A few of you who know me have already been on and made some comments (please leave future comments on the blog so I can start some discussions on what I'm doing. I'm hoping to learn from feedback on this!)
The main question or comment everyone is making is - Why call the blog Strength, health and fitness when I'm following a pretty bog standard hypertrophy package?
Well... There are a few reasons for this, I'll list three:
1) Having been I'll, I lost a lot of weight. I always prefer strength training and particularly functional performance training rather then isolation and hypertrophy. However I'm not happy with the size my body is, I've never been big but dropping from 88kg to 76kg in just over two weeks is not only a shock to the body but also the brain. I really want to put this weight back on as quick as I can (naturally). In addition I am trying to keep to the compound exercises as much as possible and am always starting with the shoulder girdle before the chest exercises (you can see the performance effect on weight lifted in the shoulder compared to the chest).
2) If you look any sports specific training, there is an overall hypertrophy phase at the beginning of a seasonal cycle. Even though I'm not competing in anything anymore, this phase works great for me right now as it will ultimately let me solve and adjust imbalances which will help me spend more time to come working on my three key goals (SHF). Hopefully as this hypertrophy phase is designed to do in a sports programme, so it should help keep me injury free and able to strength train for a longer period later in the programme.
3) I just need a bit of variety. Both my main sources of info on weightlifting (Polliquin and Platz) state regularly that variety is an essential part of progress, particularly when hitting a slump in performance improvements or coming back off an injury or illness. In fact I pretty much followed Platz to the letter in his guideline of recovery form over training. I took a whole week off exercise and diet, had faith in my metabolism and tried to put a bit of body fat on to give me some substance to heal and rest with. My ideal training programme will eventually always cycle round to hypertrophy as my one of my principles in Strength training is to get as strong as the body will allow, then manipulate the body to allow further increase in strength.
Agree or disagree with this, post a comment.
