How to Succeed with Lifetime Training & Fitness

Although the hardgainer train in philosophy is simple enough, it's very demanding to implement. It's comerstone is good exercise technique and the ability to avoid overtraining. Often when magazines publish injury-related articles, readers skip over them. That's unfortunate because such articles ram home the need to train with good form and avoid over-training.

Never adopt a negative attitude toward an article about injuries. By sharing it, the author is doing you an enormous favor. He or she is helping to dispel the training ignorance that abounds today. You need to be informed on these matters and to take the advice given. Knowledge is power-power you can use to boost your training zeal, effort and dedication to new heights. There are several ways you can look at accounts of injury experiences. The only attitude I want you to have is, "This person suffered a misfortune as a result of not being sufficiently educated. I'm going to learn from his or her experience and make sure I never have the same problem."

I want you to be the most informed and vigilant readership a training magazine has ever had. The information you need, however, goes beyond what to do in the gym. It also includes what nor to do. One of the most neglected factors in weight training past and present is that the consequences of not exercising correctly are seldom spelled out. They're glossed over while lousy instruction is pro mote willy-nilly. Trainees follow this in complete advice and learn the truth the hard way. It's bad enough when their training doesn't deliver big muscles but a lot worse when the result is physical damage, especially to joints.

In some ways this is intentional. The argument in favor of keeping things quiet holds that if you let people know about the possible down side of training, you may deter them and create a negative attitude toward it. While everyone knows that it can cause injuries, very few people know about the lasting damage that some of the conventional advice produces when it's followed for a sufficiently long period. The dangers must be spelled out.

Because this column deals with reality and doesn't foster absurd expectations, I'll continue to remind you-now and then but without laboring the point-of the urgent need to avoid overtraining and poor exercise technique. This advice is not just for hard gainers but for easy gainers as well. While the hardest of gainers are usually the most prone to suffer the consequences of training mistakes, the big and naturally robust people need reality checks too. Even a Hercules will be destroyed eventually if he lifts huge poundage's in poor form.

Weight training is too great an activity to let it be spoiled by ignorance. If you aren't sufficiently well-informed, you won't be able to experience the joy of long-term progress. Even hard gainers can achieve a great deal if they train properly and consistently over the longterm.

I want you to train successfully for the rest of your life, To do this you need a complete education on training, warts and all. Consider how many gyms are only interested in the short term. They sign up new members, give little or no attention to providing good training instruction and then wonder why their renewal rate is so poor.

The modern mentality of 'You can have it too-and very soon" encourages us to live in a fantasy, copy unsuitable role models and adopt harmful exercise technique. This usually leads to short-term excitement with training but longer-term disillusionment and failure. That's not our way. We're into sustained training excitement and long-term success.