You've never actually done dedicated strength training? Too much info is being given out by people who are making a career out of middle of the road training. If you've never done anything past a 5x5 or 4x6 rep range in your training and you've been doing the same old cookie-cutter crap for years then you really don't know nothing about strength yet.

The 5x5 fiasco has to stop. And people who want to act like you can dedicate your lift to a handful of exercises and one training method can't have their cake and eat it to.

If you're training is LIMITED when it comes to injury prevention you can't just tack on some foam rolling and mobility stuff and call it good. It doesn't work that way. Everything starts with the lifting, and indeed, the workout itself. You do these things to augment GOOD training not to make up for BAD training.

Frankly I'm sick of the "piece-meal" approach of self proclaimed experts who started strength training a couple of years…wait a minute…are 5x5's and the like really 'strength' training at all? Or are they "general" training for people who can still benefit from it? Since so many early adaptations are 'general' in nature then one could make a case for this. You gain strength from most anything you do with a weight at first. So when do we call it strength training if at first everything is somewhat equal?

Well, it shouldn't matter except that now we have people simply equating middle-ground approaches to "strength" and anything higher than 6 or 7 reps "hypertrophy" or bodybuilding training.

I've actually seen "strength and mass" programs read like this:

Squats 4x6 (heavy strength focused)
Lunges 3x8 (hypertrophy focus)

This kind of thing makes me lose my lunch. You would think that the difference between 6 and 8 was not 2. And that 24 isn't equal to 24. It's relative people. "Heavy" is only heavy compared to something else. It's not based on some silly rep chart.

I saw a blog post on a "5x5" site talking about correct grip. Frankly I do not take grip information seriously from someone who doesn't hold a bar with a maximal load on it regularly, let alone strength training information.

more later..

This looks very familiar Mr T. Love it.

Thank, Hits..

I could go on and on about how misleading it all is. How poor it is a way to manage training, etc..

You know the thing I said before at bb.net. K.I.S.S is good. K.I.R.S is NOT. Course I said that on a bb forum which is a waste of time.

Look at the Texas Method. First of all I went very deep into all of the problems with it. One big problem being the very asinine assumption that your 5x5 on Monday will somehow magically lead to a PR every Friday. And whether it matters AT ALL in the first place when you look at the type of overload you're using.

Take any exercise. Say you start at 130 pounds. Add 5 pounds a week. Look at the LOAD.

Week One: 3250
Week Two: 3375
Week Three: 3500

So you increase the load on that exercise 125 pounds every Monday for weeks on end. And that's probably just bench press. You got squats and pullups or Rows….

And you do that for weeks and weeks on end based basically on "faith". I.E. you have "faith" that since a book or some other source tells you you are an "intermediate" you will just automatically dissipate enough fatigue (given Wednesday's 'light' day) to not only not hurt yourself doing near max work on Friday but to get a PR And to do this open-ended without producing an injury…..

That right there is ENOUGH in and of itself to be called a training error for many people and said training error will usually represent one step forward two steps back. You add to that the complete IGNORANCE of useful variety and quality of any kind and it all just sucks eggs. I know because I've done more of these types of routines than anyone you've ever met. Which basically was train…get injured….build back up..train…get injured….

The TM in and of itself is ASS BACKWARDS. Why the hell anyone with any real sense and experience in strength training would do volume at the beginning of the week and then MAX work at the end is beyond me. NOBODY does that! NOBODY. And yet ALL the people out there who no better will still go "oh 5x5 is good, yada yada". Then why aren't they prescribing 5x5's to all their trainee's when they are a beginner to intermediate?

Hey just reverse the TM and make the volume more adjustable and you improve it by 500 percent simply because it follows how your body deals with these different stressors and how the fatigue is dissipated. There are many ways to manage the stress from volume and from near-maximal and other CNS intensive stuff that can be successful. But with a simple 3 day setup you are ALWAYS going to want your near-maximal at the beginning of the week when you are freshest from the WEEKEND.

Then the volume is gathered after that and you have the weekend to "recover".

The ONLY reason to do it the other way is because somewhere along the line some geniuses got together and decided that 24 to 25 reps was "optimal" and since 5x5 is such a nice clean number….it's "perfect" (that's not the whole story but close enough).

This is the MYTH OF OPTIMAL I was talking about. You take one person and you can at least try to be as close to optimal as possible. But for a population one size fits all sucks. Look at it as a mean…you have some lucky individuals who get to do this crap and not only find it efficient and skate out without injuries (how I don't know..there time will likely come as well)..so they are at the high part of the graph. And then you've got the other two sides.

Man, if a runner were to train in a load increasing way that could be comparable to this..they would fall apart for sure.

Just think about taking a mile and then increasing intensity by around 5 percent every week without reducing distance…you think that would work well? Then on top of that..at the end of the week do some sprint intervals at near maximal intensity. Then ramp it up every week like that for a couple months…

You do these things to augment GOOD training not to make up for BAD training.

I think that's why I was stuck to so many corrective exercises, before I started training with Anuj, I used to OD on External rotator exercises, when I saw his training layout, in my mind I went, "what nothing except 4 sets of face pulls in a week", it seemed so against the grain to me, especially that he managed to maintain healthy shoulders & posture with that, but when I gave his program a try, I realized it was better to keep pushing at low volume rather than a 1:1 between pushes & rows, especially for the long term, since I had tried this approach, but only for short periods of time.

Lol, 1:1 ratio of pushes to rows with added external rotator work, is a classic example of the statement above.

I had heard a lot about 5X5, 5 sets, 5 exercies, 5 reps. But, when I saw the exercises used, I was like no way, but then I was told it's an "old school strength program" used by "Bodybuilders" like John Grimek. lol

Well I don't know how much much Anuj told you about his shoulders. It goes way beyond him just managing to maintain healthy shoulders.

And the way Anuj trains really is not low volume at all. In fact it can be downright high volume sometimes. It's the total volume that counts. So the low volume is for the primary movements where most people would spend their volume and the rest of the volume is gathered with secondary things. But even then you won't always use very low volume for primary lifts. You've been exposed to maybe one or two of Anuj's plans, maybe? There are times when he has done deadlifts, for instance, at a volume that will make the 5x5 crowd scream "more than 1x5 for deadlifts…aaaaaahhhh!. And we're talking some big time workload. But it is planned for a purpose at the proper time.

There is a fine balance to be struck between maintaining high quality, a tolerance to workload, and to also being exposed to having to perform in the presence of fatigue.

The 5x5 is definitely old school but it is the Bill Starr and his routines that really set the stage for the current 5x5 craze and even that is a recycle. It's kind of funny when you think that Starr probably spent about 15 minutes writing down his most famous cookie cutter and now people will argue it's merits or lack thereof like they are discussing "War and Peace".

Yes the volume I've done on Deadlifts will stagger most people…..but it's always been planned and controlled. We don't do shit just for the sake of doing it. Everything has a purpose.

Eric: I love that last sentence. I think Starr said a lot of things just for the sake of being popular. The way people defend him is so silly….this reminds me of a George Carlin joke actually (sanctity of life) hahha

George Carlin is (was) great. Sanctity of life is an awesome bit.

I just showed it to my mom actually….and I have a new offensive facebook status now.

My God has a bigger dick than your God!!

hahahahahahahhahaha

hahhaha. That's my favourite line too.

Haha…

My favorite is actually "dead people give less than a shit about the sanctity of life!"