Drew Baye’s High Intensity Training

In a previous post I wrote about the ten biggest bodybuilding mistakes, I listed not training hard enough as the number one mistake. How hard is enough, though?

To stimulate increases in strength and size it is minimally necessary to 1. work your muscles harder than they are accustomed to, which means 2. always attempting to lift a few more pounds or perform a few more repetitions on each exercise than you did before. These are the two most fundamental principles of building muscular strength and size – overload and progression. If these two things are not the primary focus of your training, nothing else you do is going to make any difference.

Weighted Dips

To stimulate the greatest possible increases in strength and size it is necessary to work as hard as possible. Do not make the common mistake of confusing doing more exercise for working harder. Working harder means putting more effort into each exercise, and if your level of effort is high enough you will neither need nor be capable of performing a large volume of work.

To work as hard as possible simply means;

1. doing as many repetitions as you are physically capable of
2. in reasonably good form
3. with an adequately heavy weight

Physical Versus Psychological Limits

Most people quit an exercise for various psychological reasons long before they’ve reached their true physical limits. Beginners and others unaccustomed to training at a very high level of intensity often mistake a moderate level of fatigue for muscle failure, quitting when the exercise starts to get hard rather than when more reps become impossible. Many simply quit when the exercise becomes too uncomfortable for them, lacking the necessary mental toughness to push through the discomfort of burning muscles, a rapidly pounding heart and being out of breath. Some quit when an exercise becomes harder because they fear they will injure themselves.

The gap between psychological and physical limits narrows and the tolerance for muscular burning and exertional discomfort improves for most people after they’ve been training for a while, but even advanced trainees may quit far short of a true all-out effort if they’ve never experienced it. Even many advanced trainees overestimate how intensely they actually train and underestimate the level of effort they are capable of. A good solution for this is to work out with a trainer or partner that knows how to motivate you to go all-out. The judicious application of high intensity training techniques like forced reps and negatives can also help you develop the ability to push yourself harder during training.

If you quit an exercise when it gets harder due to fear of injury, consider it is not the amount of weight or how hard you are working but the integrity of your form that determines your risk of injury. As long as you maintain reasonably good form and use a competent and attentive spotter or the appropriate safety equipment when necessary there is no reason to fear injury.

Also consider no matter how fatigued you become, you are always much stronger holding or lowering a weight than you are lifting it. As long as you don’t just let go, you will not drop a weight on yourself.

Good Form

The goal of an exercise is not to make a weight go up and down. Lifting and lowering a weight (or just lowering, if you’re doing negative-only reps) is just a means to accomplish the real goal, which is to work the targeted muscles intensely enough to stimulate strength and size increases. To accomplish this you need to maintain the proper body position and move along the correct path over the correct range of motion to maintain a high level of tension on the target muscles while avoiding positions which may result in other tissues being exposed to potentially harmful levels of force.

As an exercise becomes harder do not significantly alter your body position or path or range of movement or attempt to yank, jerk or otherwise quickly move the weight to make it easier to lift. If you do, the work is either shifted away from the target muscles towards other muscles or leverage is changed reducing tension, and you are no longer accomplishing the real goal, or you increase the risk of injury due to the sudden, uncontrolled increase in force resulting from rapid acceleration. It is neither necessary nor beneficial and potentially dangerous to attempt to continue beyond the point where can not lift the weight in correct form by cheating.

Maintain your focus on the real goal – high intensity muscular work – and don’t sacrifice form and risk injury for the sake of a few more less productive reps. How you lift the weight is far more important than how many times.

How Heavy?

The weight should be at least heavy enough to be moderately hard to lift right from the start. It should not be so heavy, however, that you are unable to perform at least a few repetitions in good form.

Assuming a moderate movement speed, within reason repetition range doesn’t appear to make as much of a difference in muscular strength and size increases as the effort put into an exercise. Some people will find they do better with or prefer slightly higher or lower reps, however most people will get good results with any reasonable range from as low as three to as high as twenty, as long as they are working as hard and progressively.

I recommend a middle range of 7 to 10 repetitions as a starting point for most trainees and most exercises. A higher rep range may be more appropriate for beginners when learning a new exercise, and lower rep ranges may be more appropriate if using very high intensity training methods like rest-pause or negative-only.

The High Intensity Mindset

High intensity training is as much a test of mental toughness as it is of physical strength, and your mindset going into the workout has a big impact on how hard you’ll be able to train. I have found the following to be effective in establishing the proper mindset for going all-out during your workouts.

