For the gym rats

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Taurine is an excellent supp. Try taking Clen without it! Its a naturally occurring amino acid that helps stimulate energy. When someone says something like taurine is 'dangerous' what they mean is

"Taurine taken in excessivley high doses for excessivley long periods of time may have SOME negative effects on SOME people predisposed to said effect"

Its a bit like when people on here get high and mighty about how much protein you should take before it affects your liver, eh? Liver? Jesus mine didnt worry about 10 pints a night (no joke!) for over a year of university binging. I never turned yellow, i doubt 4 chicken breasts a day and a few shakes will make me ill somehow.

But thats the point, all this stuff is blown way out of proportion and has no bearing on reality. The human body is a remarkable thing, at the age of 80 my nan still put away 1/2 a bottle of brandy a night and smoked 40 fags a day. Just because she was the exception doesnt invalidate what she did.
 
Morba said:
women showing any real skin is also banned in some countries... means **** all here though ;]
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The French banned Redbull.. can hardly make the comparison of them being more strict that the UK. Anyway, that wasn't my point - my point was it *is* banned in some countries, ergo it is considered unhealthy enough by some governments to ban it, not that we should follow suit, but that it's not absolutly fine and dandy.
 
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Was bored at work and had to take a week off from gym due to illness but I have come up with a new routine and would like some input.

Monday - Back
Deads 5x5
Rows either DB/BB 3x8
Pulldowns 3x8
Chins 2xFailure
Shurgs 3x8/12 dropset
Abs

Tuesday - Chest/Bi
Inclinde DB press 4x6
Flat BB press 3x8
Chest press 2x10
Seated db incline curls 3x8
EZ Bar preacher curls 2x10

Thurs - Shoulders/Tri
Mil press 5x5
DB Press 3x8
Front raise 2x12
Lat Raise 2x10
CGB 3x8
Dips 2x10

Fri - Legs
Squats 5x5 (alt week to week front-back)
Leg extension/Leg press superset 3x8/12
SLDL 3x8
Calf 3x8/12

Seems quite well balanced to me and mainly exercises I like/seem to respond best too.
Opinions?
 
Doesnt anyone else here want to comment that rich is doing a fair old volume? Personally R5Rich id try and cut it back, are you getting that lot done in 60mins? id be knackered! lol.

My point is, less is more, and whilst not always true (my biceps require 15 sets or more to pump and grow) you might benefit from trying it. Those workouts remind me of my old workouts where i tried to figure out a 'perfect' system, ya know hitting all the right areas just the right amount. obeying the rules etc. Ill bet youve never tried low volume HIT style. If you have i stand corrected. Also if you KNOW volume works for you then ignore me. Im just making suggestions...
 
Clipsey said:
That's what I was thinking whilst reading that. You are best off switching it up a bit. Maybe swap legs with chest (but then you still have the same problem just with Tri's)
Apart from that workout seems pretty standard.
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i always go legs in between chest tris/back bi's then do shoulders and traps after back day. There is no perfect system but its easy to get hung up on when to train what. For example there is nothing wrong with doing shoulders monday and chest/tri's tuesday. Sure your gonna use your tri's doing shoulders but

a)They wont be used to their fullest at shoulder loads
b)You can always cut the volume of presses
c)Theres nothing wrong with pre fatiguing a muscle the day before.

With regaurd to C a lot of people overlook this fact, when you are dominant on a certain muscle in an exercise (tricep in bench, bicep in row etc) pre fatigue it (exercise it heavily) FIRST. Although your lifts will drop (put that ego away son, you dont deserve one yet) your body will compensate for the weakened muscle by diverting more focus to the other involved muscles. Its a clever thing the body, very adaptable. What mort trainers do not realise is that a movement is NOT truly a synergie of all involved muscles pulling maximally. In anyone apart from the lifting elite, one set of muscles will likely dominate the lift, taking the focus off the other muscles and preventing the fibres from being fully activated.

Lets take the bench, ill break it down simplistically to say that the 3 prime movers in this exercise are the anterior deltoid heads, the pectoralis majora and the triceps. Others would include lats, medial delts and even traps but for this example ill keep it simple. Lets say you have an effort potential of 200 au (arbitrary units) this is the maximum nervous resources available for the lift. This 200au must be split between these muscle groups to perform the movment however the split need not be even. The body will split the total at its descretion to best complete the lift.

As a triceps dominant lifter your body, unconciously will divert more 'au's' to the triceps. Perhaps an analogy of 'why' is in order at this point. Imagine the muscles as fuel tanks and imagine these au are used to 'fill' these tanks, the stronger the muscle in an exercise the bigger its tank thus the more 'au' can be sent there, a stronger muscle can accept more 'effort' being applied. However you will have more au effort units than you have space for, so lets say that these 'fuel tanks' in the muscles are expandable, once full they will stretch to accommodate extra au's, this is where muscle trauma and growth occur.

