Good Grief . . . has it been 30 years?
Wha' happened?
Yeah, yeah, sure . . . I like to re-read books.
Our eyes change as time passes.
If we allow them to.
Here's a chapter excerpt with a lesson that sometimes gets forgotten, especially as we age. Hey, poundage progression is relative to strength regression as we become older and naturally more worn down from living. Aging ain't a disease, it's as natural as eating and then shitting out the waste product, just takes longer is all. A full-body dump affair done in slo-mo. How slowly one goes downhill is the deal. Staving off the decline without a fisting pharmacist's hand up your puppet butt can be challenging, to put it mildly. But then again (no reincarnation pun intended), once you're over the hill the goal becomes slowing your roll down the other side. Keeping track of poundages still works, is still an indicator of "progression" and the rest of it. How slowly your numbers regress tells you whether or not what you're doing is working.
Hell, it's not the ideal setup, this aging bullshit, but there's still lifting games to play about with if you choose to. Seeing ways of marking "progression" during your natural "regression" is the challenge. Have at 'er.
"Whatever" with an added possible "anyhow," re-reading stuff years later can be something, that's for sure.
And this excerpt from thirty years ago is no exception . . . no sirree . . .
You will have to do some real fighting at times.
- Peary Rader
Dinosaurs understand that Poundage Progression is the key to success in weight training.
Absent poundage progression, nothing else matters.
Even hard work fails to mean very much
if you do not progressively add weight to the bar.
Why?
Because if you TRULY work hard, you WILL grow stronger. And if you grow stronger, you need to add weight to the bar. If you don't add weight, your workout will start to become too EASY.
When you see it spelled out the way it appears in the preceding paragraph, it looks as simple as ABC. But guess what - the vast majority of people who train with weights never achieve much of anything because they fail to add weight to the bar whenever it is possible to do so.
Go to any gym, anywhere in the world, and take detailed notes of the sets, reps, exercises and exercise poundages that each of the regular members uses in each of his weekly workouts.
Go back to the same gym one year later. What will you see? Almost without exception you will see the regular members using the same exercises, sets, reps and poundages that they were using the year before.
NOTHING will have changed.
Dinosaurs are different. Dinosaurs see every workout as a challenge. Every time a dinosaur trains it's a new opportunity to surpass his past best. Each time a dinosaur trains he goes to battle, and every time he goes to battle he fights to WIN! The way to win when you train is to surpass your former best, and to do so over and over and over.
A dinosaur is focused on forward progress. He always aims to surpass his previous efforts. He never rests on his laurels. He keeps going forward. He keeps adding weight to the bar. He is OBSSESSED with adding WEIGHT TO THE BAR.
Of course, an advanced dinosaur is not going to be able to add five or 10 pounds to the bar every time he trains a particular lift. It just doesn't happen that way. You can progress rapidly and steadily when you're a beginner, but eventually, as you approach a more advanced level, the rate of progress naturally slows down.
This happens to everyone, so don't overly worry when it happens to you.
Poundage progression is both a short term and a long term proposition. In my own case, I can remember reading about 400-lb bench presses when I was just a scrawny kid who wasn't even shaving yet. I determined at that time to develop the ability to bench 400 pounds. That was my long term goal. My immediate short term goal was to get my bench up to the 100-lb mark.
Interesting how the whole thing works in reverse when we get much older; e.g., I had a 400 bench. Now the challenge is to see how long I can hang on to a 350 bench done exactly the same way as the 400, no bullshitting yourself allowed. With any luck you live and train long enough so that at your age and appearance a 135x5 bench is notable and it's still challenging for you. We're not including folks who resort to a chemical sarcopinea-colada here no matter how they got the T. But no matter. It's the same thing in a different disguise, the same challenge with a different perspective, a slightly different language to be learned and spoken in the gym. And isn't this stuff you're reading a lot like a YouTube type "reacting to" someone else's thoughts and content?
Chrissake, where we we.
The 100-lb bencher seeing 400 in his future.
All successful lifters can share similar stories. They set their sights on certain long-term goals and then they broke the long-term goals into a series of short-term goals.
Every time they went to the gym they were taking one more step on the road to training success. Every time they trained they were that much closer to their long-term goals. And every time they trained they worked like "heck" to achieve their short-term goals.
I have a terrible urge to type "fuck" here. It must be tough for a guy with coprolalia to type a business letter. Not Stan, though. He never had the illness, it was just him faking it so he could curse out everyone in his emails until HR caught on to him. Gotta admit I miss his Christmas emails.
When you get right down to it, the secret to working HARD when you train is to fight like the devil to try to achieve a short-term goal.
Confused?
You are in the right place, Mate.
Let me give you an example . . .
Let's assume your long-term goal is to develop the largest pair of upper arms you could ever attain shy of a limb transplant or two.
Well, Arthur Jones, zookeeper and training guru, had a helpful hint in his training bulletin number one.
He wrote, "When you can curl 200 pounds for 10 reps in perfect form your upper arms will be as large as they need to be for any purpose associated with any sport just short of wrestling bears."Great!
Now you have a poundage goal - 10 clean reps in the BB curl with 200 pounds. This becomes your long-range goal. What about your short-term goal?
Well, what are you curling clean right now? Let's say you can curl 120 for 10, in good form. Your short-term goal will be 135x10 with the same form.
What do you do when you go to the gym if your short-term goal is 135x10? Well, there are lots of things you can do. You can load the bar to 121 or 122 and try for 10 reps. If you get them, add another pound or two the following session. If you don't get 'em, stay at the weight until you do make 10 reps with the same form, then add weight the following session. However, very small poundage increases, one or two pounds, may allow you to get 10 reps almost every time you train, week after week, all the way up to your short-term goal of 135.
Micro-loading. Not to be confused with eating 12 small meals a day, a.k.a. micro-bloating.
Or, you could load the bar to 125 or even 130. At 125 pounds you will probably only manage 7 or 8 reps. At 130 you'll hit the wall after 5 or 6. That's fine. Stay at the weight you've selected and come back the following session and go for ONE MORE REP and GET that extra rep. Even if it almost kills you, GET THE EXTRA REP! This is where it all boils down to hippos in their tanks and mental toughness. This is where you put it all on the line. THIS is where you become a man.
I don't know.
Could I just wrestle that bear instead?
Sooner or later you will get to the point where you're doing 130x10 in crisp, clean form. Then jump to 135 and work your way back up to 10 good reps. Or work your way up in one or two pound jumps. You will have achieved your short-term goal.
What do you do then?
Set a NEW goal - 150 pounds. Why 150? Because it's not too-too far down the progression road, and it's a nice, round number, and because it ties in with your long-term goal of 200 (since 150 is exactly 75% of 200).
If you want to grow this is the way to go. This is the way to work your way up, slowly and surely, to the achievement of any long term goal in life.
“When father put nine year old me wrestling with bear, I told him, ‘Hey this bear tried to bite me.’
I remember when he told me, ‘Bite him back. No problem. You have to wrestle. You have to keep going.'”
- Khabib "the Eagle" Nurmagomedov
Enjoy Your Lifting!
We meet the eccentric residents of a home for the elderly who reminisce about their lives and their changing country. Written with a keen eye for the absurd and peppered with dialogue that captures the poignancy of the everyday, Harlequin's Millions is a sensual delight.
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