Post your best advice you would give a fellow iron soldier

[Lee]

I just hope the name "mrpecs" is a joke.

 

[mrpecs]

Eat enough food. Protein being the most important to focus on. Carbs and fats are generally easy to get in good quantities.

Sleep 6-9 hours a night depending on your needs. I do fine on 6 hours a night, but I sleep 9-10 hours on the weekends.

Train hard. Focus on the big basics and add in isolation after the fact for rounding out your physique more.

Train more rather than less. Learn what your limit is. People throw around the term overtraining way too much nowadays. Any one of my friends that competed in high school and college sports would laugh at what many consider overtraining on this board.

In highschool I trained 5-6 days a week for 1.5-2 hours. Typically 3 exercises per body part for 3 sets of 6-12 reps. Most all sets taken to momentary failure.

I stalled after about a year, but I never lost strength. Many years later and I realize that I was not eating enough to fuel muscle growth and weight gain as I could not break 167lbs back then. I can tell you I did not feel overtrained and only ever even thought about that when I started reading all the Arthur Jones and Mike Mentzer stuff which imho has so many people so paranoid about training too much that it's done as much harm as it has good.

Stay consistent and keep at it. If you have a day that you just don't feel too hot, get your ass to the gym anyway. I've had several kickass workouts where I felt like crap all day only to be invigorated by the workout. But, sometimes you still feel like crap. So what. Lift 75% of your normal weight. Do something. Go to the gym. I have to remind myself of this daily as I have had many bouts of inconsistency or just plain didn't lift for months. Over the many years of on/off training I've probably lost a good 3 years of training progress. Don't let this happen to you. Keep going. Keep playing. Be thankful you can even train.

Don't skip cardio. 3-4x a week of low to moderate intensity cardio will not hurt your gains if you eat enough. Infact it will help with your endurance to do more in the gym. You will utilize oxygen better and get better pumps and recover faster from workouts. Just don't go too hard on the cardio. If you make it anaerobic then that can negatively impact your performance when lifting unless your focus is to have a powerful anaerobic capacity and a good amount of muscle. Nothing wrong with that. If maximum strength/muscle is your goal, keep the cardio moderate-low intensity. It's good for you, kinda like tai chi.

I used to hate cardio. Now I realize my error.

Experiment. Try every exercise under the sun. See which seem to hit your muscles better. Lately I've come to realize that lying french presses just don't do it for me, but I love heavy weighted bench dips, close grip bench and overhead rope pulls for triceps and omfg, kickbacks. Figure out what works best for you.

Just my opinions.

even though you did not feel overtrained and still made gains i guarantee if you backed off the volume and frequency the gains would have been greater. thats the thing people think cuase there gaining they cant be overtraining but you can be gaining much more much faster just by not doin too much

 

[mrpecs]

I just hope the name "mrpecs" is a joke.

i just hope people add worthwhile comments to this post and not pointless comments that mean nothing.

 

[stevius]

The human body is a multi million year old piece of kit and has adapted such that the muscles work in unison. A natural lifter develops great functional strength (I.E. strength that carries over from the gym to real life) by working the body as a whole.

Although actual function is not always a consideration, there may come a day when you ask yourself: "What is the point of having this lump on my body". Remember these lumps cost a lot of money and life; the bigger they get, the more they cost- so what's it really worth?

 

[Lee]

i just hope people add worthwhile comments to this post and not pointless comments that mean nothing.

Then next time you make a topic, think before you let your fingers speed away from your brain.

 

[liegelord]

Olympic squat, deadlift, bench, Pendlay row, dips, chins, standing OH press, squat cleans. Eat, sleep and repeat. Get as strong as possible in each lift, doing full-body workouts with only 3-4 exercises per workout, while eating above maintenance. Do not work to failure and of course, don't read BB magazines.

 

[HotMan]

take 1000 calories daily over maintance to bulk up..

Food/Calorie intake is 80% of training. The other 20% is the gym.

 

[Acela]

make the focus of your training compound, multi-joint movements

 

[needtogetaas]

go plat....

 

[luigisacs]

Enjoy doing the work. If you hate the routine you are on (whether its 5x5, HIT, or whatever), you are not going to gain . .