“Every day, with no excuses, I went to the gym and did fifty pull-downs on one of the machines.”
This is not the most efficient means to get towards doing a pull-up. High reps with low weights activates different muscle fibers than low reps with high weight. I would recommend increasing the amount of weight and reducing the number of reps on your lat pulldown. You should also skip a day in between doing this exercise each time. You could do 50% of your body weight as a warm-up, then try 75% of your body weight and see how many reps you can do. If you manage more than 5, you don’t have enough weight on there. Incorporate this into a circuit routine to minimize down time. A warm-up set followed by 3 sets of 3 reps is one way of doing this. By 3 reps, I mean your goal is to reach complete fatigue after only 3 reps. You should still try to complete as many reps as you can. Your circuit would include at least 3 other exercises in between that don’t target your back so you have time to rest. On your skip day, just do cardio. Another thing to try is to use different variations of the lat pulldown, so you target as wide a variety of muscles as possible. Be careful about your form.
Skipping a day is useful for hypertrophy. Not so sure how useful it is for strength. Pavel Tstatsouline wrote in The Naked Warrior how he makes his clients do pull-ups every time they exit the kitchen or go down the basement, every day, like 5-10 times a day, but the trick is, they don’t do it until failure. They just do it as long as it feels kinda comfortable. So basically they need little recovery from that. It is not hypertrophy training, it is more like etching in a neural pathway, although some hypertrophy is supposed to happen along the road.
Hypothesis: I think the major body building or power lifting trainers like Rippetoe, who write the books and make the popular methods, have incredibly lot of willpower. When they train to failure, it means they train so hard that I would run away crying for 20% of the struggle they put up with. This is why they need 48 hours (or more) time to recover or else they get overtrained. But for people with normal amounts of willpower like me, where training to failure means stopping an exercise when it is starting to get uncomfortable or kinda boring or look there is something shiny over there, very little recovery is needed from that. Not 48 hours, maybe not even 12. Remember, people used to use strength all day, every day, like unloading coal. Their recovery was 8 hours of sleeping and another 4 spent on whatever, their “training” was 12 hours long every day. The trick is, they never ever went even 10-20% to what a body building trainer would consider training to failure or muscle exhaustion.
This really should be factored in! People who are unable to go anywhere near the intensity of the pros, people whose weight training feels a lot like unloading coal (it gets tiresome or boring and thus stopped earlier than it gets real muscle failure), don’t need 48 hours of recovery and basically will never be overtrained.
The problem is, this is something the pros don’t write about this problem as it does not exist for them. They tell you to use 60% or 70% of your one rep max, but what does a one rep max even mean? Does it mean “I either lift this or die here” level of dedication, or does it mean a “well, a weight bigger than this would feel kinda hard and I am already sweating and feel a bit tired and I need to meet Joey for a beer in 25 mins, so let’s call it 1RPM and call it a day”, which is more likely for mere mortals?
That is why listeing to pros is suboptimal for mere mortals.
Skipping a day is useful for hypertrophy. Not so sure how useful it is for strength.
Depends on the strength program. Powerlifters often train just 3 days a week, with each day focused around one of the major lifts (bench press, squat, deadlift).
Olympic weightlifters train more often and work most of the same muscle groups each training day. They’ll focus each training day around one of the two Olympic lifts (snatch, clean and jerk). I believe they usually train 4 days a week.
And then there are specialties like the Smolov Routine which has a cycle of intense squatting four days a week for three weeks. However, this level of intensity is not sustainable in the long run.
Hypothesis: I think the major body building or power lifting trainers like Rippetoe, who write the books and make the popular methods, have incredibly lot of willpower.
They’re also the sort who’ll come out of a hellish training session thinking “This is great,” not “Never again”. Willpower alone won’t get you through unless you really think it’s all worth it.
I think “willpower” is something like system 2 hitting system 1 with a hammer to overcome the objections it has. Getting more willpower means getting a bigger hammer etc. I think this is mostly a waste of time. You want to figure out what evidence that system 1 takes seriously looks like and then present it with some.
