Day 288 - Body Beast and Athleticism

Received this question recently:

I'm curious about what those of you who have Beasted (Body Beast) have found about how it has impacted your overall athleticism.

Athleticism? Body Beast has hardly helped at all, and may in fact have 'slowed' me down a bit...but then again, sometimes we have to take 1 step back in order to take 2 steps forward.

No individual who uses periodizational training should do the same thing all the time.

Let's take Professional athletes for example, they don't do the same training all the time.

Power training and Strength training can only take you so far. Sure, it may be great at the start, you feel awesome, you start making some pretty big improvements, but like ANYTHING, you WILL plateau...guaranteed. Your body will simply reach a point in which you can no longer improve. That may be due to a number of factors, but one major factor (in keeping with the theme here) your muscles will eventually reach a capacity, due to their size, to no longer be able to improve (in this case, gain strength).

For someone like yourself, I would recommend spending even a few weeks every year stepping away from the strength training and focus on endurance and hypertrophy. Why? Because not only does it change things up and gives your body a break from all of the heavy forces being placed on it, but it also increases your affinity for success when you come back.

By training your muscles to be more efficient (endurance training, see: high repetitions, lower resistance),  you improve their overall ability to generate energy, therefore improving your success rate with force generation.

By training them to increase in size (hypertrophy), you improve their likelihood to be able to lift more. Bigger muscles don't always mean that they can move more weight, but they certainly improve your affinity to train them to do so.

So, back to Body Beast, although a lot of guys like to have 'big, ripped muscles', hypertrophy/endurance training also plays a tremendous part in periodized training blocks.

I, myself, am trying to gain muscle now, so that when I go back and start doing more functional training, my muscles will be prime to gain strength back (and then some), so that I can push myself even further than I did before.

Quote of the day:
"Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well."
~Jim Rohn

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