Commitment

Although you may enjoy the mental and physical challenge of a hard workout, a workout is not an end in itself, but a means to accomplishing specific goals. Keeping your goals in mind will help you stay motivated. Think about how important those goals are to you and make a commitment to yourself to give your best effort, to not have any doubts after the workout as to whether you could have gotten another rep on an exercise or worked even just a little harder.

Focus

To put a 100% physical effort into an exercise you have to focus 100% of your mind on it. To prevent your mind from wandering or the things going on around you from distracting you during your workout, take a few minutes before you start to clear your head and get focused. Sit down, close your eyes and focus only your breathing until you are able to block everything else out and your mind is not wandering. Then take a few minutes to visualize yourself performing each of the exercises in your workout perfectly, easily beating your previous weight or reps on all of them. Finally, take a brief moment to think about your goals, your motivation for training.

Before each exercise, take a few seconds to close your eyes and regain your focus if you start to feel distracted.

Putting “Pain” in Perspective

Intense burning in the muscles, a rapid heart rate and labored breathing are normal sensations resulting from high intensity muscular work, and not real pain or an indication of physical harm. These sensations are not a cause for concern. What they do indicate is that you have reached the most productive part of the exercise.

When you begin to experience these sensations do not assume you are approaching your physical limits or the end of the exercise. Remind yourself the sensations are temporary and harmless, and the real exercise is just beginning. The burn in your muscles is your cue to work even harder, and the more they burn the harder you will work. Again, think about your goals and remind yourself they are worth working through the temporary and harmless discomfort.

Drew Baye Training

This article is posted with the written permission of the author, Professor Eyal Lederman of CPDO Ltd. in London. Thanks to Steve Turner for making me aware of the article and to Professor Lederman for allowing me to post it here.

This is important reading for anyone involved in exercise, either professionally or for their own health and fitness, and especially for those who train individuals with or have lower back pain, as it addresses many of the myths of the current core and stability training trends.

The Myth of Core Stability

Professor Eyal Lederman

CPDO Ltd.,
15 Harberton Road,
London N19 3JS,
UK,

E-mail: cpd@cpdo.net
Tel: 0044 207 263 8551

Abstract

The principle of core stability has gained wide acceptance in training for prevention of injury and as a treatment modality for rehabilitation of various musculoskeletal conditions in particular the lower back. There has been surprising little criticism of this approach up to date. This article will re-examine the original findings and the principles of core stability and how well they fare within the wider knowledge of motor control, prevention of injury and rehabilitation of neuromuscular and musculoskeletal systems following injury.

Key words: Core stability, transverse abdominis, chronic lower back and neuromuscular rehabilitation

Introduction

Core stability (CS) arrived in the latter part of the 1990’s. It was largely derived from studies that demonstrated a change in onset timing of the trunk muscles in back injury and chronic lower back pain (CLBP) patients [1, 2]. The research in trunk control has been an important contribution to the understanding of neuromuscular reorganisation in back pain and injury. As long as four decades ago it was shown that motor strategies change in injury and pain [3]. The CS studies confirmed that such changes take place in the trunk muscles of patients who suffer from back injury and pain.

However, these findings combined with general beliefs about the importance of abdominal muscles for a strong back and influences from Pilates have promoted several assumptions prevalent in CS training:

1. That certain muscles are more important for stabilisation of the spine, in particular transverses abdominis (TrA).
2. That weak abdominal muscles lead to back pain
3. That strengthening abdominal or trunk muscles can reduce back pain
4. That there is a unique group of “core” muscles working independently of other trunk muscles
5. That a strong core will prevent injury.
6. That there is a relationship between stability and back pain

As a consequence of these assumptions, a whole industry grew out of these studies with gyms and clinics worldwide teaching the “tummy tuck” and trunk bracing exercise to athletes for prevention of injury and to patients as a cure for lower back pain [4, 5]. At that point core stability became a cult and TrA its mantra.

In this article some of these basic assumption will be re-examined. In particular, it will examine:

1. The role of TrA as a stabiliser and relation to back pain: is TrA that important for stabilisation?
2. The TrA timing issue: what are the timing differences between asymptomatic individuals and patients with LBP? Can timing change by CS exercise?
3. Abdominal muscle strength: what is the normal strength needed for daily activity? Can CS exercise affect strength?
4. Single muscle activation: can single muscle be selected? Does it have any functional meaning during movement? Read more…

Drew Baye Training

If you’re not making regular gains in muscular strength and size you’re probably making one or more of the following common training mistakes. These are some of the biggest mistakes a bodybuilder can make, and correcting them can often make the difference between outstanding gains and none at all.

