#70 - No Fear, No Gain

02/12/24 • 68 min

For a variety of reasons, the predominant form of exercise in popular culture is endurance training. Endurance is valorized in the media, with sports like swimming and running receiving prime position in Olympic broadcasts. Military films often depict the hero enduring through miles and miles of trackless jungle and urban wastelands. The overarching experience of endurance training is pain, and pain is relatable. Everyone suffers, or will suffer, from pain in their life. It's even in the popular saying: "no pain, no gain."

Strength training, however, does not elicit the same pain response that endurance training does. Strength training does not burn or ache, it is an entirely different experience. Squatting a heavy set of five with a barbell feels like being crushed by a Mack truck; you must overcome an intense amount of pressure in your whole body, while pushing as hard as you can against the weight. Your body dumps adrenaline, increasing your heart rate and blood pressure. The set begins long before you step on the platform too. Hours or even days before the event, the anticipation of a heavy, all-out set of squats gives you butterflies. Strength training is, essentially, engaging with and conquering a fear response.

For this reason, strength training is a harder sell in the fitness community. It is socially acceptable to pound a trainee into the ground with endurance training. People will pay dearly for it, in fact! Just look at Crossfit, where they frequently claim "your workout is our warmup." Yet, if you want to build a strong, resilient, muscular body, learning to face your fears and lift heavy barbells is a must. It's a useful skill in the gym, and in life.

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

Email: [email protected]

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

Email: [email protected]

Previous Episode

#69 - We Command You to Grow! (With the Barbell)

You've tried the templates in the bodybuilding magazines, from the bodybuilding sites. You've tried lifting like the big jacked, ripped dudes on social media... and it hasn't worked. You don't look like them, and your growth has stalled out. For some reason we accept that in sports, we shouldn't expect to perform like pro athletes without elite genetics and many years of training, but in fitness, we expect to acheive the look of people with outlier genetics, years of training, and, often, performance enhancing drugs as well. In today's episode, Dr. Santana and Coach Trent explain why basic barbell training is the answer to a better physique for the vast majority of trainees -- and that includes you!

Compound lifts -- the squat, bench press, overhead press, and deadlift -- work the entire body with very heavy weights if you progressively train them, that is, add weight to the bar on a regular basis. Because they utilize so much muscle mass, they can produce a stimulus for growth that no isolation exercise can match, and many of the best physiques in the world were built, at the beginning, with a lot of basic compound lifts. A solid base of strength in these four lifts forms of the base of the pyramid for body composition. A guy that works hard to get his squat to 315 and bench to 225 will have a decent set of legs and chest! Once that is achieved, he can then bring up his weak points with a small selection of assistance work. The same guy squatting only 185 is wasting his time trying to do any assistance work -- he simply needs to drive his squat up.

So, if you're tired of not having a muscular physique and "looking like you lift," then re-dedicate yourself to acheiving some baseline achievements on the main barbell lifts. Then, when it's time to introduce some additional exercises, you'll have a much better base of strength to perform them with (i.e. you'll be able to do those lifts heavier, and thus get more out of them) and you'll have a much better idea of where your actual weak points are.

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

Email: [email protected]

Next Episode

#71 - Programming After Novice: Making the Weight, and Your Technique, Go Up

The novice linear progression (NLP, or LP for short) is a fun time in the training career of a lifter. Never will you make as much progress -- and as fast! -- as you will during LP. It's also brutally hard, especially toward the end. Nevertheless, it comes to an end for every lifter, and people often spin their wheels trying to figure out what to do once the simple A/B program stops working. In today's episode, Dr. Santana and Coach Trent discuss some basic principles of post-novice programming, and point out that at all stages of the game, the main goal is that the weight must go up.

Weights & Plates is now on YouTube!

https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf-

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

Email: [email protected]