Pide un drástico aumento de los Pide un triple aumento de los recursos

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

~Aldous Huxley

Advanced dinosaurs do a pretty good job of avoiding fads, fallacies and pitfalls. Beginners and intermediates often have a more difficult time. Here are some basic rules to follow to help avoid wasting years of training by following bad advice, bad thinking and bad examples.

WHERE TO TRAIN

First of all, understand that you are far better off training at home then training anywhere else. If you train at a commercial gym you will be surrounded by people who give you bad advice. This applies to almost any gym in the world. The exceptions are so few that they barely matter: Dick Connor's PIT in Evansville, Indiana, Dr. Ken Leistner's IRON ISLAND GYM in New York City and a couple of other places. For the most part, commercial gyms are cesspools of mindless nonsense.

If you go to a commercial gym and someone tells you to do something - or to do something a certain way - you are virtually guaranteed that what they are telling you is (1) wrong, (2) dangerous, and (3) non-productive. Thoreau once claimed that he never learned anything important from anyone over the age of 30 (a comment that somehow seemed infinitely more insightful when I was the ripe old age of 17 than today, more than 20 years later). You probably could paraphrase Thoreau and say, without exaggeration, “I never learned anything about correct training in a commercial gym.”

If you MUST train at a commercial gym, pay no attention whatsoever to anything anyone ever tells you. Ninety-nine percent of it will be absurd, dangerous and foolish. Only one percent of it might actually be good advice. Rather than sort the wheat from the chaff, just ignore all of it. That may bruise some egos and hurt some feelings, but it's really the only rational way to deal with the problem.

LEARNING NOT TO LISTEN

The second thing you need to do is learn not to listen to people just because they have an impressive build or can push or pull more iron than you. Being big and strong is no guarantee that a man knows anything at all about how anyone else can get there safely and efficiently. In most cases, big and strong guys in today's idiotic world got that way by doing drugs - and a drug baby has absolutely nothing to offer to a dinosaur. If you are new to the Iron Game it is critically important for you to learn - and learn quickly - that the guy with the biggest arms is almost always NOT a source of useful training advice.

BEWARE THE ARMCHAIR EXPERT

The third point is the flip side of the second point. On the one hand, you would be a fool to listen to some drug-bloated pretty boy just because he happens to have a big arm or can lift three times more than you can handle. But on the other hand, you would be a fool to listen to some self-appointed “expert” who doesn't have enough muscles to pour into a thimble. BEWARE the armchair expert!

Armchair theorizers are all too common in the Iron Game. They multiply like maggots. You can hardly avoid them. Walk into the “exercise” section of any bookstore and you will see one book after another authored by some scrawny pencil-neck who has no idea in the world what real training is all about. Or worse – much worse - he doesn't even care.

SOME BOOKS DESERVE BURNING

A related point involves “celebrity” exercise books. It should go without saying that a current matinee idol, rock star or television personality is NOT going to have anything worthwhile to say about weight training. A dinosaur would sooner eat old automobile tires cooked in kerosene than read a celebrity exercise book.

CONFUSING ART AND SCIENCE

One of the biggest mistakes that trainees make is confusing art and science. Strength training is an art, not a science. This is why there is no one way to train and no one training system that everyone should follow. Many men get off track because they look for a “scientific” training system, because they are converted to the totalitarian dictates of the latest “scientific” training system or because they decide that their training program is so “scientific” that they don't need to bother with good old fashioned hard work!

Dr. Ken Leistner addressed this problem in an excellent article (“Strength Training: Science or Art”) that appears in the September, 1985 issue of THE STEEL TIP (Vol. 1. No. 9). Dr. Leistner wrote:

“If you took the time to read the numerous books related to physical fitness, exercise, and

nutrition, you would realize that there are as many “scientifically backed” theories as there are authors. You might also come away with the notion that you needed a stopwatch, pulse counter, blood pressure cuff, calorie and nutrition almanac, $79.95 running shoes, and a complete blood profile in order to achieve a state of fitness. A perusal of the muscle building literature would assault you with a variety of periodization programs, mini-cycles, plyometrics, muscle fiber type specialization movements, and exercises that a contortionist would have difficulty with. Magazine authors propose a new and earth shattering training theory almost monthly, often spurred on by the opportunity to profit from a new product that coincidentally augments their latest and greatest training theorem.

