If you're ready to join the thousands of men and women who have made the best gains of their life, grab your copy right now. Not rated yet. Outros livros para ler. Harv Eker. A dama da meia-noite Tessa Dare. Equipes brilhantes Daniel Coyle. For more detailed descriptions, please see the original post on Shape.

Created by Coach Gayle Hatch, the Hatch Squat Program is fairly straightforward: Train the squat 2x per week for 12 weeks Each training session programs front squats and back squats The Hatch Squat Program uses a descending pyramid rep scheme The athlete will attempt a….

Tim Swords is an olympic weightlifting coach and this is a 7 week squat program he employs. It can be used for the front squat or the back squat, though it is designed to peak the front squat. These spreadsheets are based off of an….

Check out Candito Advanced Squat program reviews below. Update: KG and LB rounding now supported. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it. If training more often works better for you, then why wouldnt you do it? If all these people doing it wrong are out-lifting you and staying injury-free, then could it be that theyre not so wrong?

Weve got an idea of why frequent training can work, but that doesnt clarify everything. Why do some people get strong on simple meat-and-potatoes training? How can some people go nuts every day, while others remain insistent that you need drugs to make that work?

The Least Possible Arthur Jones remains one of the most polarizing gures in bodybuilding. An entire subculture developed around Joness unorthodox High Intensity Training methods, as did an equally vocal range of critics. When discussing HIT, there is no middle ground. Joness notoriety began in the s, at a time when names like Joe Weider and Vince Gironda were synonymous with bodybuilding.

This motley crew trained according to principles of blasting and bombing, working a muscle to exhaustion with set after excruciating set, splitting up their entire body into muscle groups to be trained in total across five or six weekly workouts.

Arthur Jones didnt agree. To Jones, spending six days in the gym, training two to three hours at a stretch, was too much time wasted on too many useless sets. It was intensity, not volume, that grew muscle. Exercise science denes intensity as a physical measure: your output relative to your maximum capability. In strength training, intensity is given as a percentage of your onerep maximum 1RM. Jones used a more subjective value. In the H IT world, intensity is about effort, about pushing through pain and fatigue.

The endless sets of bombing and blasting were a waste of time. There was no effort, no drive, no stimulus behind the pumping. What bodybuilders needed was focus, to dig in and maximize the stimulus placed on a muscle with the least possible amount of physical work. Jones believed that hed teased out the mythical Grow Button hidden away inside muscle tissue, that hed learned how to push it with the most direct possible stimulus.

What mattered was the so-called inroad, tapping the muscles momentary maximum ability, which wed know today as training to failure. Volume was a distraction, unnecessary and even harmful as it depleted the energies needed to recover and grow.

The H IT school grew out of these two maxims: maximum effort put into minimal work. Endorsed by bodybuilders from Joness protg Mike Mentzer to six-time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates, who used a variation of Mentzers Heavy Duty system to bring home his Sandows, it seems there must be something to the minimalist approach.

As Im using the term here, minimalism is the belief that workouts must be timeefcient, that one set is as good as or better than three or more sets, and that recovery a vague term if there ever was one can only be maximized with ample rest between workouts. Minimalism is the belief that less is always better than more.

Even Joness most bitter opponents concede if grudgingly that the gruff curmudgeon raised points worthy of consideration. Joness central point was that people didnt train hard enough.

Going through the motions for two hour workouts, pumping away with set after set, probably isnt the most productive use of time. There has to be some kind of push behind your training. Many of Arthur Joness training recommendations arent so bad, viewed in hindsight.

Jones promoted training a muscle times a week, and despite the one set to failure perception, muscle groups were trained with more than one exercise per session.

Some of the early H IT workouts are almost volume-heavy at least compared to what would come later. Joness occasionally obsessive focus on machine training notwithstanding, these were not bad workouts.

As a core set of principles, train hard and efciently while focusing on lifting heavier weight is a message hard to argue with. Unfortunately, those reasonable ideas werent the end of the minimalist trend. The Hardgainer philosophy which grew out of H IT took the brief and intense idea and ran with it. While even Jones allowed for a reasonable frequency of workouts, the minimalist notion that we must aspire for less eventually overtook the more sensible view.

