Commitment when lifting a weight
I am an ex-Mr. 54 years old. Universe winner who believes I can add value to your workouts. I won the lightweight division at the WABBA Mr. Universe held in Tucson, Arizona in 1986. After traveling the world working as a personal trainer for 30 years, I can contribute to the way the average bodybuilder trains.
Any workout is a conversation with your body and the attitude, as well as the form used when performing any movement, must be done with total commitment. The text slam will cover the importance of training with full commitment and giving your muscles the respect they deserve.
If you take yourself seriously and believe what you tell yourself, then having a conversation with your muscles, if you are a bodybuilder, is serious business and should not be taken lightly. The results you get are directly proportional to the effort and level of commitment you put into your training.
Success in bodybuilding is based on three pillars: Training, Nutrition and Commitment. If any of these are missing, you will not be successful in increasing the lean body mass that you have now. Your body looks the way it does because of what you do to it every day, not what you do once a week.
Muscle building happens due to progressive resistance, your muscles change size and shape because you get stronger. This started the sport of competitive bodybuilding in the late 19th century, but men have seen this change in muscle size and shape since the Greeks and Egyptians wrote about it.
The first bodybuilding competition was the brainchild of the ‘father of bodybuilding’ Eugen Sandow. That first bodybuilding competition was called the “Great Competition” held in London at the Royal Albert Hall on September 14, 1901. This started a subculture where men and women began to have a conversation with their bodies.
Pushing beyond the point you have previously trained can only come from serious commitment. It was in the 1980s that the idea of having this conversation with the body exploded and suddenly everyone wanted to join a gym and start training.
The health benefits have been well proven, but the holistic advantage of regular training has become a requirement to compete in this harsh capitalist world we live in. The sense of commitment required to perform better than last time is the foundation of bodybuilding as a sport.
Aside from the obvious health advantages one can gain from bodybuilding, it is the mental maturity of delayed gratification that sets many bodybuilders above the rest when it comes to committing to a task. 50-year-old Arnold told Franco when they were training at Gold’s Gym Venice Beach “I’m going to lift this weight for 12 reps no matter what.”
When we train to lift a weight for a preselected number of reps, we are using a previous conversation we had with the muscle group to select a weight. We then tried to hit the reps we were looking for by having a conversation with the muscles involved in the movement, one rep at a time.
Some professional bodybuilders have taken this awareness or ‘muscle talk’ a step further by training instinctively and not counting reps at all. This technique takes time and practice, but as they said in that great movie Apocalypse Now “…you must learn how to do it before you can unlearn.”
A novice bodybuilder beginning his first year of training on a regular basis is building a foundation. If a beginner were taught from the beginning how to visually and mentally separate the different muscle groups during training, he would get results faster.
On average, it takes about three years of regular weight training to start reaching that dreaded plateau so many bodybuilders talk about. No matter what shape a beginner is in, he will get results fast if he trains regularly and eats right.
Having established the importance of commitment when it comes to the bodybuilding conversation you are having with your body, we will now focus on respect. When the goal is to be able to train instinctively and not count reps, you need to focus on the respect you have for the rep count versus your respect for the muscle being trained.
This just comes from self-knowledge which is the conversation we are talking about. The ability to know when to push while your mind tells you another rep is completely impossible, you’re in pain and unable to move the weight another inch.
As we push through these barriers, we need to make sure we know the difference between what our heads are telling us and what our muscles are telling us. When we train, we’re training muscles, so the conversation starts on the first rep. Your mind tells you to hit a preselected number of reps and you start counting.
If you were giving muscle the same respect you give rep count, you’d be taking the first step toward instinctive training. Knowing which voice is the head talking to you and which voice is the muscle talking will be much easier for some. There are bodybuilders who have been training for years and will never understand this difference.
It is critical that when you do instinctive training, you can only do it with perfect form. As soon as the muscles can no longer complete the movement with perfect form, no matter how hard you push your mind or your muscles, you have reached failure.
If you get into the habit of cheating on your form you will only get injured, 80% of bodybuilders know all about rotator cuff injuries or chondromalacia patellae or other related problems that started training with poor form. When you have a conversation with a specific muscle group, your goal is to activate as many muscle fibers as possible.
If you’re still reading this, then you know that progressive resistance comes from changing the adaptations your body is making. If you’re hitting a training plateau before you’ve been training regularly for three years, then you’re not cycling your workouts. Cycling is necessary for bodybuilding because your body is built to survive by adapting.
Your body is designed to adapt to the stress you put on your muscles, so eat right so this adaptation can occur. If you train the same way for weeks and months, your body reaches a point where it no longer needs to recruit new muscle fibers because the same stress is applied from the same angle with the same weight for the same repetitions.
This is a plateau and you need to change the way you are training every 6-8 weeks or else you will stop adapting and stop building muscle. Two completely different bodybuilders like Arnold and Sergio trained very differently, but they both changed their training routine at least every two months.
The more muscle they put on, the more often they would have to change their workouts because the body is built to survive and adapt. The adaptations you get from training correctly are only due to the progressive resistance you put your muscles through every day or every other day.
The end result is a bodybuilder with a body that comes from years of intense training sessions that have been performed with commitment and respect for both muscle and rep count. My own personal growth and learning about my body, my limitations and my capabilities has only come from respect and total commitment when making any movement.
Looking back at the beginning of the bodybuilding and fitness boom in the 1980s, the surge in bodybuilding was not because we saw a massive increase in the number of contestants lining up to compete, but rather because of the holistic benefits that were seen in athletes who trained like a bodybuilder
Even when the training was done for more than a cosmetic need for approval, the result gives the trainee a strength and fortitude that is displayed in the daily lives of bodybuilders. If you want to get something done, you should give the task to a busy person because it will be completed more than lightly.
The same goes for the commitment a bodybuilder learns when lifting a weight. If you want to complete a task, give it to a bodybuilder who is somehow able to juggle the demands of eating the right nutrition at the right time, training with the intensity required so that you can stress the body a little more. the next training session.
The advantage when this ‘bodybuilder’ is competing for any task on the open market is that this commitment and seriousness taken to complete any task will have a distinct advantage over the competition, due to the strength and resolve when the task is done until the job is complete. .
I’m not telling you to stop counting reps, if you’ve been training for a few years, I’m suggesting a change of attitude towards your muscles when you train. The difference when your mind is telling you one thing and your muscles are telling you something else can only be effectively used to your advantage if you can feel the difference yourself.
Good luck!