Significantly, the true requisites for increasing strength and cardiovascular fitness have been lost. The common sense approach to the attainment of strength and health has become a thing of the past, overshadowed by the new, the “hip,” the “scientific.” I do not believe that the development of strength tends itself to a scientific explanation. True, legitimate research has given us useful insights, but generally speaking, strength training has marched steadily backward for the past decade as the masses have genuflected to Eastern Bloc verbiage and the “latest” from the California crowd. The dependence upon hard work and the application of dedicated effort have been replaced by quick hitting anabolic drugs and a vast array of useless equipment. Perseverance and insistence upon progressive overload utilizing basic exercises that call upon the major muscular structures of the body are seen as a comical cliché, yet, the average results of training, the gains made by the vast majority of trainees, is no better now than it was fifteen or twenty years ago, especially if the drug users are culled out of the population sample.”

MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT

You really do need to be cynical when it comes to weight training advice. The amount of bad information on the market is staggering. We need to re-institute meaningful deterrents to criminal behavior - drawing and quartering, the rack and the thumb screw, for example — and reserve them for those who publish worthless information about weight training. The situation really is that bad.

FIFTY OR SIXTY YEARS AGO

Ask yourself how people learned to train fifty or sixty years ago. There were virtually no books or courses available back then - there was no television – there were almost no magazines - but somehow, most people who trained with weights managed to get real strong real quick. How did they do it?

information available in those days - books and courses by Calvert, Saxon, Pullum, Inch, Aston, Hackenschmidt, Jowett and Liederman. They read Alan Calvert's STRENGTH, Peary Rader's IRON MAN, Roger Eells' VIM and Bob Hoffman's STRENGTH AND HEALTH. It was actually EASIER to find decent training advice in those days. Why? Because there was not much information on the market, but what WAS available was all pretty good. Nowadays, the real problem is figuring out what is good - it lends to get lost in the shuffle with all of the bad stuff. And the bad stuff outnumbers the good by about 100 to one.

THEN AND NOW

One very important difference between THEN and NOW was that people who lifted weights fifty or sixty years ago were interested in STRENGTH, not in looking “cut” or “sleek” or “buff.” Thai provided a very easy way to test the validity of any training advice you received. If you gave it a try and you got stronger, it was good advice. If you gave it a try and you either stagnated or LOST strength, you knew almost immediately that it was bad advice! The same was true if you thought of something new and gave your idea a try (and back then, so much was “new” that many guys developed their best training ideas entirely as the result of trial and error and a helpful burst of intuition). If you got stronger, your idea was good: if you did not get stronger, it was a bad idea. The proof was in the pudding. You tested everything. You kept what worked and you discarded the rest.

Today, most people train for appearance rather than strength, and as a result, they cannot effectively gauge the results of any given suggestion or idea. Take the idea of super-sets, for example. Guys will say they got “good results” by doing two exercises for the biceps back to back with no rest between exercises. “Good results?” By what standard? Do they mean they got STRONGER by training that way? Not likely! What they mean is that they got “a good bum” or “a good pump” and therefore it “felt” like the supersets were working. Or else they did them for a couple of workouts and someone said their arms looked “buff” and they attributed their new-found buffness to the supersets. But pump, burn and buffness don't add up to strength.

The old-timers never would have fallen for such nonsense as supersets, slow motion training, pumping or “going for the bum.” I'd love to hear Herman Goerner's response to the suggestion that he stop doing one arm deadlifts with 600 or 700 pounds and “train for a pump.”

I'd love to hear Arthur Saxon's response to the idea that he should count to ten while lifting a light weight instead of heaving a 300 pound sack of flour overhead at whatever speed he could manage.

I'd love to hear Doug Hepburn's response to someone who told him to super-set presses and lateral raises instead of building his enormous deltoids by military pressing world record poundages as hard and fast as possible.

I'd love to hear Bob Peoples' response to anyone who told him to stop doing deadlifts because they were too “basic” and to switch to a hyperextension/leg curl super-set instead.

I'd love to hear John Davis' response to someone who told him that Olympic lifting didn't build size or strength because you used “momentum” to lift the weight.

I'd love to hear Norb Schemansky's response to someone who told him to stop squatting, pulling and pressing world class poundages, “isolate” his muscles, move very slowly and learn to “feel” the weight all the way up and all the way down.

Men like Goerner, Saxon, Hepburn, Peoples, Davis, and Schemansky didn't have to read books or glossy magazines to figure out what it takes to grow big and strong. Neither do you. Neither does anyone. More important than what you read is what you DON'T read. Knowing what works is largely a matter of knowing what doesn't. More important than what you know is what you know enough not to try. Be a dinosaur. Stick to your guns. Train like a dinosaur. Don't get sucked into every passing fad or fancy. Keep things simple. Retain your cynicism. Don't get sidetracked. Dinosaur training is the Royal Road to muscular size and strength. You deserve no less than to follow the Royal Road. Leave the bunny path to the bunnies.

Often do the spirits of great events stride on before the events/ and in today already walks tomorrow.

~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In critical and baffling situations, it is always best to return to first principle and simple action.