results.If you fly into the gym and push your way through a bunch of sets that do not have a focus on each and every rep the amount of wasted potential is immense.

There has always existed a fundamental dispute in bodybuilding theory between the high number of sets crowd and a smaller coterie of those who favored a small number of sets to the most intense failure that can be produced. Both positions have something to offer. Each can be turned into something that is unproductive.

The many sets advocates are often chemically enhanced and that ipso facto means that the average person cannot sustain the kind of workloads that this kind of training entails.What Mr. Normal gets out of 20-30 sets per body part is long boring workouts in which intensity corners are cut to compensate for the load. Submaximal sets one upon the other miss the point that muscle grows as it is exposed to peak contraction.

One or two sets to failure advocates put tremendous pressure on the inexperienced trainer to push his body into territories of pain etc which the entire psychological apparatus of the normal human is designed to avoid. Going to failure is so natural that without a tyrant standing over him the average guy will not reach the potential that this technique is designed to reach.

There is a way to approach this dichotomy: limit the sets in a workout to less than 10 per body part and emphasize the performance of each rep in each set. The focus of such workouts never leaves the individual rep, done strictly with maximum weight and in realistic numbers. The mind enters into such workouts and concentration is the premium.Such sessions do not tax the limits of endurance and they do not require that the boundaries of pain management be explored. They do set put pressure on muscle. This is a workout that a normie can handle and will find producing results. Think reps. Your servant,as always.
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Old Thinking

September 18th 2007 11:06
This trip I would like to engage in a little thinking. Specifically I would like to speculate about what aging might look like, if we were to continue to work out for the decades that reach toward the century mark.

First, what we can expect if we do not continue to train. The excess weight is a no-brainer. As the metabolism slows by the decade few of us will find the wherewithal to limit our caloric intake to anywhere near what it will have to be to maintain a weight to within tens of percentage points of our youth. There is a growing body of informed speculation that radical restriction of calories will result in the significant extension of lifespan. How many are affording themselves of this opportunity to live a number of extra year? And to live them in a thin body?

Yet, as large as the middle aged become, it is a clear marker of old age that the body starts to shrink. That can be the result of only one thing-loss of muscle. Loss of muscle slows metabolism and deactivates the body's mechanism for strengthening bones. Unused joints begin to atrophy and whatever movement takes place is labored.

Untrained abdominals begin to sag pretty early on. The internal organs that they restrain are soon too much to restrain and the organs protrude, causing a concomitant strain on the lower back, already weakened by years without a significant challenge to grow. So the stoop arrives and it creates its own set of problems.

Sadly, walking is a recommended activity for the aging. If it is engaged in with serious intent, it will ultimately betray its adherent.Mile after mile will pound the feet and knees,which unhinge the hips and throw the back out of alignment. The continued miles of walking will also prompt the body to jettison muscle, convinced that the walking is its new function. The loss of muscle will do no good. In sum,the body becomes a creaky and undependable partner in life.


What to do? The facts have been in for years. People who lift weights and convince their body that that is its function can short circuit much of the above damage. Bones will actually grow, the metabolism will have to stay up, blood will flow into the extremities. The back will remain strong and the posture erect. The answer is weights,of course. AND...if you start at even an advanced age you can still get these benefits.

How would we be if we continued to work with iron until our 60s were a memory? Like fit people of more advanced chronology. As good as it can be. Enough thinking.Your servant, as always.

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Messing Up the Toughest Way to Train

September 16th 2007 13:42
Some of the recent entries at NMF have discussed the toughest way to train: giant sets-all the sets for a body part done in a continuous circuit. There is no question that a regimen of every body part trained with giant sets is the classic way to assure yourself that you are going all out. Today how to mess up the toughest way to train.

The simplest way to goof up any training is to allow the macro to dominate the micro. What does that mean? Lets say I enter the gym with a giant set or two on my training mind. I am really focused on this challenge and aim to succeed in making it through this workout. What is a huge temptation for me? To focus on the circuit and deemphasize the individual sets


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Rest

September 12th 2007 09:38
The average person who enters into a fitness program complete with gym membership may well not do it out of some innate attraction to the idea of working against their physical limitations. Probably their presence in the gym has more to do with dissatisfaction than with real interest . For this person the problem is not to pace oneself with the proper level of rest and work. Theirs is a burst of activity for which failure or success will mean a swift good-bye to the world of sweating and laboring.

