A Talk with a Clueless Trainer

I just signed up with a new gym and got a free one hour session with a trainer. Although he certainly had some useful information, in some areas he was just flat out wrong.

Building Muscle

His program was some convoluted plan involving separate muscles on separate days of the week, then changing up every other week --at least as far as I could understand it without a schematic in front of me. He was also recommending doing three sets of 15 repetitions.

The key to building muscle is simple. The muscle must be worked to its maximum, or to failure, and then allowed time to recover. Use the heaviest weight you can lift, and lift it until you can’t lift it any more. One idea is to lift the weight until you can’t move it any more, then drop down a couple of pounds, and repeat.

“Your body learns your workout” or “Your muscles learn.” Bullcrap. Muscles are dumb. The problem with plateauing is that you’re lifting the same weight when you should be increasing it with each workout. You’re doing three sets of 15 reps when you should be doing one set of one rep at a weight that makes your muscles scream. See the “Max Contraction” books.

Do a whole body workout and then rest a couple of days. At first, when you start out and are lifting light weights, you can work out every other day. But the more muscular you get, the more you lift, and the more time your body needs to recover. A critical idea to keep in mind is that you don’t build muscle when you lift; you build muscle during the recovery phase.

As an example, one trainer in Florida used to advertise that he could add a ½ inch to major muscle groups in a week, guaranteed. Now to professional bodybuilders who have hit a plateau, gains like this are huge. These guys are often doing two workouts a day, of several hours each, and are totally maxed out in muscle gain. When a body builder arrived at the trainer’s gym in Florida, he would measure them and then tell them to take several days off. He told them just to lie out on a beach. For these guys, that was incredibly difficult, but when they returned to the gym in several days, he measured them, and they’d made gains! What was the secret? Simple –they’d overtrained and hadn’t allowed time for their muscles to recover and rebuild. Those three or four days off gave them the time they needed to build muscle mass.