AmpedTraining Blog
2010 January 23 | 5 Comments »
By Matt Perryman
It’s in vogue these days to hate on bodybuilding and the training methods bodybuilders use. The trend these days is to play up the role of strength-based training and ‘functional’ (sic) training methods, getting away from the older bodybuilding culture that’s dominated the popular conception of weight-lifting since at least the 1960s.
It used to be all about the pump, about feeling and shaping and all of that. These days, it’s more about ensuring proper movement, developing well-rounded fitness, and putting strength-based methods at the center of that balanced program. Specialized goals are then added to that framework, in the same sense that your house can look different from your neighbors even if they have the same blueprints.
I can’t say there’s a real problem with this, because that’s the gist of my philosophy, and in general I think that’s how things should be done. However, this takes us to a dangerous place, a thought process that can be counterproductive; in other words, you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
This includes even the most Bro-ish of bodybuilding techniques. I can’t lie here, either. I’ve been guilty of this mentality too; or it least it might seem like it with my pro-strength, pro-rationality views. The reality’s a little different, but people used to thinking in black/white terms tend to label everyone else as thinking in black/white terms too.
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2009 December 7 | 1 Comment »
By Matt Perryman
The other week a blog was linked on a board I read, and it was a discussion loosely titled as “explosive movements don’t make you explosive”. This is a recurring theme amongst some elements of the strength & conditioning field, most notably the more rapid later-comers of the HIT and SuperSlow schools of thought.
I added a few comments to the discussion, because I felt the gentleman in question was mistaken on a few assumptions. Firstly, I linked to several studies that showed the addition of elastic bands to regular strength-training to be more effective at developing both strength and power when compared to regular weights (PMID: 16686552, PMID: 18550975).
This sparked a tangential discussion – namely, what does variable resistance training (the fancy name for adding bands or chains or anything that changes the normal resistance curve) have to do with training explosively?
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2009 July 10 | 2 Comments »
By Matt Perryman
The shoulders have got to be the most-injured joint in weight-training populations. Virtually everybody walks around with some kind of shoulder aches.
Even I’ve had my issues with this. Years ago, I started noticing a pain in my right shoulder, near where the pectoral muscle inserts, when I was doing any kind of flat pressing movement. I’d assumed (naively) that it was some strain of the pec, and responded by just taking time off. This went on for years, alternating between getting (reasonably) strong on the bench, only to have this pain come back and sending me back to square one.
It turns out I actually had a partially-torn subscapularis (one of the rotator cuff muscles; thanks to Eric Cressey for helping me to figure that out), and according to my ART guy, a whole metric ton of scar tissue in both shoulders, though the right was the worst.
Since then, I’ve had to take a lot of steps to rehabilitate the area, and that’s what this is going to deal with: my attempts at fixing, working around, and maybe even preventing shoulder problems.
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2009 July 8 | Comments Off
By Matt Perryman
I was surfing around lately and stumbled across this old article I wrote for Mind & Muscle, going on five years ago. Interesting to read back through it now.
http://www.mindandmuscle.net/node/167
EDIT: I also found this thread on the M&M forums, where we discuss the article as well.
I do enjoy my discussion about moderating effort on a weekly scale with RPE values, which kinda blows Waterbury’s whole idea about “revolutionizing” the fitness industry out of the water, since I beat him by a good five years.
But I’m benevolent about it; I stole it from Supertraining just like everybody else has. I do enjoy me some irony, though.
2009 April 4 | 1 Comment »
By Matt Perryman
It’s been awhile since I’ve written a good old-fashioned hater post, which is ironic since that’s one of the reasons I started this site: to serve as a place to rebuke claims of guru bullshit. I’ve pretty well gotten away from that lately, for better or worse, but today I saw something that got me interested enough to write up a response.
Namely I want to talk about this recent obsession with movement speed (tempo) and motor unit recruitment. This is being touted as “revolutionary” by certain parties; although it might be new to the current crop of would-be Internet lifters and bodybuilders, this is not a new concept. In fact, in my brief decade in the gym, I can remember running into that same idea in half a dozen places in the early days of the ‘net, back when places like Deepsquatter and MFW were the only real places to get decent info.
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2009 March 3 | 3 Comments »
By Matt Perryman
If you’ve read some of my older rantings, you’ve seen that I don’t terribly care for the phrase “adrenal fatigue”. A survey of medical literature just doesn’t agree with the idea of an adrenal dysfunction. Yet, many people have complained of having the symptoms. The same goes for the “damaged” [sic] metabolism. This has a little more evidence in the literature, yet it’s often used as a catch-all term for a certain set of symptoms.
In the past, I’ve considered this to be a function of simply too much stress and little to no attention paid to recovery. For example, the people most often complaining of both of these symptoms are usually doing the Standard Female Fitness Regimen – 2-3 hours of cardio every day, an equally stressful weight-training plan (if any at all), and a diet that might add up to 900 calories of chicken and broccoli – combined with the normal stresses of life. Some will exhibit signs of thyroid disease and either hyper- or hypocortisolemia (which are actually pathological conditions, mind you, that should be diagnosed by a medical doctor).
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2009 March 2 | Comments Off
By Matt Perryman
You grow outside the gym, not in it. That’s the mantra so often repeated, used to justify everything from training a muscle group only once a week to taking off whole months from exercise. There’s certainly a lot of truth in that statement. One thing that’s come into vogue these days is the concept of the unloading week (sometimes called deloading; it’s the same concept) where you do what the title says: remove the training stress from your body to “unload” it.
This is a valuable tool. Yet, as obvious as “take it easy” is, I don’t think a lot of people get it. So I want to talk about that.
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2009 February 26 | 1 Comment »
By Matt Perryman
I don’t usually listen to people online that quote squat numbers. If someone has a video, or is a competing powerlifter or Olympic weightlifter, that’s one thing. It isn’t a matter of lying, either. I think most people just don’t realize what actually constitutes a real squat.
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2009 February 17 | Comments Off
By Matt Perryman
I made this post on another forum, and it’s one of those things I tend to write off-the-cuff that tends to summarize things fairly well, so I thought I’d share. The context was a discussion about ‘overtraining’ and stress/fatigue in general.
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2009 February 9 | Comments Off
By Matt Perryman
Everybody likes to bench press, especially in the commercial gyms. It’s the one lift that everybody knows and everyone will ask about if you mention you lift weights. “How much ya bench?” Guys seem to gravitate to the bench, and crappy form, like it’s some expected tradition.
What about the girls though? Besides pullups, I can’t think of a lift that women seem to have a harder time with. It can lead to some frustration and eventually just giving up.
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