Latest Research on Weight Training: Much Less There than Meets the Eye

Hardly a week goes by when I dont receive an email for a stunning new discovery in weight training.

The emergence of artificial intelligence has also produced a blizzard of claims about new and improved training.

Mostly this blizzard of information is an increasingly desperate attempt to get attention in a heavily saturated market.

I characterize most of the things I have seen lately as following something like following format:

Headline: Latest Research shows the HUGE superiority of our program.

But, in tiny print at the bottom of the page. Disclaimer: We firmly believe in the results of our test even though none of the results were statistically significant and we used crippled people as our control group.

 

Whats the real problem?

The real problem in power training and in almost all sports training is precise execution. That is to get maximum results for your bench press, or your 3-point shot the key issue is NOT found in the endless number of training protocols you could generate.

The real issue is YOU executing the movement precisely.

This is done by your body, not by a computer app.

In short, the issue is how you control your own body when doing a precision athletic movement.

 

Real problem #2

When you work out, you only have a limited amount of physical energy available to do the heavy lifts in your program.

In power training, you must focus all your serious practice on the execution of 12-18 individual lifts. After that number, your body control declines, and extra work becomes counterproductive.

However, your computer app can keep kicking out an endless number of exercises done with no limitation on your actual physical energy.

 

Real problem #3

Most of the miracle programs I see focus on short term (4-8 week) results.

Miracle programs seem to push for constant gains with no backing off.

Longer term results or longer-term problems are ignored.

For example, doing heavy deadlifts more than once a week is something that most of us can get away with for a few weeks. Deadlifting more than once a week for months is potentially dangerous as this prevents our lower spine from healing properly between workouts.

Those of us who have been deadlifting for many decades have observed the rule of heavy once a week.

Also, competitive lifters cycle their training throughout the year with periods of intense heavy training and periods of lighter conditioning. This allows us to put out maximum effort during peaking cycles and at contests.

 

Real Problem #4

The longer you lift weights or train for a sport, the more individualized your training requirements become.

Once you get beyond the advanced beginner stage, each of us will have unique issues we need to address. All our bodies are different, and as we become more skilled our training issues will be much more unique to us.

For example, as someone with relatively long arms my training for the bench press will be quite different than for someone with relatively short arms.

 

Bottom Line

There are literally dozens or hundreds of workout programs that someone could do. There is no magic program out there waiting to be revealed by Generative AI or by some guru who discovered weight training last month.

Computers can generate massive amounts of information that is only related to the data set they have. The ancient maxim of garbage in-garbage out applies.

Each of us who have been at this for a long time must use all our cleverness and experience to build the training programs that will work best for us.and perhaps only for us.

Lift Big!

Richard