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_Wolf_ · 03-07-2006, 08:26 AM

10) Another of my favorites from Glenn:

"im so sick and tired of hearing people who just started training who say they cant gain weight. jeez ive heard this crap so often. every day it seems i have some stupid kid ask me about how to gain weight... in resturants, at the grocery store, yo uname it. for some reason there seems to be a sign on my back or something. usually i know its worthless to talk to them, sometimes i actually waste my time. talked to a kid at the golden corral a couple of days ago. took almost an hour when i should have been enjoying my all you can eat steak night... 3 days later i see him in the gym when i just happened to go in to talk to a friend who i knew was there... kid was there doing preacher curls. said hi to me, then said well i talked to my friend about what you said and he said he tried it once and overtrained so i decided to do this thing i read about... on the other hand about 6 months ago i talked to this 6' tall, 150lb kid who wanted to know about getting stronger. kid had done well in judo, won some titles, also after that had done cycling, turned pro then quit a year later, quite a good road racer. he actually did what i told him i guess, about 3 months after i saw him the first time i saw hiim again, he weighed about 185... he wanted to try olympic weightlifting so i let him train with the team i coach. now hes weighing 204 and clean and jerking about 300lbs, 54lbs gained in 6 months. no drugs. olympic squat from 175lbs to 385lbs, front squat from 150lbs to 330lbs. hell be a good lifter, has a good work ethic. needs to be 240 and fairly lean, will compete eventually in the 231 pound class. will take about another 12-15 months i suppose. why is a kid like this the exception and not the rule? why will kids do the same old thing for years in the abscense of results, and not try anything new? what the hell is wrong with people. there is a gym in town, i know the owner so i go and talk to him sometimes, there are all these kids in there, skinny little ****s, doing curls. they never progress, you see the same faces one year to the next, same bodies too."

11) Ultra slow reps or TUT is, for the most part completely worthless. Will it work? Yes. But the total amount of work that one can complete is much lower when utilizing slow reps. Just go natural. Don’t try to be super fast, and bouncy, and don’t try to go ultra slow. Just do it naturally and controlled.

12) “The burn”, “the pump” and “the feel” have nothing to do with the effectiveness of an exercise. Yes, even I have been caught on upper body days looking at myself in the mirror when I’m all blown up, but that has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the last exercise. You do hammer strength bench presses and flyes for sets of 20 and I’ll do heavy barbell bench presses and deep dips. One of us will “feel the pump” more and the other one will grow.

13) Likewise, delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) also gives no clue as to the effectiveness of a workout. It just means A) you have a ton of microtrauma in a muscle or a lot of lactic acid/ waste products. Congratulations.

14) “Core stability training” is not done on a swiss ball or a stability board. It’s done by pulling heavy deadlifts, standing overhead presses, full squats, heavy barbell rows, heavy farmer’s walks, Atlas stones, tire flipping, reverse hypers, heavy back extensions, glute ham raises, and heavy abdominal work.

15) A good gym has nothing to do with how nice the machines are or if they have a pool or tanning beds or even if it’s air conditioned. A good gym smells like a mix of body odor and liniment and supplies their members with a big box of chalk.

Kelly Baggett, one of the best strength coaches his take as well on how to get bigger

This is not to attack anyone but I'd be willing to bet a lot more natural muscle has been built using the recommnedations of Matt and Glenn over the years then all the complicated bodybuilding schemes out there. The problem with bodybuilders is they try to overcomplicate everything and lose site of the big picture.....that's making strength gains in the gym on basic movements along with scale weight increases on a week to week basis. Now you can complicate that as much as you want but those are the only 2 things it takes to get big. It doesn't take any sort've fancy specialized training routines and special diets. If more people would spend more time in dark stinky ass gyms worrying about putting weight on the very basic movements and spend more time eating in high volume (note the golden corral reference) with an emphasis on gaining scale weight then a lot more muscle would be built.
For every bodybuilder who has success building a physique naturally I'll show you at least 20 who don't get jack **** in the way of results because they sit around with their thumb up their butt worrying about this and worrying about that and basing everything off of their "pump"...worrying about the "feel" of this exercise and trying to trash the muscle every workout without any regards to periodization and failign to realize that if they would've just strived to put 50 lbs on their squat and 15 lbs on the scale their problems would be taken care of......They go starving themselves to death on boiled chicken and broccoli while spending $300 per month in supplements thinking they can get "bigger" and "smaller" at the same time spending 5 years wasting time not gaining 10 lbs of scale weight all while looking at strength athletes with their nose up in the air when what they don't realize is that fat powerlifter they like to make fun of has actually put on 50 lbs of muscle in the last year and he could spend 3 months stripping that fat off and hand you your ass and balls in a bodybuilding contest simply because he trained very simple, focused on strength gains and most importnatly wasn't afraid to sit down at the dinner table and do some serious eating.

Give me 2 twin brothers one who hangs around with and reads bodybuilding related info for a year and another who hangs around with and trains at a powerlifting gym both without steroids and after that year is over let's see which one builds more muscle. Nine times out of 10 I'll take the powerlifter.

Having said that a strenght athletes routine may not be 100% optimal for a bodybuilder but there are a lot of things people could learn from strength trainers.