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Issue 4 carb loading

AWARE72

AWARE72

MuscleHead
Oct 17, 2010
323
18
Functional Realities
By Neil Gardner.
Neil Gardner - Index

A series of articles to inspire the body and stimulate the mind

Finishing up on last months cliffhanger we find ourselves in need of a jolly good carb load. “that’s easy’ I hear you say “I’ll just eat some junk and I’ll look bigger” and you know what? You may be right. But it isn’t the best way to carb load. We all know that a carb isn’t just a carb, there a simple, complex fibrous, and complex starchy, along with high GI, and high load carbs. This makes things a little trickier. Starting the carb load with some simple carbs is what usually happens the idea behind this is to get a massive fast acting glycogen load to get that huge overcompensation of water placement. Not a bad idea, but the logic behind this is somewhat flawed as we know the comp is 24hrs away and these carbs can get in and do their thing in just a few hours, how do we maintain the fullness without the dreaded flood. This beast is the nasty that allows the water in the muscle to leak back under the skin wiping out all our hard won condition. Don’t want that happening do you? Good, so lets rethink this a little. if we start with some complex long lasting carbs we can go with a good ol baked potatoe, throw a little homemade salad on top and you have your self a great start. Two of these should fill you right up. Next meal 2-4 hrs later as much basmati rice as you can fit in! that’s right, shovel that rice in till you are fit to burst! Don’t forget to pose in between meals to really get those carbs in and to see how the transformation is going. Another few hours later more rice!! Keep this carbs/pose cycle up until just before bed. Sick of rice yet? Good.
Now is the time to switch to some faster acting carbs, it’s about 12 hours ‘till stage time so time for some dark fruit cake, a great way to get in the simpler carbs. Cut the cake into 12 slices and have four every 90mins. By this time you should be all tanned up and bursting with veins and fullness. Have I mentioned water yet? Nope! Because you would have dropped this when you went to bed. No more water ‘till after the pre judging (if it is a split show). Remember most of the judging is done at the morning pre judging so make sure you are at your best for this time and not for the evening. Although it is possible to hold condition from hour to hour it will fade after about 8 around hours. So now you are back stage. What you need now is some of those simple carbs to amp you up for the gruelling task of posing. Something simple like chocolate or jelly beans. At this point you will not look any worse in the next 30 mins, so have as much as you like, which in itself is pretty difficult because you will be pumping up and prepping your tan, but I know you will do the best you can.
There you have it…..
Go look at the ‘threesome with’ column for my thoughts on calf training, then zip back here because now we can start in with some training principles.
You back? Good. Lets get stuck in!

The Great Debate
Volume Vs Weight.
Don’t say we don’t tackle the hard issues at Hard Core Aussie Muscle!
There has long been an argument within bodybuilding in particular and weight training in general, about what is the best way to train. Lighter weights for pump and burn? Or heavy duty, low reps and sets for the rugged massive look?
Well first of all you have to define ‘what is best’ In My opinion ‘best’ is the fastest possible muscle growth in the shortest amount of time. Given that is what most people want I’ll add a further ‘and maintainable’ to that. Meaning after I have gotten through my hyper growth phase I want to keep all the muscle I have gained.
Breaking down what it is we are trying to achieve you will find that muscles do some funny things but all striated muscles act pretty much the same ie they contract and relax and continue to do so until they cannot contract anymore. If a load is placed on a skeletal muscle that is greater than it can handle it will fail. To avoid future failure under the same load the body undergoes a series of events that lead to hypertrophy, in other words the muscles adapt to be able to bear a greater load, we know this as ‘growth’. So in simple terms failure leads to growth. What kind of failure is one of the other great debates.
Starting with failure as our goal we know that using a light weight will lead to failure, eventually, and a heavy weight will lead to failure, quickly, which would be more time efficient. So that’s a plus. Using a light weight for high reps puts a lot of blood into the trained area increasing potential nutrition to the muscles, that is a tick for Volume training. Going beyond momentary muscular failure may well be detrimental to recovery times. One thing is certain the more you overtrain the more time you need to recover, the less workouts you get in the less stimulus on the muscle, there is a point of diminishing return when extreme inroads into failure will not bring any greater results that moderate ones. What determines this is central nervous system recovery. Someone who trains with forced reps and forced negatives, along with 1rm type training will (if nutrition plan and rest times are adequate) improve their strength, but not always increase muscle by an equal amount. Why is that? Because the muscle fully isn’t stimulated, it is the tendons and ligaments that do a greater percentage of weight. The muscle becomes the weak link in the chain and ,here is the dangerous part, weak links break first! Injuries and tears are going to slow muscle gains down a lot. So extreme heavy HIT training can cause some strength gains and will give the illusion of added size due to the inflammation that results form the micro trauma, this is transitory though. Looking at the other side of the equation high reps. Higher reps will primarily target the slower twitch fibres, higher reps being 30 and above. The problem here is that these slow twitch fibre don’t hypertophy much, unlike the fast twitch ones that are stimulated with greater weight. But that isn’t enough of a reason not to train with high reps, going to failure is still the key only it is failure at 30 plus reps. Slow twitch fibres may not add as much muscle as their faster twtich friends, but muscle IS muscle and getting even a little more slow twitch muscle is going to add to overall size. Neglecting volume training is not going to help in building the best physique, we could be neglecting a further 5-10% of potential muscle mass, but making it our prime goal is not ideal either. Too much volume leads to overuse injuries from all those repetive motions and are slow (chronic) occurring types of dysfunctions. Where is all this leading? Simply put, and I love simple things, we need both. The optimum rep range is somewhere between 4 and 30, using a weight that causes failure at 12 reps is just about on the money. But throwing in some uber heavy triples and singles will add connective strength and CNS conditioning, along with some 50 or even 100reps sets which will add lactic tolerance and hit those elusive slow twitch fibres. In conclusion Heavy Vs Light is a moot point, they are both valuable, how you schedule them into your workout is another article all together.
 
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