This is an excellent visual example, but I am not sure it holds. System 1 is optimized for the ancestral environment where calories are scarce and exercise is plenty, either chasing down the calories or running away from something that considers you a nice source of calories. So of course System 1 wants to be lazy all day and stuff itself with food, it is a perfect strategy for the ancestral environment where it has little chance do that, but what little rest or feasting it can get, it should. It is hugely suboptimal for the modern environment. System 2 is simply telling System 1 “shut up, everything you want to do (wrt to food or exercise) is completely wrong in this modern environment”. System 1 simply does not have any valid arguments.
And as far as I can tell, System 1 takes only three things seriously, fear of immediate danger, chasing some immediately rewarding shiny thing, or social pressure / conformism / validation / status and all that. The willpower hammer is more or less trying to work the fear pathway.
You’re right that the situation probably does not look like that simple picture. But I’ve always been dubious of the assertion that the AE was scarce on calories. Studies on hunter gatherers find they work about 20 hours per week to sustain themselves.
Edit: ” Later, in 1996, Ross Sackett performed two distinct meta-analyses to empirically test Sahlin’s view. The first of these studies looked at 102 time-allocation studies, and the second one analyzed 207 energy-expenditure studies. Sackett found that adults in foraging and horticultural societies work, on average, about 6.5 hours a day”
So that’s still quite a bit of work, but definitely not sunup to sundown work.
Good point, but System 1 is far older than that… going back to the “lizard brain” basically. But this sounds like a worthwhile thing to investigate, I just don’t yet know how. Did they just by magic chance have the balance that the amount of work that makes one just about comfortably tired yields just about enough calories? I wonder why either they didn’t work harder just to afford to feast hard, or the opposite, enjoy being too lazy and put up with suboptimal calories for a day or week?
Causation goes the other way. A creature evolved that can sustain itself with an amount of effort that makes it comfortably tired. If the AE was harsher we would be better inclined to working 80 hour weeks perhaps.
Yes, this sounds sensible. Still, I cannot exactly put my finger on it, but something must be missing from this picture…
Nevertheless, I find your idea quite interesting. Basically, building a self-motivation science based on what kind of arguments, evidence or motivation does System 1 finds the most moving. I see potential in it.
I think as a first step we could split up System 1 to two parts, the really old ones, and the more specifically human parts. The really old parts probably only know the carrot and the stick, immediate reward and immediate fear. The more specifically human parts are I think predominantly social. I find the theory highly plausible that human intelligence evolved because of a selective pressure of competition inside the species and not some external pressure, because an external pressure should have resulted in a normal distribution of intelligence in the primate species, and basically today we would have half-retarded chimp servants. This runaway arms race of intelligence inside one species must be caused by some pressure inside the species. Probably sexual selection and mating. From this angle, the argument or evidence the human part of System 1is most likely to pay attention to is social status or sex appeal.
There’s evidence that people will move for the fun of it, and more so if movement is socially supported.
I suggest that the desire for movement gets trained out of a lot of people through being expected to be still a lot of the time when young, and also because ordinary non-athletic movement is presented as too low status to be motivating.
I may be overdoing this, but I think taking a half hour walk lacks coolness, while running marathons, or at least half marathons, is the minimum needed to count as exercise.
Also, the default idea for exercise is that it should be simple movements done at a level of intensity that many people find unpleasant to painful.My paranoid reading is that exercise is structured to be unpleasant so that there’s a status gain for people who do it.
Well, one thing is true, if an evil genius wanted to make people sedentary, inventing classrooms and teachers who frown upon fidgeting would be an excellent way to :)
A related issue is that at some point around puberty kids find it no longer matching their half-adult dignity to just run around playing. At that point they don’t really have many ideas what other ways to move.
I think it also got less social, people used to do sports together, now run or lift alone.
Thanks for the advice. I don’t want to do alternating days, because doing the same thing every day makes it easier to have as a habit (for me, anyway). More weight with less reps/set and doing a circuit both make sense. I’m sort of combining weight maintenance and strength goals, and I should probably meet with someone who advises on these questions for a living instead of winging it.
Pavel Tstatsouline certainly does, and in Naked Warrior claims daily training, even more than once daily training, works as long as it is not done until failure. It is feasible to make people do pull-ups every time they exit the kitchen, but not until failure. The mainstream advice, which recommends 48 hours of rest, is based on training to failure. I think the difference is that the not-to-failure training is less like usual training and more like work, like digging with a shovel every day as a job.
