![]() In most cases, what’s the outcome? Injury, mental burnout and diminished results. The worst offenders of this generally occurs in the pre contest period, in the last 4-6 weeks. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is the overuse of intensifying techniques or load in every single session, and consistently pushing things to failure in a rush for better results. Don’t get me wrong, as I said above I’m a huge fan of training hard and training to failure as a basic stimulus for growth – ON OCCASION. Heavy sets, volume work, forced reps, drop sets, isoholds, supersets and other intensifying techniques are thrown at every workout, with the person driving themselves into the ground every single session, 7 days a week with no rhyme or reason. Instead of mapping out short and long term goals, and setting realistic training protocols to meet them, I’m seeing a lot of athletes going in and training blindly. Somewhere along the way, most physique athletes completely forgot about this basic principle. For performance athletes like powerlifters, olympic lifters, gymnasts and fighters, this is common practice – Plan out 16 weeks, or in some cases the entire year, methodically and follow it and peak perfectly for that competition. In just about every sport I can think of, there is always a focus on planning out training cycles to achieve certain benchmark goals. The best piece of advice I can give anyone is to train to a plan. The art of programming comes down to the periodisation of the above – whether it’s within a session or across a training cycle to create a strong, aesthetically pleasing, injury-free physique. ![]() Both approaches are needed to progress optimally. ![]() You can probably guess where I’m going with this – there’s a middle ground. Spending all of your time focusing on beating last week’s performance and continually getting stronger will undoubtedly cause a positive growth response – but you’ll also wind up accruing injuries from failing to correct structural imbalances with dominant body parts will continuing to grow, with your weaknesses become further highlighted. The heavier or closer to failure you go, the more significant this dominance in recruitment becomes – exacerbating issues from both an aesthetic and rehab perspective. Your body will emphasise dominant, efficient muscle groups at the expense of your lagging, inefficient body parts. So in the interest of survival, it will do whatever it needs to to move the weight. All it cares about is not getting squashed under a heavy bar. The downside to this is that under these circumstances, the body has absolutely no idea of your goals of thick lower lats, quad sweep, a full upper chest and wide, capped delts. Push your body with progressively heavier weights and take yourself to that point of eyeball-bursting pain once in a while and you stimulate the hypertrophic response. On the other hand, training for strength, under heavy loads and to failure are all critical factors necessary for growth. The problem with this is that it won’t build as much overall muscle mass – The weight is light and sets are rarely taken to failure – so there isn’t much force or muscle damage being created to stimulate growth – so the focus is on blood flow and pump to stimulate small improvements. PERIODISATION FOR GROWTH & LONGEVITY In Training by Eugene TeoJMuch of my programming, especially in the initial phases, is focused on ‘innervation’ training – emphasising the ‘mind-muscle connection’ and consciously contracting and squeezing the target muscle – typically from unorthodox angles and using sub-maximal weights. ![]()
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