| Myth: Beginners Don't Need Variety |
| Here is the basic gist of the myth. There is a handful of superior exercises and those exercises will form the 'foundation' for everything else that follows. Using just these superior movements the beginner will progress more quickly, maintain performance longer and be stronger relevant to a wide variety of tasks owing to the 'basicness' of these movements.
Now, I could tackle the need for variety for ANY strength trainee from many different directions. But instead of coming at it sideways, as is my usual course, I'll attack this myth head on. It has no basis in reality and there is no evidence that supports these conclusions in regards to motor learning. You see, if you tie strength progression and movement acquisition together, couple that with specificity, and basically stop thinking after that, you can come to the conclusion that the best way to get stronger at a back squat and learn to back squat is just to back squat. And you'd be wrong. First of all you've got lots of related squatting movements to choose from. And beyond that you have many knee dominant movements to choose (if you like that classification). Say we design an experiment. We take a group of UNTRAINED trainees and teach them a variety of basic knee dominant moves. We could include single leg stuff, overhead squats, front squats, front loaded squats, goblet squats, potato sack squats, etc. We could couple that with work on even more basic movement patterns. Like hip drive (powerful hip extension) and other varieties aimed at improving kinesthetic sense, spatial awareness and orientation, etc. This group basically practices at getting really "skilled" with a lot of different varieties. We take a second group. This group has some experience in training but has never back squatted nor received any formal instruction. In other words, we take the typical gym rat who spends most of his time bench pressing, leg pressing, and maybe a little love for the lat pulldown. We let them do their thing while we prepare our first group. We could even have a 'control' group of untrained and unprepared individuals. At some point we design a squat test. After 5 minutes of verbal instruction and a demonstration, each of our groups must pull off a good back squat. Let's assume we know what a good back squat is. Who do you think 'wins' given only 5 minutes instruction and one demonstration? You already know. I don't need to tell you. Our prepared group will do better. What's more, our prepared group may do just as well or better than a moderately trained group who has done a typical beginners routine consisting of back squats while we prepared our movement group. You probably learned this without realizing it. You learned it in gym class, for instance. You know you have a better chance hitting a free throw from the free throw line if you've had prior experience making baskets closer in. You also know that you have a better chance of shooting a basket from the corner if you've had plenty of free throw experience. You know this but you've had it beaten out of you by the KISS crowd. Keep It Simple, like any aphorism can be taken too far. And this is an ironic one since the very act of trying to reduce something to an irreducible simplicity is a fallacy in itself. Einstein said, "Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler".  I coined an alternative a while back. K.I.R.S. Keep it Restrictive, Stupid. When KISS become KIRS, we have a problem, Houston. Related to that blog post is my comments after the Single, Double, and Triple Progression article after a poster asks "why not do it with 'linear' progression?" I think I put a few nails in that coffin. Movements are built. And our group will not only have plenty of building blocks to build a good back squat, they will have MORE bricks to put in their wall than all our other hypothetical groups! This is referred to as movement 'schema' and it simply means that given more variety and especially relevant variety, movement learning is faster and more successful (less error or 'failure'). What you should get from this is that considering an "exercise" foundational actually LIMITS our ability to learn new things IF that means we purposely neglect variety. Because movement patterns are foundational and exercises are built on a number of different patterns woven together in a coordinated fashion. But it's more than that because variety helps form our kinesthetic sense, our spatial awareness and coordination, even our ability to take verbal cues. And it goes on and on. Motor learning is a very complex subject that is still on the ground floor as far as our understanding goes. Does this mean you can't learn to back squat by just back squatting? Of course not. It means that there is nothing superior about just back squatting even for learning the back squat itself! The back squat is a simple lift and just back squatting, if you train it right, will result in a good back squat. But no better than building from other learning. With more complex movements it becomes more crucial to learn the way I've described. But what about progressing? Getting stronger at the back squat? If you've been led to believe that any variety you throw in to the mix…say