1. Not Training Hard Enough

To stimulate muscular strength and size increases, you have to work your muscles harder than they are accustomed to, the harder the better. Specifically, you should perform each exercise until it is impossible to continue in good form, using a heavy enough weight that you are only able to perform between 5 and 15 slow, controlled reps (some people get better results with lower rep ranges, e.g. 5-8, some with highter, e.g. 10 to 15, but most would do best to start in the 7 to 10 range and adjust from there).

The exercise is not over when the muscles start to burn or when things start to become uncomfortable. The real valuable work is just starting. The exercise isn’t even over when your muscles feel like they’re on fire and your heart is pounding through your chest, you’re just getting to the best part. The greatest stimulus for muscular strength and size increases occur during the last few hardest reps, and if you give up at any point short of an all-out effort, you aren’t going to get nearly the growth stimulation.

2. Not Training Progressively

As you become stronger you must attempt to lift progressively heavier weights to stimulate further improvement. If you continue to use the same weights on all your exercises despite increasing in strength, the weights will no longer be challenging enough to stimulate further improvements. Attempt to either perform more repetitions or use a slightly heavier weight on every exercise, every time you train.

3. Doing Too Many Exercises and Sets

It is the intensity of muscular work that stimulates strength and size increases, not the volume. Doing any more exercise than minimally necessary will reduce rather than improve gains, by interfering with the process of recovery and adaptation.

In most cases, all you need is one hard set of only one or two exercises per major muscle group. More is rarely necessary, and usually counterproductive.

4. Training Too Frequently

The body must be allowed adequate time between workouts to fully recover and adapt, or gains will not occur. Exercise does not produce any improvements in the body, exercise can only stimulate the body to produce the improvements, if it is intense enough, or prevent the improvements from being produced, if it too much is performed, too often. The body produces the muscular strength and size increases stimulated by exercise, but only if it allowed adequate time between workouts to do so.

5. Not Keeping A Workout Journal or Progress Charts

Proper adjustment of training volume and frequency to avoid overtraining requires objective evaluation of progress. If you’re not keeping accurate records of your workouts, you can not objectively evaluate the effectiveness of your program and make the necessary changes to keep gaining or get your progress back on track.

6. Using Sloppy Form

Poor form reduces the effectiveness of an exercise and increases the likelihood of injury. While an entire book could be written on the specifics of proper exercise form, one of the most effective ways to improve exercise form in general can be summed up in two words: slow down. Moving more slowly makes it easier to maintain proper positioning and alignment, and allows for better focus on performing the exercise correctly and on intensely contracting the target muscles.

7. Switching Exercises or Routines Too Frequently

Real gains are made by consistent progress on the basic exercises over time. Changing routines too frequently prevents the body from getting past the initial, primarily neural/skill adaptation stage and into the more productive training that follows.

The belief that one must change their routines regularly to avoid plateaus because the muscles become resistant to further improvement with specific exercises is based on the observation that the fastest improvements in performance on an exercise routine occur over the first six to eight weeks after which it begins to slow down, and that changing the routine appears to solve this problem.

During the first several weeks performing a new exercise or routine a larger percentage of the improvements in exercise performance are due to neural or skill adaptations. After this initial period of neural adaptation, performance improvements slow down and the majority of adaptation is occurring in the muscles. This is where the real progress starts, however, and it is important to not change the routine at this point. It will be slower than during the initial six to eight weeks, but you will make progress if you properly adjust your workout volume and frequency.

Contrary to bodybuilding myth and uninformed opinion, the muscles do not stop adapting to a particular exercise, method, or routine – if there is sufficient overload a muscle will be stimulated to grow, and as long as volume and frequency are not excessive, and adequate rest and nutrition are provided, and one hasn’t already reached the limits of their potential, it will grow stronger and larger.

If you only performed a few, basic barbell exercises, covering all the major muscle groups, and trained hard and progressively you would eventually become as big and as muscular as your genetics allow. There is no need to constantly switch up angles, rep methods, or anything else.

