I think each bodypart x1 a week sucks

[Dorian'sDisciple]

At least for me..maybe when you're exceptionally advanced both size and strength wise it is prudent to only hit a muscle once a week. However, i have been trying x2 a week the last 2 months and have made much better progress in both size and strength.

i cant understand why noobs follow the conventional wisdom and train once a week. guys benching 40lbs?? no way does their chest/cns whatever need 7 days to recover.

i am starting to think the oldschool was the best school

 

[guldukat]

At least for me..maybe when you're exceptionally advanced both size and strength wise it is prudent to only hit a muscle once a week. However, i have been trying x2 a week the last 2 months and have made much better progress in both size and strength.

i cant understand why noobs follow the conventional wisdom and train once a week. guys benching 40lbs?? no way does their chest/cns whatever need 7 days to recover.

i am starting to think the oldschool was the best school

I hear ya.

In my experience, one of the only obvious downsides to training everything more than once a week or so is glycogen depletion. You'll be growing, but it's difficult to tell just how much growth's going on, especially if you don't eat properly (as I oftentimes don't...diet in general's my bodybuilding Achilles' Heel).

Take, as an example, some observations about my calf training last year. Mine are pretty good even if I don't train them (thanks, dad!). And for a good while I didn't do any direct calf work.

But this time a year ago, I decided "pretty good" wasn't enough. I wanted freaky calves so I started creaming them, along with everything else, 3x each 2 week period on a DC-style routine.

Initially, I was disappointed. In maybe 11 hard weeks of training, they'd only gone from ~17" to 17.4". I'd had better results when I trained them less frequently in the past.

However, after a two week cruising period (lighter weights, never to failure), they were 17.75" each. I interpret this to mean I'd had that ~quarter-inch of "extra" growth before the cruising, but the failure/rest-pausing work was depleting glycogen stores faster than they could be fully replenished. Or somesuch.

 

[guldukat]

One other thing...

Too often people think frequency is fixed. They always have to train a bodypart once, twice, or however many times a week. They tend to believe more or less would instantly result in over- or undertraining respectively.

I wonder how many of them test that assumption? I used to believe recovery was similarly plastic, and trying to tailor my training around that idea wasted a LOT of time.

 

[biogeared]

Once every 5 days works pretty well.

 

[Yarg!]

I work a body part once every 7 days... Then again, I do lots of reps/sets, so it all balances out at the end. I seem to get alot of good results doing this, and working out the fast and slow twitch fibers seperately (heavily modified 5 by 5 ). I love this technique, and I will stick with it untill I find something better.

 

[guldukat]

Once every 5 days works pretty well.

Agreed.

That reminds me of something else: routines which are rigidly based on a calendar week. (Most of the time that's actually not a problem. Plenty of great routines have you on a regular weekly schedule.)

The thing is, the good routines don't have you doing X on Mon., Y on Tues. etc. for the sake thereof...they have you train at certain times for good reasons, with a big picture in mind.

OTOH, if a guy who'd benefit from an 8 day cycle just crams everything into Mon. thru Sat. for "neatness" sake, his gains could suffer. He'd need to question the whys of what he's doing, and see that a tidy schedule is a much lower priority than developing the most productive split he can.

If assumption's the mother of all fuck-ups, then sacrificing gains just to keep things "simple" is the grandmother of fuck-ups Question everything, I say; then when you're done with that, question it some more.

 

[Tom Treutlein]

What exactly were the "Old School" workouts?

 

[guldukat]

I work a body part once every 7 days... Then again, I do lots of reps/sets, so it all balances out at the end. I seem to get alot of good results doing this, and working out the fast and slow twitch fibers seperately (heavily modified 5 by 5 ). I love this technique, and I will stick with it untill I find something better.

There ya go.

I'm on a cliche roll here so I'll continue: some like to say pain is weakness leaving the body.

In a similar vein, we could say weakness/smallness is a disease, and training is the cure

I often think of training like medicine. Medicine's something we can measure (dose); training's measurable too, w/ sets, reps and so on. We can take too much or too little medicine, just as we can over or undertrain.

So in effect, what you are doing is giving yourself a very large dose 1x/wk. instead of a moderate dose 1.5x/wk., small doses 2-3x/wk., etc.

Generally, I do think that a number of smaller doses work somewhat better than singularly huge ones. I mean, once you've done two sets of deep, high rep squats to failure, then 2-3 heavy sets of SLDL or Romanians, you've given your thighs plenty of stimulation to grow.

At that point, would throwing in leg extensions et al. really yield much more growth? And since taking a higher dose risks [or is] ODing, it'll be that much longer before your "bloodstream's" ready for another dose--that much longer before you can grow again.

That's just food for thought, really; it's always nice to consider the possibilities one has at hand, and it heartens me to hear people ask "why?" a lot. (Yep. I don't have kids yet LOL. That'll show me! )

Anyway, that's also a rather moot point in your case, since what you're doing's working well (good to hear, btw). I think in the long run, the differences between training something 2x/wk. vs. 1x/wk. isn't necessarily huge, anyway. I gained well training each bodypart once per week myself.

 

[guldukat]

What exactly were the "Old School" workouts?

That dinosaur training's as old school as it gets

Seriously, Reeves-era stuff, maybe? I tend to think any training which emphasized the heavy basics with somewhat abbreviated volume and moderate to high frequency is old school at heart.

 

[NYBodyguard]

reminds me when I was about 16 I went to a trainging class, the teacher said that there are 4 extremly important things when it comes to working out:

1) Stretch allot

2) Dont lift too heavy

3) Rest Rest Rest

4) the more you eat the more you grow

Based on how he looked thats all he did