a lunge will just mean magically dropping 5 pounds off your squat and slowing down your progression, well that's wrong too. Because something else that variety does, among many wonderful things, is that it tends to help us maintain performance over time. But I thought performance was weight on the bar? In regard to a single strength training exercise performance is, of course, proficiency, but it is also: * Coordination That's how well you "perform" it. Load on the bar is how much you lift and says nothing about how well you lifted it. Put another way, your old pickup truck may be able to haul tons like a champ. But if it burns a quart of oil and drops a universal joint in the process you can't say it's performing very well. When you couple high performance with progressive weight increases over time you keep getting stronger for a very long time. When you couple progressive weight increases with no other considerations, you have a very finite ceiling of progression. You also have the possibility of compensations and changes in the movement patterns that result in cumulative trauma that over time results in acute injury and overuse syndromes. Also, mundane training in itself can lead to declines in performance and sustainability owing to the boring nature of the training itself. You've heard the simplistic statement about how progress is 80% nutrition and 20% training? NO. It's all in your head, dude! Even the 'success' of programs are more a symptom of the popular mind than reality. To illustrate why this is I wrote an article called Why Programs Work. Related to that is the review Diets: "They All Work When You Stick to Them." See these related categories at GUS: |
| Creatine Files |
| Creatine supplementation has pretty much been done to death. Yet the same old questions are still being asked and the same old wrong answers are still being given.
I'll answer the two easiest: "Are there any advantages to creatine supplementation?" For anaerobic activities and especially for activities where force or power production are at play, then the answer appears to be yes. "Do I need to take creatine?" No. Creatine will not make or break you and it is doubtful that the short term benefits of supplementing with creatine translate into anything long term. In other words, if you are interested in maximizing your absolute strength, the creatine will not end up making you stronger, once you are nearing your strength ceiling, than you would have been without it. That being said, maximum strength and absolute strength are two different things. There is usually what is called a "strength deficit" between one's maximal ability and absolute strength. Your absolute strength would be the maximum voluntary OR involuntary strength in some kind of freaky situation that would enable your muscles to exert the maximum force they are capable of. It just may be that creatine helps you decrease this deficit a bit. However, when it comes to athletic performance in the associated areas, creatine has been observed to have enough of an impact that there is controversy over it's use and many consider it to be 'doping'. One of those associated areas I just spoke of is NOT endurance. There has been little to no research into creatine supplementation's impact on endurance but there is little reason to believe it would have much benefit. Speaking of 'doping', in one of the articles at GUS, the ISSN (International Society of Sports Nutrition) Position Statement on Creatine, the following statement is made: "If proper precautions and supervision are provided, supplementation in young athletes is acceptable and may provide a nutritional alternative to potentially dangerous anabolic drugs." Now, the ISSN statement is a very good review of the research. I published it at GUS after all. But of all the statements they could have made about creatine this may be the most asinine one I've ever read. Creatine may be a lot of things but it ain't a steroid and the 'advantages' of creatine will never appear to be an alternative to anabolics by any 'young athlete' who has used steroids. I find that particular statement, therefore, to be a bit of the hard sell, or at least wishful thinking. However, the information provided in the review is very informative. Between that and all the other creatine files at GUS, all your questions will be answered, I think, including whether you should bother with CEE or just stick with plain old Creatine Monohydrate: |
| Gripper Guide Continued |
| Joe Weir has continued his guide to heavy grippers with a part two. These are THE definitive guides to grippers. From the article:
"The original Gripper Guide focused on the beginnings of gripper training. In that post I used CoC grippers as my standard gripper (hence the table is based on CoC resistances only) and laid out some suggestions for picking resistances and how to train. The reason I use CoC is simple. They were among the first to take grippers to the next level and they have a very good product. This part of my guide is centered around the very first thing you will do in your grip training. Buying a gripper! I've also got some other training tidbits and advice thrown into the mix." |
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