A hardgainer is the prototypical skinny kid that cant gain weight. Hardgainers are at a genetic disadvantage, as they dont respond to training normally, so they have to do even less work for any hope of a strong, well-muscled physique.

H ITs minimalist legacy remains with us today, responsible in part for the popular gym-belief that that less is always better. You train with brief, intense workouts, and follow up with lots of rest. Thats just how its done. Anything more is overtraining. Whether were talking H IT or blasting and bombing, were still in the world of bodybuilding. Were still talking about the best way to train muscles, whether thats lots of volume and lots of workouts, or a handful of sets at nose-bleed intensity with plenty of rest time.

Its all about muscles, not strength. Current biological knowledge is vastly improved over the understanding of the s and 70s. We know more about muscle growth and about recovery and overtraining than we did when minimalism first took shape. Yet strength training remains in a virtual dark age when it comes to understanding what happens and why. We can do better than that. Dealing With Stress Every time we butt heads with the unfriendly world, we call it stress.

In everyday language, stress means psychological pressure. Boss breathing down your neck. Endless trafc on your morning commute. To be stressed out is to be anxious, wound up, nervous. This definition isnt too far off the mark. Stress has a specic meaning: the biological response to a threat encountered by a living being. Stress is your bodys reaction to a threat.

The threat itself is a stressor. Stressors can be physical: a third-degree burn, a deep cut in your arm, a punch in the throat. Stressors can be psychological, as with the demanding boss or morning gridlock. Before the early 20th century, it was assumed that living organisms responded to challenges with a variety of different responses.

Heat would create a different reaction than cold, infection different from a hammer to the head. In the s, experiments performed by Hans Selye turned that idea on its head. Selye found that, regardless of the threat, rats demonstrated the exact same set of biological reactions. Hot or cold, u or hammer-blow, the same set of neurological and hormonal signals collectively called the neuroendocrine stress-response were activated any time the rats faced a challenge. A universal stress-response means that the stress symptoms arent controlled locally.

The entire organism responds to challenges as a whole. We now know that the stress-response originates in the brain, in regions that we call the sympathetic nervous system. Whenever the rats faced a stress, whether a fright or a lack of food, the sympathetic nerves would activate and the same set of symptoms would appear. The organism would rst become aware of a threat, causing a state of alarm and activation of the sympathetic nervous system.

Now aware and alert, the organism works to cope and resist the stressor. If things go well, the organism ghts off whatevers ailing it and things go back to normal. If not, the organism enters the third stage, complete exhaustion. Having failed to cope with or get rid of the threat, the organisms energy reserves are depleted and it gets sick or dies.

Selyes G A S model can be found in virtually all mainstream ideas on exercising. Workouts are stressful, damaging muscles and connective tissues, activating the heart and lungs and the organs of general housekeeping. Of course your body would treat physical activity as a threat. Train hard, then rest and recover. As Selyes model predicts, your entire body mobilizes to fend off the challenge.

Sympathetic nerves drive up levels of stress hormones catecholamines and. With the threat removed, stress hormones and amped-up neural activity return to baseline while any mop-up operations repairs of damaged tissues, for example go on about their business.

Exercise scientists adopted the G A S model, adding one key feature that remains with us. Repair processes cause an over-adaptation after a workout session, and its this overshoot that makes us bigger and stronger and faster. Better known as supercompensation, this recovery process is a matter of restoring all the biomolecules that we depleted during exercise. But your body is smart, so it adds a little bit on top to ensure that youre better prepared for the next time.

Theres a catch, though. Train again too soon, and you dip back into the stores before theyre fully replaced. Train too late and the surplus your strength and size gains will have been sold off to pay for the livers new car.

Supercompensation is all about timing. Training every ve days, or seven days, or no more than once every 10 days, all of those rules come from the principle of supercompensation. If you train too often, youll eventually drain your recovery supply and exhaust yourself just like Selyes rats. The supercompensation model dominates the way we think about exercise.

Train hard, then take time off to recuperate. You grow outside the gym, not in it. Supercompensation theory tries to summarize a range of complex processes of which recovered muscles are only one variable with one single indicator.

