I cannot remember where I picked up this article.
But I read it everytime I feel the need.
QUESTION: Yeah, but those guys in the pre-steroid days were in the dark ages of weight training science. Don't you think that, with all the advances in modern training, nutritional knowledge and supplements, people can get much bigger than the old-timers could?
ANSWER: If you really believe all that then you've been effectively mislead by the modern training magazines.
There isn't one supplement on the market today that will make a significant difference in your muscle mass. Oh sure, there are ones out there that can make you hold water while you're taking them, therefore making you register more on the scales. And there are ones that can "dry you out" and make you look more ripped for a little while. But none of them will do Jack when it comes to actually building muscle. Of course, you're not going to hear that in the modern training magazines, where most of their monetary incomes come either directly or indirectly from the sale of supplements, but it's true nonetheless. The Bodybuilding supplement racket has been on the go for over 50 years, supplements come and go every few years, when you've been training long enough you'll see that. I've tried most of them and then woke up and kept my money. As far as I'm concerned those crooks that sell Bodybuilding supplements have stolen thousands of dollars from me. Somebody should do something about their false and misleading advertising.
Now, I'm not saying that all supplements are bad - they are not. But any company that presents their product under the pretext that it will build any significant amount of muscle are simply liars and all they're concerned with is extracting money from your wallet. Supplements can be used as nutritional "insurance" - that's all. Don't expect anything out of them that you wouldn't expect from a healthy meal, with regards to building muscle.
Modern nutritional advice has been very useful, but when you consider that the average North American diet of the 1950s was lightyears ahead of the current way people typically eat (in regards to healthfulness) it really doesn't have much of an impact. Do you really think that taking a protein/maltodextrin/creatine/glutamine drink after your training session is going to make up for the processed, denatured and chemically-preserved crap that you eat the rest of the day?
And seriously, do you really think that having a whey protein shake and dextrose after training will make much of a difference over having some milk, eggs and malt syrup? If you do then you've read too many commercially-driven muscle mags.
Most modern training approaches aren't modern at all. If you dig back far enough you'll find that it's probably been done before. For instance, Brian Haycock's Hypertrophy Specific Training (HST); Harry Paschall was presenting a system almost identical over 50 years ago. Brian used modern science to formulate his training approach, yet it's practically the same thing that was being recommended 50 years ago!
Before the introduction of steroids into Bodybuilding people trained on practically the same approach for over 30 years. Why do you think that's so? Because people were so stupid that they didn't know the difference? No. Only after steroids came along, and users had superior recovery abilities and tolerances to exercise, did the routines start to become higher in volume and/or intensity. Before that, people had to carefully train within the limitations of their drug-free bodies.
So no, I don't think that modern training science has really improved much on the basic training approaches of drug-free trainees. What modern training science has done is allow us to understand why we do what we do and what we should do in the future. This allows us to plan and adapt our training as we progress (or fail to). In the old days the process involved much more of a hit-and-miss approach. Without the science they had to rely totally on experience. And while that was inefficient for some, there's no better teacher than experience. So when they got it right they progressed. Today people are so brainwashed that instead of listening to their own bodies they go running to the latest newsstand muscle magazine for advice from some drug-bloated, so-called Bodybuilder.
If anything, modern training approaches are WAY behind the training approaches of 40 and more years ago, when it comes to the drug-free trainee. Drugs have so affected Bodybuilding that practically everything you read in the modern magazines is tainted by drug-using individuals. Training programs influenced by drug use are useless for drug-free people. How is that advancing training practices?
As an illustration, in the derivation of the formulae in this article I used a measure called the fat free mass index (FFMI). The FFMI is a calculation used to detect drug-using athletes - basically it predicts the maximum lean body mass a person can achieve without the use of anabolic/androgenic steroids. Based on the FFMI, practically all of the old-timers I tested were at the very limits of their drug-free muscle mass potentials (yet they didn't go too high on the FFMI - another indication that they didn't have access to anabolic drugs). If modern nutritional approaches, training techniques, supplements, etc, are so much more effective then why haven't natural Bodybuilders gotten any bigger - after all today's drug-free Bodybuilders don't have FFMIs any higher than those of the late 1940s/early 1950s. Of course, today's "natural" Bodybuilders might compete more ripped, but they don't have any more overall muscle.
I've been training for many years. I've tried just about every training approach that's out there. Let me tell you this: The best gains I ever made is when I stopped following the "modern" training advice given in the glossy magazines and started following the advice of the "old-timers". After all, they're the ones who actually trained drug-free bodies, why wouldn't their advice be more appropriate for me?
To give you some perspective, here are some pictures of Reg Park in the early-to-mid 1950s. Now go around to some current "natural" Bodybuilding shows. I doubt that you'll find a single competitor as big and ripped as that - and half the competitors in "natural" shows are really drug-users that "tricked" the test or were users in the past. Again, if modern training, supplement and nutrition knowledge is so far advanced why haven't current drug-free champions surpassed the level of 1950s drug-free champions?\
End of article.,..
Real food has real nutrients in the most bioavailable form NATURALLY.
Eat real food as close to nature as possible
Jag
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