Ground Up Strength

This eBook explores the idea that strength training and hypertrophy are "the same" and how strength training has been sold to a bodybuilding audience using idea that are more propaganda than physical fact. The extreme version of this propaganda is that strength training alone will eventually make you look like a bodybuilder and that trainees must therefore build their squat and deadlift up to some arbitrary number in order to realize their bodybuilding goals.

I did not write this to defend or condemn bodybuilding style training, however. I wrote it to help the strength trainee who has been confused and stymied by these ideas. We must be clear on our goals! Beyond this explanation I will let the book tell the rest.

Since the idea that training for hypertrophy is somehow the same as training for absolute strength is one of those ideas that can lead to strength training failure I wanted to explore other concepts and ideas that also lead us down that road. And since many of these concepts are enmeshed with watered down strength/mass propaganda I thought they should "go together".

The series of posts I am writing to explore this is entitled Traning to Fail. There are many general and philosophical ideas to be discussed as well as some in-depth practical training concepts. Some of you may prefer the practical over the philosophical or vice versa. I encourage you to consider whether each can really stand alone. Most concrete training practices have some type of philosophical or theoretical foundation. If you understand the foundation you can more easily assign merit or lack of merit to these practices without having to travel down so many blind alleys in your own training.

The posts that have been written so far can be found on my Training to Fail page and there are two earlier posts listed that are also related. I encourage you to read those as well as some of the ideas in the failure posts are discussed further in those.

I hope this letter finds you well. I have been working hard to bring you information and I hope you will consider helping me continue to do so by coming to GUS and participating in the forum and other site postings and by encouraging your friends to sign up for the newsletter and/or join the site. The more subscribers the more letters! Remember I work for a living just like you do! Tell your friends if they sign up they get three very informative free eBooks for their trouble. Thanks for reading as always.

You may have noticed that I put the words "a free eBook" over and over again in each of the books. This is not to toot my own horn and remind you I'm giving all this away! It is to discourage someone from trying to sell the books in some way. I want them to remain free. That does not mean that I care if someone profits from them in some way I just don't want them to charge outright for them since that is simply unfair and would constitue fraud since people can always recieve these books for free through GUS or a friend who has them.

Strength Training Motivation and Goal Setting and Strength Training Psychology versus Physiology: It's All Mental

The first concerns the difference between motivation and goals and the fact that many trainees are not at all clear on why they train, which would be their motivation and on what they want to accomplish, which would be their goals. It goes much further than that but I won't bore you with a full summary…just read the post and see if it sounds familiar to you.

The second post discusses the mistake of trying to quantify "aspects" of strength training and particularly trying to determine how much of strength training is a mental game versus a physiological one.

Fast versus slow is actually a poor way of categorizing the lifts. It's shorthand at best. Read Slow Versus Fast Pulls: Why is the Deadlift a Slow Pull and the Olympic Lifts Fast Pulls? to get the answers.

Knees Over Toes Myth