8. Not Training Legs

Heavy leg work,  squats, deadlifts, leg presses, etc., can be brutal when done properly, and as a result many would-be bodybuilders avoid it, preferring to focus on the relatively easier upper body exercises. This is a huge mistake, as heavy leg work appears to have a beneficial effect on growth throughout the entire body, particularly squats and deadlifts.

Do not skip training legs. Doing so robs you of potential full-body size increases, and having a well developed upper body and chicken legs looks stupid.

9. Not Eating Enough Quality Food

Your body requires both material and energy to produce new muscle tissue. Often, when skinny guys complain they have a hard time gaining muscle mass, it turns out they simply aren’t eating enough food in general or protein in particular to support the growth they stimulate during their workouts. If you want to get big, you have to eat big. This doesn’t mean pigging out, but getting enough calories and protein daily to add at least a few pounds per month, but not so much your waist size or abdominal skinfold increases significantly.

Just like your workouts, you have to keep track of your eating and make adjustments based on how your body responds.

10. Wasting Money on Bogus Bodybuilding Supplements

While stopping wasting your money on supplements might not make your muscles suddenly start growing, it will stop your wallet from shrinking. There are a few supplements which have proven to be beneficial, but most provide little or no benefit. If you want to know which supplements work and which don’t, don’t read about them in the bodybuilding magazines – they make a large amount of their money selling advertising to supplement companies and are hardly unbiased sources of information on the subject. Almost everything you read in muscle magazines is bullshit. If you want reliable information on supplements or their ingredients, read the scientific journals, and even then, do so critically.

Drew Baye Training

21 Convention founder Anthony Johnson came over Saturday to go through a negative-only workout on the Hybrid machine and brought his video camera with him.

The workout consisted of negative-only squats, dips, low rows (first video), calf raises, presses and pulldowns (second video). When performing negative-0nly on the Hybrid machine, the rep starts with a brief static contraction during which effort is gradually increased to maximum, followed by a slow, full-range, maximum-effort negative. Due to the extremely high level of intensity, I only have people perform three of these repetitions.

You can read Anthony’s comments on the workout at his blog in the post The Most Brutal Workout Ever.

The machine can also be used for “hyper” reps, which involve both maximum positive and negative movement, and “double negative” reps, which consist of alternating between maximum negatives on opposing movements such as dip/low row or press/pulldown, however we figured negative-only would be the best place to start, since the double-negative and especially the hyper reps can be particularly brutal for someone not used to training in this fashion.

Drew Baye Training

I recently posted a link on Facebook to Arthur De Vany’s Top Ten Reasons Not to Run Marathons, to which a friend who runs replied,

Everyone has their opinion. I run because I like to. Not because I want to run 26.2 miles every day or even 13.1 miles every day. I think it’s a stress reliever and I truly enjoy it. I’m sure this study was done on people who run extreme distances all the time. I’m sure you think your way of training is the best and I’m also sure it’s great for a lot of people. Exercise of any sort is better than sitting on the couch eating potato chips =)

Contrary to popular but uninformed opinion, something is not always better than nothing where physical activity and exercise are concerned. In fact, many activities people perform for exercise or health reasons do more harm than good.

The goal of exercise is to stimulate improvements in fitness, and should not undermine health in the process, as Dr. Doug McGuff stresses in Body by Science. However, activities like jogging, aerobic dance, plyometrics, and others exposing the body to high peak and impact forces are often recommended as exercise despite carrying a significant risk of injury or damaging health in some other way.

In the case of running, doing nothing would definitely be better. Since jogging is a very slow, very inefficient, very poor way of improving cardiovascular conditioning and burns few calories for the time invested, very little benefit would be lost by quitting, compared to the benefit of preventing long term damage to the feet, ankles, knees, hips and spine and associated degenerative joint conditions, not to mention the likely pulls, strains and tears. Read more…

Drew Baye Training

I just received the following article from Ken Mannie, head strength and conditioning coach at Michigan State University, with permission to post it here.

Exercises, Equipment Modes and Rep Duration: The Question of Superiority

by Ken Mannie

The training landscape is in a state of continual flux, and the ongoing changes, updates, and emergence of proposed cutting-edge devices and techniques makes for interesting and thought-provoking debates among practitioners.

The inquiries I receive the most deal with lifting movements, equipment modes, and rep duration. Two recent questions are symbolic of the ones I receive on a regular basis:

What strength training movements and equipment modes would you classify as being the best, or most important, for athletics?

