WHY PROGRAMS DOESNT WORK

You keep working out, and the meat does not grow.  Sometimes it even, oh, my God, decreases.  And you’re training properly.  You give your muscles enough time to rest, train the group once a week, use compound exercises and the “pyramid”. From time to time you shock your muscles with forced reps and feel that your muscles are constantly filled with blood during workout.  And they... don’t grow anyway.   Muscle growth is affected by two main factors: recovery, which also includes nutrition and training. Well, it’s time I told you why bodybuilding programs don’t grow your meat.  There are some important secrets here that you don’t know.TYPICAL TRAINING PROGRAMThe main reason why you don’t grow using traditional programs is because YOU DON’T TAKE STEROIDS! And that means you’re probably doing everything wrong at the gym. And it’s not your fault at all.  Everyone around you inspires you with false ideas about training due to their ignorance.  Unfortunately, all typical bodybuilding training programs WORK REALLY BAD WITHOUT STEROIDS. Which makes perfect sense: because they were written by people who take steroids for exactly the same people.  Let’s imagine a typical workout of a modern bodybuilder.  It’s likely to have the following components:DEEP SPLIT, i.e. muscle splitting by days.  That means you divide your body into at least three parts, or even all five.   For example: 1-chest, 2-back, 3-deltoids, 4-arms, 5-legs. or 1 - chest and arms, 2 - back and deltoids, 4 - legs.   Ever since Uncle Joe came up with a split, it became the essential part of bodybuilding.  But Arnold started with FULL BODY.  And he gained most of his muscles without splitting. LOW FREQUENCY OF TRAINING is a side component of split.  Due to the fact that you deeply split your body by different days of the week, you rarely train each individual muscle group.   Once a week is a traditional practice now.  Once every 5-6 days is less common. 8-12 REPS is a classic range of reps in bodybuilding.  For some reason, nobody takes into account the speed of the movement, but only the number of reps. HIGH VOLUME OF WORK for each group.  The main point of the concept is that for a muscle to grow, it must do more strength work.  This is the essence of modern bodybuilding. Split is designed to help us accomplish this difficult task.  SMALL REST BETWEEN SETS means that we should rest as little as possible.  The traditional range is 1-2 minutes.  If you can rest for 30 seconds, it’s even better.  The less rest you have, the more work you do per unit time. Come on, son! Do it! PUMPING INSTEAD OF LOAD PROGRESSION.  Now it’s very rare to see a guy with a diary in the gym. But I always see fans looking at their muscles filled with blood.  Why not? Arnold once said it’s like an erection, and it’s exciting. Here we are, getting excited. Well? Did I describe everything correctly? This is really a description of a typical bodybuilding workout.  We all practice similar schemes most often.  But someone is growing and someone isn’t. Why?  Because although the schemes are similar for everyone, but there is a nuance, as they say.  And this nuance has a name - ANABOLIC STEROIDS! The workouts I described are perfect for their usage.  Later I will tell you in detail what you need to do with the program to make it work for a gym goer who doesn’t use steroids.  Now let me tell you about a very interesting experience with Testosterone Enanthate.HOW STEROIDS AFFECT MUSCLE SIZE AND STRENGTH (EXPERIMENT)You can read about this experiment here.It lasted 10 weeks and involved 43 trained men.  That is, they are people with at least several years of experience in the gym.  All the test subjects were divided into 4 different groups, with two variables: a) training YES-NO b) steroids YES-NO. Here’s the result:GROUP 1 = No steroids + No training (control) GROUP 2 = Steroids + No training GROUP 3 = No steroids + Training GROUP 4 = Steroids + Training  Members of groups 2 and 4  were given 600 mg of testosterone enanthate each week. That’s a very good dosage. This amount of testosterone is often used at primary and secondary levels. I know people who take doses of up to 1,000 mg of testosterone per week. By the way, the participants did not know whether they were taking placebo or testosterone.  It was necessary for the purity of the experiment. Nutrition in all groups was standard and based on the weight of each participant and their needs. Everyone received 36 kcal and 1.5 g of protein for each kg of his own weight.As for weight training in groups 3 (no steroids) and 4 (steroids), it was absolutely identical. Okay. Now guess... what happened?  Look at the growth of dry meat:GROUP 1 = No steroids + No training = 0 kg GROUP 2 = Steroids + No training = 3.2 kg GROUP 3 = No steroids + Training = 1.9 kg GROUP 4 = Steroids + Training = 6.1 kg  If we compare a man who trains and takes steroids with a man who trains and does not take steroids, we will see that the former has gained THREE TIMES MORE MUSCLES than the latter.  This explains why anabolic steroids are used in professional sports, because without them you will be three times behind your rivals. It’s like having a competition between three-liter and one-liter cars of the same weight. The former one will accelerate three times faster and the competition will be senseless.However, I want to draw your attention to another comparison.  