Why?

Watching a rather large man struggling to Clean 120KG in the gym today was a real epiphany for me. If you’re not competitive in an activity, be it Weightlifting or Powerlifting, you should ask yourself why you’re doing it.

After years spent training for Powerlifting, I have some anecdotal experience and can attest that the injury risk, and the less than optimal hypertrophy response from that type of specific training will leave one dissatisfied. There’s also evidence that strongly correlates the most muscular Powerlifters as the most successful Powerlifters.

Yes, it’s a process to get good enough at something to become competitive, however in the strength sports, you need muscle mass to active and contract and generate force. It’s not easy to force your body to grow new muscle tissue, so if you aren’t optimizing your efforts, you’re going to fall short. Sure, practice the skills (especially relevant for the Olympic lifts), but doing a bunch of Power Cleans for singles isn’t going to build enough muscle. Likewise, doing low rep sets of the three Powerlifts isn’t going to provide sufficient mechanical tension in a progressive manner to produce optimal muscle gains. So you end up beating the hell out of yourself trying to improve your 1RM, and making incremental progress, but you won’t be adding much muscle, you’ll have lots of under worked muscles, and your progress will slow dramatically as you max out the neural gains and motor skill practice.

It’s taken me a while to embrace the style of training I’m doing now, but I’m seeing great progress with regular rep PR’s and slowly increasing the load I’m moving for reps. I’m even finding some enjoyment in doing exercises I always disliked, like lateral raises, bicep curls and calf raises, because I’m setting rep targets and breaking through them. My body looks and feels good and while I’ve added some body fat, I’m still relatively lean so the assumption is I’ve gained some muscle.

I am confident I’ll be able to further tweak my training as we get into the program design modules of the Bayesian Bodybuilding PT course, so until then I’ll keep doing exactly what I’m doing.