This has been a topic of much discussion over the years, with as many different answers as those giving them. Those with an affinity for the Olympic style lifts and/or their close relatives will adamantly profess their virtues.

Power lifting enthusiasts will expound their firm convictions on the “Big 3”: the bench press, squat, and dead lift.

Others will lean more toward the newer wave of “functional” training activities as being more specific to athletic movements.

And, of course, there is the seemingly endless diatribe regarding the superiority of either free weights or machines.

Coaches eventually develop their own unique training approaches and make personal determinations on lifting priorities. If they have covered all of the bases and constructed a strong rationale for what has been implemented, it is difficult for anyone to disagree with them.

However, it must be stated loud and clear that not only is the jury still out on some of these issues, they are all scratching their heads and rubbing their eyes trying to separate fact from fiction.

With all due respect given to the current multitude of training methodologies, here are some suggestions and perspectives from our corner. Read more…

Drew Baye Training

The following is a handout I wrote for new personal training clients several years ago. I have reposted it here at the request of several people and to save myself time answering many of the questions it addresses. The upcoming book contains more current, expanded discussions of each of the considerations covered here as well as many others. I will also be posting an updated, condensed version of the safety section from the book after it is published as a PDF for in-the-gym and phone training clients.

Safety Considerations for Exercise

Exercise, when properly performed, can stimulate the body to produce dramatic improvements in muscular strength and endurance, bone strength, cardiovascular efficiency, flexibility, and body composition. However, when improperly performed, exercise can produce injury. There are several general safety considerations which must be observed to reduce the risk of serious injury during exercise. Read more…

Drew Baye Training

The following article was originally published on Cyberpump.com in 1998.

Recently I’ve been receiving a lot of e-mail and phone calls from people with questions regarding their workouts. Often, people are surprised at the brevity of the routines I recommend, and ask, “why so few exercises?” To which I respond, why do any more? Why perform any more exercise than the minimal amount necessary to stimulate growth in all the major muscle groups?

It is unnecessary, and even counterproductive to do any more exercise than is minimally required to stimulate growth in all of the major muscular structures. More exercise than this will not stimulate more growth, but it will use up more energy and metabolic resources, which leaves your body with less to recover from and produce the muscular growth stimulated by the workout. While I do not believe that it is possible to exercise too intensely, or that the majority of people train anywhere near as intensely as they are truly capable of, I know for a fact that it is very easy to perform too much exercise and believe that the majority of people would benefit from a reduction in the volume of their training. Read more…

Drew Baye Training

Home and commercial gyms both have advantages and disadvantages. Which one is right for you will depend primarily on your available space and budget, and what best meets your training needs and lifestyle.

Space

If you don’t have the space in your home or apartment for a gym, this is a moot point. However, the amount of space required to get a good workout is actually very small. A doorway chin up bar takes up no floor space, and a pair of adjustable dumbbells which take up almost no space at all can provide a complete workout. Check out Matt Brzycki and Fred Fornicola’s book Dumbbell Training for Strength and Fitness for examples.

With nothing but an Olympic bar and enough plates, which only requires about a 10 x 4 foot space, you can perform exercises that hit all the major muscle groups:

1. Deadlift (hips, thighs, lower back, upper back, traps)
2. Press (shoulders, triceps, traps)
3. Curl (biceps)
4. Push Ups (chest, shoulders, triceps)
5. Standing Calf Raise (calves)
6. Weighted Crunch (abs)

There are dozens more you could do, but you only need a few. If you have a little more room you can fit a power rack and a flat bench, and add squats and bench press. Many power racks have chinning bars built in them as well, and I recommend this or a free-standing chinning station rather than a doorway chinning bar if you are over 200 pounds or if you’re doing weighted chin ups. Read more…

Drew Baye Training

Body by Science, by Doug McGuff, MD and John Little

If you buy only one book on exercise this year, I recommend Doug McGuff, MD and John Little’s Body by Science. If you buy only two books, I recommend getting a second copy of it because you’re going to want to share it with friends, and if you’re a trainer you’re going to want to keep one at work to show clients.

Body by Science explains the how and why of high intensity training, balancing enough scientific background to convey key principles and concepts without overwhelming the lay reader, and practical in-the-gym how-to. It is well organized, well researched, and well written, and an enjoyable and informative read. Every one of its eleven chapters contains a wealth of information, clearly explained with the assistance of numerous graphs and diagrams. Read more…

Drew Baye Training