So where does that leave us? We are on the bench press, we have a capability of 200au's of effort, this lift is going to be a maximal lift or set so will take 100% of our available effort. Available effort will be (for argument sake)10% above the capacity of the muscles so between them they can accept 180au without trauma. The triceps are dominant so can take 50au each on their own, the pec's are second taking 30au each and the ant delts 10au apeice. So far so crystal. Heres where the difficult part occurs. The body will 'fill' the triceps first using 100au, then fill the pecs with 60 and finally the last 20 will go in the delts. Great! you think, the delts and pecs can squeeze in the last 20au's and stretch and grow. Well that would be easy wouldnt it.

Instead the body chooses to boost the strongest muscle, the triceps, as the overall trauma to the muscle is reduced as it is a stronger muscle to begin with, remember the body is trying to save itself from this damage! Whats worse is that in this example we have shown growth, due to other factors (nervous system functionality etc) it would be entirely possible for the triceps (in the example) to have a capacity of say 120 combined. Meaning that the muscles would all comfortably absorb the effort without stimulating a growth response.

Thus the idea of pre fatigue would be to 'deflate' these 'tanks' by isolating the muscle first. This puts more emphasis on the lagging muscles and helps to bring them into balance. Just try it for yourself, take your dominant muscle group and isolate it (dont destroy it!) for 4 or 5 sets at abou 50% of your 1rm. Then do the compound exercise and i guarantee you will feel the difference. Just dont forget to take 10-20% off your usual lift or you wont complete the sets!
 
Well if I do back then I do bi's day after I got an issue and then if I do chest and then shoulder tri;s I also have that problem so its either one or the other?

And UEX I didnt really think it was a lot of volume either :s Maybe a bit much on the shoulders but the rest of the days is like 2-3 exercies per group hardly a lot is it?

And no I aint tried any HIT stuff, personally I cant be arsed to mess around with all the multiple different training exercies I see and read about and how people do 1rm yada yada yada. I dont see the problem with going in hitting body parts resting for like 2mins between sets and cracking on. Seems pretty standard practice :P

An example of a low volume HIT? Ill look at it but its not something I have really considered....

*edit*

Interesting read as well UEX I see what your getting at and in principle seems good! I would say proberly my tri's are more dominant in a BB bench press so if this is the case I would want to train my tri;s before any pressing so my chest is forced to work overtime basically?
 
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yeah sorry it didnt come across too well, i think i either rambled or i didnt punctuate too well.

R5Rich - What i meant by trying to switch up volume is try doing 3 compound exercises for each bodypart per train.

So

chest and tris
10x5 bb bench
10x5 cg bench
10x5 incline db bench

legs
10x5 back squat
10x5 dumbell hack squat
10x5 romanian deadlift
100 calf raises in few sets as possible

Back + bi's
10x5 Deadlift
10x5 Tbar row
10x5 bent over row
(im eliminating chins because you need to get stronger atm)
100 hyperextentions in as few sets as poss

Shoulders

10x5 Snatch grip military press
10x5 arnold press
10x5 pronated dumbell press
100 shrugs in as few sets as possible.

Thats what i would call a moderate to high volume workout, but the cunning part is it uses few exercises so simply switching it down to say 5x5 or 3x8 or even 3x3 you can maintain the same core structure and easily alter volume.

i just think it would be worth you focusing more on the core lifts and wasting less energy on all the silly auxillary exercises. I can cleanly shoulder press 70kg on the bar for reps and jerk over 100 in snatch grip, yet to do sets of proper side lateral raise im using around 10 kilos or so, its only JUST worth doing. Assuming you lift less than me (apologies if im wrong here) you would need to use tiny weights to do a proper raise. Whilst im all for keeping your ego in check id suggest that more benefit could be had from doing more volume on the big presses and getting stronger at THOSE before isolating, like i said, im not telling you anything im just suggesting you think about this sort of stuff and finding out what works for you. Going by pics and previous posts from yourself i would personally suggest a more core focused program, more volume and intensity on the big lifts and cut out all the isolated crap, waste of energy imo until you progress. but thats imo see :D
 
03/10/08
Shoulders & Arms

Seated DB Press (2010)
12x15KG
12x15KG
12x15KG
8x20KG - PB
8x20KG

Seated Machine Shoulder Press (2010)
10x20KG
10x20KG
9x30KG - PB
8x30KG
10x20KG

Preacher Curl (3010)
8x25KG
10x20KG
10x20KG
10x20KG
10x20KG

Machine Tricep Dips
15x50KG
12x67.5KG
12x67.5KG
10x80KG - PB
10x80KG

Seated Calf Raise
15x15KG
10x40KG
8x40KG

Decent shoulder work, was easier to push the weight with back support, I think the weight should increase pretty quickly now when usually my shoulders have been slow to progress.

The machine tricep dips weren't that great, I would have been able to do the whole stack at 95KG if it didn't lift me up when trying to push it.... there was quite a lot of chest involvement which I did manage to limit but I wont do that movement again.. CGBP next time or some rope work.
 
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