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Fadi

...
When I was younger and involved in Olympic weightlifting, I had the coaches do all the thinking for me..., I just lifted what I was asked to lift. Coming to bodybuilding, I followed the same method, a method where you don't lift balls to the wall just because you feel like it or because you can.

I'll give a weightlifting example to clarify the point first, then we'll get into bodybuilding.

If a weightlifter's training week called for some high intensity lifting, and the exercise he's performing was the clean pulls for example, the optimal weight on that bar would be equivalent to about 106% of what that lifter could clean and jerk. For me lifting 160kg above my head, would call for 170kg clean pulls on the bar for sets of 2s. That has been established to be the optimal load but not the maximum load I could clean pull. So why settle for the optimal and not go for the maximum in that instance? Because weightlifting number one priority is power and not strength. Make that power with form instead of maximum strength, which by necessity would fore the lifter to create a mechanical advantage (bit of cheating if you like), calling onto more and more secondary muscles to perform the lift (throwing the line of power of that clean pull right out the window); taking away from the lifter's skills and form instead of adding to it. As Spartacus has written in another thread, there are many an Olympic weightlifter who could squat a ton so to speak, but that does not equate to power, form, and skill on the lifting platform.

Bodybuilding: here the emphasis is on making our muscles bigger above all else. So muscle size rather than power and strength is at the center of our training methodology. Please read that last sentence again.

Sometimes walking into a bodybuilding gym, you would think that you're in the wrong place with the way some bodybuilders train. Their focus (and ironically these bodybuilder are usually the smaller ones), seems to be on lifting the maximum weight they can master. Yet, one look to your left or right, and you're bound to see Mr. BIG bodybuilder lifting less than these "beasts". What gives? Simple, the man knows his stuff, he knows the difference between lifting an optimal weight, a weight that would actually maximise his muscle fiber activation/tension/stress, a weight that is optimal for that particular muscle instead of going for a weigh that is there for much more than "that particular muscle", and more so for all those other muscles that would need to bear the brunt of the load should that bodybuilder insist on simply lifting it, with an attitude of total disregard as to lifting efficiency.

My words above were not in regards to periodisation over a certain time period or the like. My words above were simply saying that to choose a weight you can lift, is not the same thing as saying choosing a weight you ought to lift. That is all.

Thank you.
 
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