A lot has been written about the idea of training twice a day, and the practice has both scientific as well as historical justification. Despite this, many people who attempt two-a-days tend to quickly burn out and dismiss the idea altogether.
To better understand the applicability of this method to your own situation, it’s helpful to first delineate between the physiological versus the practical realities of two-a-days.
A friend from Italy asks:
“Coach, It’s hard for one to get bigger when their strength is the limiting factor. Eric Cressey once used an analogy of a cup with water in it. The water inside is your size, speed, endurance etc. But eventually the cup gets full and the only thing you can do to really progress is to increase the size of the glass- maximal strength.
I really wanna know…
Over the past week, I’ve had several conversations with women who’ve told me that going to the gym and (particularly) lifting weights is intimidating for them.
I know I should already realize this, and I guess I do, but I really want your feedback on this issue.
When I was in High School, a funny thing happened (or actually didn’t happen):
My parents never taught me that the reason you go to college is to prepare for a career.
So, not having that knowledge, I just went to college. For sociology. It just seemed interesting, and actually, it was.
Somewhere around the beginning of my sophmore year, I first heard the oft-repeated maxim among career sociologists, which goes like this: “The only way you can make money from sociology is to teach it to others.”
(I suspect a number of fields are like this)
So my college career was fun and interesting, and ultimately worthwhile, but it makes me wonder:
How many of us go to the gym “just because”? And I wonder if our gym experience might be more fruitful if we went there for a reason- a clear, compelling reason. Interestingly, the people with the most clarification about this are pro athletes and obese people- the former for financial reasons, and the latter for even more obvious reasons. The rest of us seem mired in a fog of incertitude. We never get anywhere, but because we don’t have a frame of reference with which to measure success, we don’t even know we’re not getting anywhere.
You can’t put enough work into getting clear about outcomes. Here’s hoping this post spurs you in that direction…
Recently I was asked “…what is your preference on dumbbells compared to barbells? Does the increased amount of weight you can move on say, an incline barbell press offset the extra work by the stabilizing muscles if you were use dumbbells? Should dumbbells and barbells be alternated?”
And this is a great question worthy of a thoughtful response!
As the old saying goes, “When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
And I’m guilty of this too. Since my training and experience is in athletic preparation, I tend to think of everyone as athletes. No matter what you do, no matter what your station in life, I believe you should think of yourself as an athlete too. Here’s why…
Coaches often discuss the optimal rest intervals between sets for various training objectives. One common “rule of thumb” is that for maximal strength you want “complete” rests, and for hypertrophy you need “incomplete” rests between sets.
Acute, catastrophic injuries resulting from weight training are thankfully, rare. For those of us with chronic, painful, “non-descript” injuries however, that fact is less than comforting. There’s nothing more frustrating than that all-too-familiar “it doesn’t hurt until I lift” pain.
Sometimes, these injuries take the form of chronic inflammatory problems such as medialepichondialitis (tennis elbow), a shoulder that clicks, low back spasm, heel pain, the list goes on and on. Often, these injuries are unnoticed during normal day to day activities, but as soon as you try to run or lift, or anything else, there it is again. This leads to the observation that weight training doesn’t cause injuries, it reveals them.
In this post I’m going to outline a training method that, more times than not, will allow you to re-establish your training without flaring up those injuries. I call it the “boil the frog” method. But first, let’s look at a few things you really should consider if the opening paragraphs of this post sound like you…
It’s recently dawned on me that if you follow my training recommendations, you’ll be essentially training like an Olympic weightlifter, although you may not actually be doing the O-lifts themselves. The salient points of such an approach include:
If you’re a competitive lifter, your “core” lifts are your actual competitive lifts (clean & jerk and snatch for O-lifters and squat, bench, and deadlift for powerlifters).
Historically, most lifters have tended to go intense & heavy on the core lifts, and then a bit lighter on the assistance lifts. In recent years, powerlifting maverick Louie Simmons turned the traditional paradigm upside down: his Westside charges go moderate and fast on the core lifts, and then get down to business, going super-heavy on the assistance lifts.
Here’s why this approach CAN work very well, especially for experienced lifters:
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