Can you really reduce your bodys recoveredness to a single question of whether you are or arent recovered? Selye thought that living organisms would deplete their reserves of stress hormones if the stress-response continued indenitely.

The organs producing catecholamines and glucocorticoids would burn out, leaving the poor rats or bodybuilders defenseless. As it turns out, Selye wasnt quite correct. To see why, we have to take a brief detour. If you could only do one exercise, what would it be?

Youve almost certainly had these questions come up when talking shop. How do you express that in real-world terms? What does it mean to say theres a best exercise? How would you begin to measure that? In real terms, you cant. Those questions dont make sense.

Youd think you would be able to give a simple answer to a simple question, but it isnt like that. Your biology classes might give you the impression that living bodies are like a squishy version of Mr. Potato Head. Add a nervous system and a circulatory system and a skeletal system together and the result is a functioning human being. Just put the pieces and you get a living organism.

We expect the world to add up like an arithmetic equation. The tiniest parts add together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle and always give you the same predetermined result. Finding the answer is simply a matter of understanding all the little pieces. If youve ever lived in a hurricane zone during the warm months, youll be familiar with the whirling vortex shape of a cyclone.

Between June and November every year, the whole east coast of the United States keeps a nervous eye out toward the Atlantic. Hurricanes begin as humble thunderstorms off the coast of Cape Verde in Africa. As they make their way across the warm oceans, something happens to the clouds. Fueled by the heat of warm seas, wind speeds pick up, pressure drops, and before you know it, youve got a spinning death-cloud in the familiar shape.

What is a hurricane exactly? You know it when you see it, to be sure, but what is it? The simple answer, which applies to any cloud, is water. Zoom in down to the tiniest level and a hurricane isnt anything but ordinary water droplets, made up of ordinary H2O molecules. Its the same stuff you drink and bathe in, yet I cant recall a time that a glass of water knocked over a city. Theres something different about the hurricane. Take a rug on your oor and look at it up close. Use a magnifying glass for extra effect.

Rugs are woven out of hundreds and thousands of threads. Up close, you can see those strands criss-crossed into the repeating pattern that makes up the whole object we call rug. How much does any one of those threads add to the rug object? Would it ever occur to you to ask that question in the first place?

Probably not. The rug forms out of all the threads woven into a pattern. You could take out one, or two, or ten threads and not affect the thing we call rug. You wouldnt ask about the relationship between thread and rug just as you wouldnt think about a hurricane by asking about the water droplets. Over the last few decades, science has slowly come around to the understanding that biology is more like a hurricane than Victorian clockwork.

Reductionism, the point. The hurricane is what wed call an emergent property of the water droplets or water molecules, if you zoom in even further. The droplets are just plain old water droplets, no different from the condensation on a cold drink in the summer. Its only when kicked up into a specific pattern that we get the object we call a hurricane. The pattern is what matters.

A hurricane persists despite the turnover of tremendous amounts of water, which it pulls in from warm seas and dumps out as rain. If you look at the hurricane as a lot of water droplets, you leave out something very important.

Individual droplets dont just add up to a cyclone the way gears and springs add up into a watch. Its the relationship between the water molecules, not just hundreds or thousands but millions upon millions, that matters. When theyre arranged in the right way, you get a hurricane. Think patterns, not pieces. Your body can be considered in much the same sense. Whats most important to live: the heart, the brain, or the kidneys?

The correct answer is all of them or, more confusingly, none of them. You cant live without any of those organs; none of them is most or least important. Simple cause-and-effect thinking has no place in the study living beings. Causes and effects smear out over networks where each piece effects, and is effected by, tens, hundreds, or thousands of other pieces.

The patterns that define our bodies are complex. Complexity is a challenging concept, and even the scientic community is still coming to terms with it, so dont beat yourself up if bells arent ringing right now. The important thing to remember is that individual pieces of complex systems arent the big deal.

Think big picture. What matters is the pattern, not the little parts that make it up. Rugs will survive children pulling out some of their threads. A hurricane will absorb and drop many tons of water and we still identify it as the same storm. Are squats better than deadlifts? Does cortisol eat up your hard-won muscle or lead to a abby gut? The only correct response to questions like this is to unask them: forget this line of thinking, as it makes no sense.