There are many,however,for whom weight training and cardio workouts have a genuine appeal. Like everyone else they start out with too little knowledge,but their enthusiasm for the activity sustains them until the know-how can season them into life long trainers. In that life of training there are bound to be periods of intensity and other periods of distraction. Today a few comments about the periods of intensity and the balancing rest and work


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Save Money and Become an Expert

September 9th 2007 12:34
I have discussed this issue before,but the web being what it is, I suspect that you may be reading this having arrived here via the 9th wonder of the world: the search engine. If that is true, let me introduce this site. Its called No Myth Fitness and it exists for the benefit of a regular human being for whom getting into shape is a challenge and who has a normal life complete with time constraints that do not permit wasting time on fitness methods that do not work. Its also for those who have some money, but not enough to throw away on equipment and/or supplements that are over-hyped and short on output. Finally, its about the geometry of moving from point A to point B,from unfit to fit, with as much speed and as little undue effort as is possible.

That brings me to the most basic problem for someone to whom weight training or any other activity has been suggested as a "good idea" and is willing or desperate enough to try it: what do I do and how do I do it! If you were a complete beginner and you were to walk into a gym and take a quick glance around you would be justified in being intimidated. There are all those machines-some for running/walking, some for riding, some for lifting. If you turn to the free weights, you could really get a puzzled feeling. What to do and where to begin


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Rant time: Friends of Fat

September 6th 2007 10:59
Modern science has once again stunned me by proving the obvious. Acute readers will have read recently that research now reveals that getting fat has a distinct social aspect: fat people tend to help others get fat. The fact that this is well known by anyone who has been invited to eat cakes, pies, etc by someone who is not the least concerned about the detrimental effects of eating trash will have on weight or blood chemistry seems lost on the scientific world. Hanging around with the unconcerned, either fat or otherwise, is not the way to maintain the battle against overweight.

In fact anyone who does not want to be any fatter than they are has got to be on guard against supposed friends practically 24/7. How many experience something like this with some frequency: to increase bon ami on the job and promote some phony sense that employees are a family management arranges a big feed where sugar and carbs are flowing? To say no to this poison fest is to be considered a cro-magnon. Sometimes the coworkers and/or boss decide that a meal out is in order and that means eating crap or appearing to be too prissy to accept the largesse of the company. Even relations with the opposite sex tend to resolve themselves into food addiction, do they not


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Waste Your Effort?Abs Will Do It!

September 4th 2007 10:53
Where is the most energy wasted in weight training? I think it is in abdominal training. Why? Because everyone in the gym makes the attempt to train abs. Everyone from the sad and overweight newby to the professional bodybuilder. There is practically no other muscle group that gets this kind of attention. The problem is that most abdominal training is misdirected and of limited result.

The abdominal muscles are there to bring the torso downward and the hips upward, where they come as close to meeting as is possible in the center of the body. Any movement that is going to build abs must include these movements. The fact is that the shoulders and neck can quite easily act in conjunction with the abs to move the torso toward the hips and the hip flexors can just as easily take the preponderance of the work in moving the hips toward the center of the body. This simply means that ab work is as easy to do wrong and unproductively as any group in the body


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Jump Into the NMF TIme Machine

September 1st 2007 11:33
True science is about contingency. I always know that I am talking to a pathetic scientific second-hander by how dogmatic he is. Real science is about the unending search for the truth, for the ever evanescent universal truth which might be hiding amidst the chaos of the world we actually experience. When you lock yourself into a position in the realm of science you are setting yourself up for the feel of the rug being pulled from under you. The science of fitness is no exception. Yet millions of people spend time on fitness activities that are long discredited and bristle if you tell them that they are wrong.

Lets jump in the NMF time machine and head for the 80s. Aerobics is creating millionaires just from the sale of Jennifer Beale leg warmers. Jane Fonda is funding her leftist boyfriend's political career with aerobics videos. Gyms are crawling with 30 something baby boomers, telling themselves that they are getting into shape in aerobics, while really fulling an atavistic need to dance. Much of the high tech equipment,which a moron could learn to use in five seconds after a sharp blow to the head, is not yet in existence. Lifting weights is way less user friendly. The treadmill is one speed and the exercise bike recently added a cyber element by featuring a workout timer. The stair stepper? I won't even go there


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