Note that those people who took steroids and did not train still gained more muscles (3.2 kg) than those athletes who did not use steroids (1.9 kg).  CONCLUSION: When you take steroids, proper workouts are not as important as when you do not take steroids since you grow anyway. This is one of the biggest problems of modern bodybuilding.  Most schemes that you can see in bodybuilding magazines or on websites will not work for you if you do not take steroids.  Simply because these schemes were written by people on the basis of their chemical experience, which, as you can see, is not indicative.  Think about it, people didn’t train at all, and they gained more than people who went to the gym and did not take steroids!REPLICATION OF OTHERS’ SUCCESS STORIESDear athletes, the experience I have described above shows that you can’t be equal to the bodybuilders around you.  Just because if this guy’s really big and muscular, he’s probably using steroids. And even if he says he’s not doing it. Understand that if such person admits the use of steroids, he not only lowers his status in your eyes (which is not beneficial to him), but also can face problems with law enforcement agencies, and sports federation. Does he need that? No! So almost everyone says they don’t use steroids.You believe in this fish story of good nutrition and repeat other people’s schemes which are terrible for you.  You just won’t grow using them at best.  And at the worst, you’re gonna hurt yourself, or you’re gonna drive yourself into overtraining.  In the late 90s I read a funny letter from a young man in “Pump Muscles” magazine. It was a popular magazine for gym goers at the time. So, in the beginning, there was a section with letters from readers, where they were enthusiastically spluttering with delight.I still remember very clearly an article from a guy who met our bodybuilding champion on vacation.  When asked about pharmacology, the bodybuilder answered typically that he never used anything. Look, I brought a whole bucket of nuts with me. I eat them - there are many micronutrients and quality protein. That’s my secret.  And what do you think? The novice believed in it and was now telling anyone what a great athlete that bodybuilder was.  This situation is typical for non-experts.  Not only do they have no knowledge for assessment, they also want to be deceived about the effectiveness of natural training. In general, forget about all the typical splits and schemes that you have seen in books or bodybuilding magazines. They are 99% designed exclusively for training with anabolic steroids.  Now let’s talk about what workout you really need.HOW TO TRAIN PROPERLY (FOR A PERSON WHO DOES NOT TAKE STEROIDS).Everything I described before is working. But it works best for people who use steroids. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that traditional schemes don’t work at all for people who don’t use steroids. They work, but much worse than they could because the lack of pharmacology is usually ignored here.   Let’s start with the beginning.DEEP SPLITSplit allows you to do more work for each individual muscle group because it gives you more time during each workout.  Deep split allows you to have a single day of training for your hands or deltoids.  In a natural workout, this will be too much overload leading to increased catabolism at the workout itself, due to excess lactic acid and activation of lysosomes.In addition, the natural stimulation of anabolic hormone production by the pituitary gland depends more on stress intensity than on its duration.  This means that it is better to train large groups intensively (briefly) than to train small groups for a long time.   It also means that it is better for a natural athlete to start every training day with a large muscle group, since it will stimulate production of growth factors such as testosterone, growth hormone, free creatine and mRNA.Roughly speaking, with deep splitting, you get a lack of growth factors when training small muscle groups.   The ideal scheme for a natural beginner athlete is FULL BODY. For an athlete who has some experience - SPLIT IN TWO.  An advanced athlete can SPLIT IN THREE. You don’t need more than that.LOW TRAINING FREQUENCYThat’s the second bad thing you get from a deep split.  Devoting days for each muscle group, you end up training them once a week.   Remember, most protein synthesis after workout ends in 72 hours (90%).  And the residual synthesis, which can run in the cells for another week, does not play a role, because the new training does not inhibit it.  When you take steroids, it doesn’t matter because artificial hormones constantly stimulate synthesis even in situations when you are not training.  But if you don’t take steroids, you need to train the group more often in order to constantly boost the synthesis in it. Otherwise you’ll have a cycle: Progress - Regress. It can go on like this for years if you train without pharmaceuticals.In my “NATURAL: How to Grow Muscle without Steroids” material I use a wonderful experiment where the scientists compared frequent and rare workouts without steroids.  