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I've never seen a strength training or bodybuilding program developed for a mass audience that didn't "work". No matter how ridiculous the program is and how unfounded it's principles all such programs tend to be seen as largely successful.
Once upon a time the world did not need specialists to the degree it does now. Most every human being had the basic skills of survival. Sure there were still "roles" that certain members of a group would be given by convention but the roles were simple and there weren't so many of them.
Now, if your mother in law has trouble with her new DVD player, you are more likely to attribute that trouble to her lack of familiarity with modern technology than to any defects in the product. It is her failure to understand what is to you a simple device.
But is it simple? Could the fault lie in the product? Is it, perhaps, more complex than it needs to be? Probably not but the point is most people would never consider the possibility. It's a "common sense" attribution. DVD players are "everyday" items and failure to understand them suggests a lack of common sense.
Most people you know never report problems controlling their DVD player. Since your mother in law USUALLY has trouble with technology you automatically attribute the problem to her. And, of course, in this case, your attribution is most likely correct.
But when it comes to strength training and bodybuilding programs that are published in books or popularized on the internet we see some problems with this type of attribution.
We are told to just "pick a program" and follow it like the owner's manual of that DVD. If the program then fails to produce results for us the failure is attributed to us rather than the program. WE failed to follow the instructions; or to comprehend them.
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Success or Failure Attributions
The fitness culture tends to attribute success and lack of success to the individual. Lack of motivation, lack of adherence, lack of understanding and more vague concepts such as "doing too much" or "doing too little". Part of the outcome of this is that people tend to report SUCCESS but not FAILURE. And we don't go looking for these reports but simply rely on the relative abundance of self reports of success.
Since they are so abundant by comparison the few reports of failure can be easily written off. I've even heard such statements as "a crappy program done with the right attitude is better than a good program done with a bad attitude". Hardly a scientific argument since 'attitude' is not an easily defined concept. Yet, we can see how bad programs can be "defended" on a vague basis. To me, that is like telling someone that if they beat their head against a wall with a "positive" attitude that will work better than stopping short of the wall with a negative attitude.
And, in fact, people do fail to adopt the proper attitude when entering a new training program. But in such cases they would adopt a poor attitude with ANY new program. Probably, just telling someone to improve their attitude will have little effect on their attitude!
Attitude
Also, such statements rely on ideas about general attitude and fail to consider the importance of specific attitude. A trainee may have a positive and enthusiastic attitude towards "strength training" and "hard work" but have a more negative attitude toward, for instance, low reps. A trainee who is convinced that anything under eight reps will fail to produce results will not be swayed by statements such as "you are unwilling to lift heavy enough". And his underlying specific attitudes towards the parameters employed WILL affect his results. But since there is no one there or no one who is willing to explain these parameters in a way which will positively affect his attitude toward them he is left to his own responses.
And which came first? The "attitude" or the program? I have never encountered anyone who writes programs for general consumption who considered the impact of that program on a trainee's psyche.
Given that there is no way that one program and it's plan of progression can possibly fit every trainee then it is easy to imagine that an inappropriate program could lead to a "bad attitude".
Perhaps the loading is too aggressive. Or volume is ramped to quickly (too "intensive"). Perhaps the writer failed to mention how other fitness goals could impact the effect of a resistance training program. Yes, that is the fault of the program as well. There is more to resistance training than just resistance training.
Everybody from the elite olympic athlete to the common gym rat believes that success depends on a certain amount of volume and intensity in the training regimen and that without it one is simply not training hard enough.
Social Influence
So what I am saying is that there is a big psychosocial influence at work here. We let social conventions drive our individual training without any thought to whether the results will be better performance or worse. When we speak of attitudes however, we fail to recognize that there is a point of contention between the models we use to write programs and the "effect" of an individuals attitude on their outcome. That is, these models DO NOT CONSIDER the contribution of the individuals disposition as will be shown later.
Mundane training effects us as well. Doing the same thing day in and day out with the same parameters is not conducive to an enthusiastic and positive outlook to training.
We are so apt to blame trainees but once they adopt a "program" they have no one but themselves, much of the time. They don't have a supportive trainer or coach. Or an experienced buddy. If they seek out help on the internet they are invariably told to "work harder" or "follow the directions" which is hardly helpful at all since, much of the time, to their mind they HAVE been working hard and they HAVE been following directions.
Strength and bodybuilding programs are like popular diets. We have been socially conditioned to think that if they fail it is our fault.
Stress and Stressors
The training program is a STRESS. All individuals do not respond to the same stressor in the same ways. That in itself should be enough to dissuade you from recommending the same program to every resistance trainee who asks or from adopting the program that is the most popular or "hardcore" but I'll assume you need more convincing.
Traditionally, there have been two basic ways that researchers look at the effects of a prolonged stressor (the training program) and the difference between them may not be apparent at first glance. These are stimulus oriented (or stimulus-event oriented) and response oriented. The latter was the model developed by physiologist Walter Cannon and later by Hans Seyle when he developed the famous "General Adaptation Syndrome" (GAS) from which we derived many of our basic training premises.
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