“Every day, with no excuses, I went to the gym and did fifty pull-downs on one of the machines.”
This is not the most efficient means to get towards doing a pull-up. High reps with low weights activates different muscle fibers than low reps with high weight. I would recommend increasing the amount of weight and reducing the number of reps on your lat pulldown. You should also skip a day in between doing this exercise each time. You could do 50% of your body weight as a warm-up, then try 75% of your body weight and see how many reps you can do. If you manage more than 5, you don’t have enough weight on there. Incorporate this into a circuit routine to minimize down time. A warm-up set followed by 3 sets of 3 reps is one way of doing this. By 3 reps, I mean your goal is to reach complete fatigue after only 3 reps. You should still try to complete as many reps as you can. Your circuit would include at least 3 other exercises in between that don’t target your back so you have time to rest. On your skip day, just do cardio. Another thing to try is to use different variations of the lat pulldown, so you target as wide a variety of muscles as possible. Be careful about your form.
Skipping a day is useful for hypertrophy. Not so sure how useful it is for strength. Pavel Tstatsouline wrote in The Naked Warrior how he makes his clients do pull-ups every time they exit the kitchen or go down the basement, every day, like 5-10 times a day, but the trick is, they don’t do it until failure. They just do it as long as it feels kinda comfortable. So basically they need little recovery from that. It is not hypertrophy training, it is more like etching in a neural pathway, although some hypertrophy is supposed to happen along the road.
Hypothesis: I think the major body building or power lifting trainers like Rippetoe, who write the books and make the popular methods, have incredibly lot of willpower. When they train to failure, it means they train so hard that I would run away crying for 20% of the struggle they put up with. This is why they need 48 hours (or more) time to recover or else they get overtrained. But for people with normal amounts of willpower like me, where training to failure means stopping an exercise when it is starting to get uncomfortable or kinda boring or look there is something shiny over there, very little recovery is needed from that. Not 48 hours, maybe not even 12. Remember, people used to use strength all day, every day, like unloading coal. Their recovery was 8 hours of sleeping and another 4 spent on whatever, their “training” was 12 hours long every day. The trick is, they never ever went even 10-20% to what a body building trainer would consider training to failure or muscle exhaustion.
This really should be factored in! People who are unable to go anywhere near the intensity of the pros, people whose weight training feels a lot like unloading coal (it gets tiresome or boring and thus stopped earlier than it gets real muscle failure), don’t need 48 hours of recovery and basically will never be overtrained.
The problem is, this is something the pros don’t write about this problem as it does not exist for them. They tell you to use 60% or 70% of your one rep max, but what does a one rep max even mean? Does it mean “I either lift this or die here” level of dedication, or does it mean a “well, a weight bigger than this would feel kinda hard and I am already sweating and feel a bit tired and I need to meet Joey for a beer in 25 mins, so let’s call it 1RPM and call it a day”, which is more likely for mere mortals?
That is why listeing to pros is suboptimal for mere mortals.
Depends on the strength program. Powerlifters often train just 3 days a week, with each day focused around one of the major lifts (bench press, squat, deadlift).
Olympic weightlifters train more often and work most of the same muscle groups each training day. They’ll focus each training day around one of the two Olympic lifts (snatch, clean and jerk). I believe they usually train 4 days a week.
And then there are specialties like the Smolov Routine which has a cycle of intense squatting four days a week for three weeks. However, this level of intensity is not sustainable in the long run.
They’re also the sort who’ll come out of a hellish training session thinking “This is great,” not “Never again”. Willpower alone won’t get you through unless you really think it’s all worth it.
I think “willpower” is something like system 2 hitting system 1 with a hammer to overcome the objections it has. Getting more willpower means getting a bigger hammer etc. I think this is mostly a waste of time. You want to figure out what evidence that system 1 takes seriously looks like and then present it with some.
This is an excellent visual example, but I am not sure it holds. System 1 is optimized for the ancestral environment where calories are scarce and exercise is plenty, either chasing down the calories or running away from something that considers you a nice source of calories. So of course System 1 wants to be lazy all day and stuff itself with food, it is a perfect strategy for the ancestral environment where it has little chance do that, but what little rest or feasting it can get, it should. It is hugely suboptimal for the modern environment. System 2 is simply telling System 1 “shut up, everything you want to do (wrt to food or exercise) is completely wrong in this modern environment”. System 1 simply does not have any valid arguments.