There was 30% more progress in the former case than in the latter.  You can read about the experiment  here .HIGH VOLUME OF WORKThe more work you do, the more stress and adaptation to it in the form of big muscles.  However, it only works so obviously when you use steroids.  Why? Because the more linear volume of work per muscle (the more sets and reps we do for it), the more acidification and catabolism.  Lactic acid causes destruction of muscle cells due to lysosomal activity.  That’s why natural athletes are often not advised to do a lot of sets for the muscle and to train for a long time.According to my observations, it is enough to acidify a muscle in 3-4 sets of one exercise. If you keep rushing, there may be more harm than good.  You can continue working on a muscle. But only after resting for 5-20 minutes to reduce the concentration of lactic acid.  So forget the 100 sets on this muscle and 100 sets on that muscle.  For a natural athlete within the same workout, it doesn’t work, it only harms.LITTLE REST BETWEEN SETSThat’s what further increases the destructive concentration of lactic acid.  The thing is, it’s produced during glycolysis. That is, during work.  Once you’re done with the set, lactic acid starts to leave your muscles.  And the more you rest, the more acid is removed. That’s why the weightlifters rest 3-5 minutes between sets, by the way. This reduces the concentration of acid that prevents the use of efficient energy (ATP), and the weightlifter can press the same weight as in the previous set.  Strength always drops with high levels of acidification.A very short rest between sets is traditional for bodybuilding: from 30 to 120 seconds.  It’s not enough to remove acid, which accumulates more and more, destroying your muscle cells.PUMPING INSTEAD OF LOAD PROGRESSION.Pumping is a sign of glycolysis and lactic acid accumulation.  In fact, I think people underestimate the importance of “muscle pump” because they don’t understand the importance of hydrogen ions for anabolism and muscle growth.   Pumping may be enough and may be excessive, that’s the problem.  Traditional bodybuilding schemes, when 2 to 4 consecutive exercises are done for the same muscle, are excessive pumping because they create an excessive concentration of acid in the muscles.   One exercise is quite enough, given that we bodybuilders have little rest between sets.If you’re a natural athlete, I suggest you think more about load progression than pumping.  The matter is that a regular increase in load is a guarantee of increasing stress on your muscles.  For natural athletes, it is this stress that stimulates generation of anabolic hormones and factors.  Load progression is not as important for people who take steroids since they have artificial hormones in their blood.  If a natural athlete constantly trains with the same weight, it only indicates that he does not have muscle stress, which means that the pituitary gland does not stimulate testosterone and growth hormone secretion. But as soon as he begins to monitor his progress regularly, stress is constantly increasing and stimulating growth.  In this respect, stress is more important than pumping because stress “creates” growth factors (hormones), while pumping triggers them through hydrogen ions reading information about protein synthesis in the DNA of the cell.RATE OF PROGRESSIf you’re a natural athlete, forget about fast progress.  Most of the information you’ve heard about other people’s achievements is chemical records.  Try to compete with yourself, not with other people you can’t control.  It is very important to have real expectations, so that there would be no disappointment.HOW TO INCREASE THE TESTOSTERONEI’ve already done a story on the subject where I’ve talked about non-standard testosterone boosters.  Now I want to give you a few more recommendations that weren’t in that story.EAT FATTY FOOD. We’re talking about good fats.  The thing is, natural athletes need fats and cholesterol to produce hormones.  People like Arnold could afford a low-fat diet with 10% fat content (30% protein, 60% carbs, 10% fat = typical diet of a steroid user).   A natural athlete needs 20-30% of the calories to come from the fat.  There are many experiments where the lack of fat (people were on a diet) reduced the production of testosterone.VITAMIN D actively affects testosterone synthesis.  Those of us who work indoors often lack this vitamin.  The thing is, its synthesis requires the sun energy. That’s why, if you’re staying indoors all the time, you may lack this vitamin and testosterone.  In this case it makes sense to take a blood test for vitamin D, and buy it at a pharmacy.  Usually 2-3,000 international units is enough.ZINC also actively affects testosterone generation.  There’s less testosterone in case of zinc deficit.  It is proved by many experiments.LESS BODY FAT.  It is a proven fact that the fatter a man is, the less testosterone is produced in his body.  Next time you see a fat man, know that he is likely to have a potency problem because of the low testosterone.  Recommendation - look after your body, don’t get fat - and training will be more effective in terms of muscle growth.