Squats or deadlifts? Does the bench press train chest or shoulders? Whats more important, diet or training? Complex systems have some interesting properties.

Their patterns are inherently unstable, intrinsically variable, having no easily identied chains of causes and effects as we would expect in a factory. Despite all this volatility and uncertainty, these patterns can remain stable over long periods of time and are resilient in the face of all kinds of perturbations. We still think of the body as a collection of linear systems that we can tug on and pry apart. Every time someone asks whats most important or worries about whether a hormone is optimally stimulated, youre seeing reductionist thinking in action.

We have to get over the Mr. Potato Head biology. You can no longer consider muscles as dead pieces of meat that receive orders from the brain and have no other contact with the rest of your body.

Muscles like glands, heart, lungs, brain and everything else are elements in an on-going storm of biochemical activity.

Points of Equilibrium When a hurricane gets over land and loses the warmth of the sea, it zzles out. With no energy, the once-organized pattern decays and pretty soon the dwindling vortex isnt much more than a front of rain clouds. Living organisms have the advantage here: they will take steps to keep their patterns intact when the environment challenges them.

The word for this is homeostasis. If youre not familiar with the term, heres Merriam-Websters definition: A relatively stable state of equilibrium or a tendency toward such a state between the different but interdependent elements or groups of elements of an organism, population, or group. All living things strive to reach an agreement with their surroundings, a tendency toward the equilibrium state as the dictionary says.

Since stability is a requirement for life, living organisms developed many ways of guaranteeing they stay that way. Mammals, including humans, come with seriously impressive equipment for this purpose. Nearly any value you can name, from your heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, eye-blinks, pupil dilation, digestion, and toe-nail growth, has some kind of oversight to keep it in line with the bodys specifications.

All of these life processes have an ideal value, called a set point, and a whole mess of regulatory feedback loops work to keep bodily functions more or less at that ideal point. Like a thermostat, as soon as the number falls off the target, the feedback loop kicks in and nudges it back in place. What is optimal for a biological function? Can we have a blood pressure, a heart rate, or toe-nail growth that is optimal regardless of the circumstances?

Not likely. Set points are more like set ranges, with multiple ideal points depending on whats happening with everything else. Ideal while staring at your cubicles wall is different from ideal while youre asleep or sprinting at top speed.

More and more research reveals that biological stability, which were inclined to think of as specic, hard numbers, isnt really all that stable. Regulation of life-processes involves huge amounts of communication between organs and tissues. Your body is a vibrant ecosystem, a web of interlocking networks, where each biological function relies on the activity of everything else. Any single life process, from a single cell and on up the scale of organization, results from dozens, hundreds or even thousands of signals working to create the appearance of stability.

Bruce McEwen, endocrinologist and stress researcher at Rockefeller University, suggests that this chaotic system-wide process of equilibrium-seeking called allostasis describes living beings more accurately and completely than homeostasis.

According to the allostatic model, biology is inherently noisy and fuzzy, and this instability is actually a feature of the system. Living bodies can react in ways that a dumb storm cant, and this considerable adaptability is possible precisely because complex systems arent locked into orderly machine-like processes. Allostasis is stability through change, the flexibility that living organisms need to survive.

The brain is loosely in charge of this nightmarish bureaucracy, although it isn ft exactly a pointy-haired micro-manager. The brain works like the guy on TV who spins the dinner plates on top of dowels. Once theyre all spinning, its all a matter of ne-tuning and adjusting to keep the act going.

Instead of spinning plates, your brain juggles heart rate, blood pressure, hormone levels, temperature, and about ten trillion other things at once. Its well-equipped for this job and does it beautifully most of the time. All of this means we need to have a hard look at our older ideas on stress. Hans Selye believed that chronically-stressed critters were pushed away from their set point of health when critical tissues and glands were exhausted.

What Selye couldnt know at the time is that the stress-response involves more than a simple elevation of stress hormones. When a car almost hits you on the way home, or you have to run from a lion, your whole system gets thrown out of balance and then works to bring you back into equilibrium.

The nervous system sets off a cascade of changes, starting with a snap to attention, jittery nerves, and increased heart rate that we call the adrenaline rush. Adrenaline rush is deceptive wording.