And as far as I can tell, System 1 takes only three things seriously, fear of immediate danger, chasing some immediately rewarding shiny thing, or social pressure / conformism / validation / status and all that. The willpower hammer is more or less trying to work the fear pathway.
You’re right that the situation probably does not look like that simple picture. But I’ve always been dubious of the assertion that the AE was scarce on calories. Studies on hunter gatherers find they work about 20 hours per week to sustain themselves.
Edit: ” Later, in 1996, Ross Sackett performed two distinct meta-analyses to empirically test Sahlin’s view. The first of these studies looked at 102 time-allocation studies, and the second one analyzed 207 energy-expenditure studies. Sackett found that adults in foraging and horticultural societies work, on average, about 6.5 hours a day”
So that’s still quite a bit of work, but definitely not sunup to sundown work.
Good point, but System 1 is far older than that… going back to the “lizard brain” basically. But this sounds like a worthwhile thing to investigate, I just don’t yet know how. Did they just by magic chance have the balance that the amount of work that makes one just about comfortably tired yields just about enough calories? I wonder why either they didn’t work harder just to afford to feast hard, or the opposite, enjoy being too lazy and put up with suboptimal calories for a day or week?
Causation goes the other way. A creature evolved that can sustain itself with an amount of effort that makes it comfortably tired. If the AE was harsher we would be better inclined to working 80 hour weeks perhaps.
Yes, this sounds sensible. Still, I cannot exactly put my finger on it, but something must be missing from this picture…
Nevertheless, I find your idea quite interesting. Basically, building a self-motivation science based on what kind of arguments, evidence or motivation does System 1 finds the most moving. I see potential in it.
I think as a first step we could split up System 1 to two parts, the really old ones, and the more specifically human parts. The really old parts probably only know the carrot and the stick, immediate reward and immediate fear. The more specifically human parts are I think predominantly social. I find the theory highly plausible that human intelligence evolved because of a selective pressure of competition inside the species and not some external pressure, because an external pressure should have resulted in a normal distribution of intelligence in the primate species, and basically today we would have half-retarded chimp servants. This runaway arms race of intelligence inside one species must be caused by some pressure inside the species. Probably sexual selection and mating. From this angle, the argument or evidence the human part of System 1is most likely to pay attention to is social status or sex appeal.
There’s evidence that people will move for the fun of it, and more so if movement is socially supported.
I suggest that the desire for movement gets trained out of a lot of people through being expected to be still a lot of the time when young, and also because ordinary non-athletic movement is presented as too low status to be motivating.
I may be overdoing this, but I think taking a half hour walk lacks coolness, while running marathons, or at least half marathons, is the minimum needed to count as exercise.
Also, the default idea for exercise is that it should be simple movements done at a level of intensity that many people find unpleasant to painful.My paranoid reading is that exercise is structured to be unpleasant so that there’s a status gain for people who do it.
Well, one thing is true, if an evil genius wanted to make people sedentary, inventing classrooms and teachers who frown upon fidgeting would be an excellent way to :)
A related issue is that at some point around puberty kids find it no longer matching their half-adult dignity to just run around playing. At that point they don’t really have many ideas what other ways to move.
I think it also got less social, people used to do sports together, now run or lift alone.
I think car seats are also part of the problem.
Thanks for the advice. I don’t want to do alternating days, because doing the same thing every day makes it easier to have as a habit (for me, anyway). More weight with less reps/set and doing a circuit both make sense. I’m sort of combining weight maintenance and strength goals, and I should probably meet with someone who advises on these questions for a living instead of winging it.
Pavel Tstatsouline certainly does, and in Naked Warrior claims daily training, even more than once daily training, works as long as it is not done until failure. It is feasible to make people do pull-ups every time they exit the kitchen, but not until failure. The mainstream advice, which recommends 48 hours of rest, is based on training to failure. I think the difference is that the not-to-failure training is less like usual training and more like work, like digging with a shovel every day as a job.