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I'm currently training Mountain Dog Style with John Meadows and seeing some impressive results (surprising strength gains and growth in prior weak areas). John varies intensity and volume throughout your training (usually a 12 week period).
This type of training would of course be on the more advanced level. I was curious if anyone takes this approach with their own training. There is a lot of misinformation out there, especially in the magazines. Sometimes this makes it look like advanced guys use the same routine all the time, or that they just haphazardly do what ever they feel like when they get to the gym.
Now, although we train "body parts", I believe this cycling of training makes sense as the body works as a system. So in my opinion over training is more of a systemic issue as the result of doing to much over all, for too long and without enough nutritional/supplementation support.
That being said I remember a book that was put out years ago on HIT by Dr. Ellington Darden in which he had people train the entire body in a workout, but when you did these sessions you would concentrate on a specific muscle group, while doing more of a maintenance workout for the rest of the body. In other words you might do 1 or 2 sets for everything else, but would do a high intensity style workout for the selected muscle group (ie. negatives, supersets, pre exhaust etc.)
Now I don't believe this to be a productive routine, but it got me thinking if you combined this idea with cycling training as I mentioned earlier. So the idea would be to have each body part peak with volume and intensity at different times. So you may be on lower volume on most body parts one week, but your chest would be high volume, high intensity. This pattern would change week by week so you would have each body parts volume and intensity peak at different times.
On paper this sounds good, but again I believe over training is more of a systemic problem than a problem with over doing a specific body part. I'm not sure if this would be beneficial over cycling the entire body.
I'm not sure if this makes sense the way I'm writing it so here is a basic example of what I'm thinking:
Week 1
Chest Lower intensity, lower volume
Back medium volume, medium intensity
Shoulders Medium volume, High intensity
Legs High volume, high intensity
Week 2
Chest medium volume, medium intensity
Back medium volume, high intensity
Shoulders high volume, high intensity
legs low volume, low intensity (or) high volume and low intensity
...and so on.
Again I don't believe this would be any better, but I was interested in peoples feedback to see if anyone had done something like this. I may have some of my clients volunteer to try this to see if there were any difference in their results.
This type of training would of course be on the more advanced level. I was curious if anyone takes this approach with their own training. There is a lot of misinformation out there, especially in the magazines. Sometimes this makes it look like advanced guys use the same routine all the time, or that they just haphazardly do what ever they feel like when they get to the gym.
Now, although we train "body parts", I believe this cycling of training makes sense as the body works as a system. So in my opinion over training is more of a systemic issue as the result of doing to much over all, for too long and without enough nutritional/supplementation support.
That being said I remember a book that was put out years ago on HIT by Dr. Ellington Darden in which he had people train the entire body in a workout, but when you did these sessions you would concentrate on a specific muscle group, while doing more of a maintenance workout for the rest of the body. In other words you might do 1 or 2 sets for everything else, but would do a high intensity style workout for the selected muscle group (ie. negatives, supersets, pre exhaust etc.)
Now I don't believe this to be a productive routine, but it got me thinking if you combined this idea with cycling training as I mentioned earlier. So the idea would be to have each body part peak with volume and intensity at different times. So you may be on lower volume on most body parts one week, but your chest would be high volume, high intensity. This pattern would change week by week so you would have each body parts volume and intensity peak at different times.
On paper this sounds good, but again I believe over training is more of a systemic problem than a problem with over doing a specific body part. I'm not sure if this would be beneficial over cycling the entire body.
I'm not sure if this makes sense the way I'm writing it so here is a basic example of what I'm thinking:
Week 1
Chest Lower intensity, lower volume
Back medium volume, medium intensity
Shoulders Medium volume, High intensity
Legs High volume, high intensity
Week 2
Chest medium volume, medium intensity
Back medium volume, high intensity
Shoulders high volume, high intensity
legs low volume, low intensity (or) high volume and low intensity
...and so on.
Again I don't believe this would be any better, but I was interested in peoples feedback to see if anyone had done something like this. I may have some of my clients volunteer to try this to see if there were any difference in their results.
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