Where Selye viewed the alert feeling as the product of sympathetic nerves and adrenal hormones, allostasis implies that your entire body shifts into a different mode. When a heckler throws a beer bottle at the stage, the guy balancing the spinning plates has to react if he doesnt want his act to end. Hes got to concentrate and stay more alert, ready to move.

While in stress-mode, organs and tissues behave differently. For a brief period of time, long enough to dodge a bad driver or get away from a lion, this is ne. But you arent meant to spend your life in that condition. The allostatic model of stress suggests that stress-induced illness isnt a result of depleting or exhausting any particular glands or hormones or what have you, but rather the unintended consequence of an overactive coping strategy. Stress-mode is not a healthy place to be, thanks to all the physiological changes it involves, and spending too much time there accumulates wear and tear across your entire body, which we measure as allostatic load.

Paraphrasing researcher Robert Sapolsky, your bodys army doesnt run out of bullets; it spends so much on the defense budget that it doesnt have any cash left over for the more essential life processes.

Youll adjust and everything settles back to normal. Its when you stay in. Recovered or Ready? The stability-via-change dance of allostasis leaves supercompensation theory in an awkward position.

No depleted biomolecules to trigger the supercompensation effect. No exhaustion of stress hormones to leave you overtrained. That also means a lot of things the textbooks tell us about recovery could stand a revision.

Supercompensation isnt exactly wrong, but its not quite right-enough either. The question can be put simply: What is recovery, exactly? Are you recovered when your muscles have their energy stores replenished? When proteins have rebuilt themselves? When the muscle stops showing signs of tissue damage? When you dont feel so sore anymore? What about the tendons and ligaments and other connective tissues?

What about the immune system? It s time to get strong. MusclePharm recommends that you consult with your physician before beginning any exercise program. Participants should be in good physical condition and be able to participate in the exercise. By following this plan, you understand that when participating in any exercise or exercise program, there is the possibility of physical injury.

If you engage in this exercise or exercise program, you understand and agree that you do so at your own risk. You understand and agree that you are voluntarily participating in these activities and you assume any and all risk of injury to yourself. Each of the three main lifts will get their own day and we ll finish each week with some overhead and arm work to balance everything out.

If you don t think four days is enough, don t fret because these six weeks will wear you out. Your intensity needs to be through the roof and you need to push yourself- especially on the squat, deadlift and bench- like you never have before. Building your 1-rep max and getting stronger means not being afraid to attack the weights and be aggressive.

Get after it, push yourself and get stronger. To improve your deadlift, we will utilize the conjugate system, which is a matter of rotating special exercises each week so your nervous system can t adapt. This allows you to see significant strength gains, which is what we re after here. With the conjugate system, we will rotate regular deadlifts with deficit deadlifts, which can be performed in almost any gym by standing on one or two pound weight plates.

The reason for using deficit deadlifts in this program is to create more leg drive and better bar speed. This is a great way to utilize the conjugate system without the need for specialized equipment. With that in mind, we will work up to a 1-rep max each week, which is the Westside Barbell component. Challenge yourself in that regard and you ll see some impressive gains. As for the rest of the day, your second exercise will always be a rowing motion, and a superset, picking two of the three row options.

One of the rows will be done with low reps, while the second part of the superset includes high reps to really give your back a massive pump. The third exercise will be a rear delt exercise.

A lot of people have problems with an imbalance when it comes to their front and rear delts, and this work will help combat that. To finish up Mondays, we ll use a posterior chain exercise and superset that with ab wheels to strengthen the core, which is a huge component to building the deadlift.

The bench work will consist of pyramid bench pressing, meaning you ll go down in reps and up in weight with each set. But there s a twist in this program, one that will send your bench soaring. We will be doing our benching with our legs up, crossed and at a degree angle.

This one is going to challenge you. This essentially takes your arch and anchors away, which highly activates your chest, shoulders, upper back, triceps and core strength. Do not bounce the bar off your chest. This will force you to use your strength to return to the raised position, a major key in moving your bench in the right direction. Try to unrack the bar yourself and then get a spot so you PG 2.