TEDx - Why weight lifting is a waste of time
- Thread starter Ned Land
- Start date
Thurston
Winger
He didn’t come up with this realisation.
Mike Mentzer and Arthur Jones were saying these kind of things decades ago:
you don’t really gain much by “lifting” weights, you’d gain more just by lowering them (the eccentric), in a very controlled manner.
People are around 40% stronger in the eccentric portion of a lift.
As you probably know, Westside Barbell use resistance bands for some bench press workouts.
The X3 equipment costs about £400 and it’s essentially resistance bands with a bar and base plate.
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Thurston
Winger
Variable resistance, or accommodating resistance, as the late Louie Simmons of Westside called it, and which essentially amounts to the same thing, was an idea which was likely not first conceptualised by the aforementioned Arthur Jones, but who tried to solve it with his range of Nautilus machines in the seventies.
Jones added a CAM mechanism to his machines to provide varied resistance throughout the entire range of motion of a movement. He correctly reasoned that the problem with a barbell is that they can only move in a vertical plane, and training only with standard barbell exercises would not account for where a person is weakest through that movement.
Bands and chains were essentially Simmons attempt to solve the same problem, but without deviating away from use of the barbell.
Good gyms will generally be the ones which have machines with CAM mechanisms. Memberships of these places tend to be £20-£25 a month. Whereas bands, if you wish to go down the Simmons road and largely eschew machines in favour of almost exclusively training with barbells are pretty inexpensive (fwiw Simmons didn’t totally eschew machines, and even invented a couple himself I believe). So I see no reason why anyone in their right mind would wish to spend £400 to solve a problem which has had established solutions for the past several decades.
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Thanks for the detailed reply. I’ve been incorporating some techniques for bench press from a Dave Tate programme but I’ll read up on those other people.
maygo
Winger
I saw a post on insta a while back saying something like this- you can lift a weight of 10kg, you can probably hold a weight of 15kg in the locked out position, but you can lower a weight of 20kg so negatives are good for loading.
Made sense to me, even if I’ve not explained it well here
Made sense to me, even if I’ve not explained it well here
Thurston
Winger
Yeah. I’ll give you an example, the barbell OHP is one of the slowest and most difficult lifts to progress for pretty much everyone.I saw a post on insta a while back saying something like this- you can lift a weight of 10kg, you can probably hold a weight of 15kg in the locked out position, but you can lower a weight of 20kg so negatives are good for loading.
Made sense to me, even if I’ve not explained it well here
On most lifts which plateau I find cluster sets usually work pretty well (the rationale behind the popular Wendler 5-3-1 isn’t a million miles away from amounting to the same thing), but nope, nothing.
The shoulder machine at the gym I go to has a foot pedal which will get you into an almost fully locked out position, so I wouldn’t lift the weight up, I’d just use the foot pedal, and started overloading and doing negatives on it from the top position with more weight than I’d otherwise lift (you could do similar with a Smith Machine although with significantly more inconvenience).
As you might gather from posts within this thread where I’ve referenced proponents of HIT, eccentric only training is a principle which has been firmly enshrined.
Anyway, I’m not exaggerating in the slightest when I say this, my shoulders shot up and within a month, what had been my OHP top set for about a year became my warm up weight.
