This question of the week is a question to me, rather than a question to you. Let me know your thoughts on the subject after reading the article.
Let me tell you about a recent conversation with one of my friends over IM. This guy used to lift with me back in college, but he’s working on his own business right now and hasn’t touched a weight in almost a year. So they guy goes out and gets a gym membership and starts training again last Monday.
This is how the conversation went down…
There are still 4 presidential candidates for 2009. Allow me to break down the candidates and explain to you why each one of them needs to get back in the weight room. At the end, I would like to introduce you to my surprise independent candidate; the only player you can really count on to save the day.
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John McCain, who will probably keep us in Iraq for eternity, thus killing off thousands more Americans, burning many more billions of ‘government’ dollars, and sinking the economy into a deep recession by 2010. I mean, it doesn’t make him look good when everyone knows he would make American women suffer by staffing his offices with pro-life Nazis.
Maybe he could improve his appearance and popularity by following a couple conditioning tips here on Project Swole. He’s getting older, and could probably firm up that face with a couple High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) sessions each week. I would also recommend some resistance training with free weights twice per week to help increase bone density.
We all know how beneficial exercise is to maintaining a healthy body. Kids do not usually know this and teenagers do not usually care. Therefore I must ask, at what age did you start exercising and why did you start exercising? I don’t mean at age 6 when your parents enrolled you in little league or mighty mites soccer. I mean, when did you really make an effort to start training your body for a specific reason?
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Did you lift weights for football in high school? As a kid, did you start training outside of Karate class so that you could be faster and stronger than the rest of the kids in the class? Perhaps you started walking / jogging / running for the first time ever at age 45 because you grew tired of the spare tire?
For me, it was when I was 16. From age 12 or so I messed around with weights in my dad’s garage, doing bench presses and curls of course. But when I turned 16 and got my license, I got a membership to Worlds Gym in Plaistow, NH and started doing… well, bench presses and curls… but that’s not the point. That membership lead me to examine the ways in which I could really start to fill out my clothes develop increased muscle size and definition all over my body.
By age 17 I had learned how to train my full body. I was using a small variety of exercises including leg presses, stiff leg deadlifts, bench presses, lat pull downs, triceps push downs, curls, and crunches. At this time I investigated a crazy program by some professional bodybuilder that included 2 workouts per day, 6 days per week. I attempted to follow the program for several months, but ended up overtraining, seeing minimal gains, and getting burnt out. In desperation I finally asked the resident personal trainer Ted for advice.
He scoffed at the crazy program I was trying to follow, muttering something about professional bodybuilding, steroids, and overtraining. When I returned a gaze of complete bewilderment, he sighed and brought me out onto the floor for a bit of tutoring. Ted put me on a 4 day split, training 2 or 3 muscles per day, and emphasized proper form, proper weight progression, proper nutrition, and proper supplementation. Ted introduced me to creatine and enlightened me with the knowledge that I can build millions of different kinds of workout programs. The rest, as they say, is history.
I have one word for you… girls. My build was what I would now call ‘skinny-fat’. I still had a layer of baby fat, with nasty love handles, a slight double chin, and tiny ass arms. My hair was long, I had acne, and quite frankly, girls were scared of me. In order to remedy this, I decided at age 16 that I would go on meds for the acne (thank you Accutane), cut my hair, lose some weight, and pad my bones with sculpted muscles. I had hoped that doing this would land me a girlfriend. Well guess what? I was right!
Before I graduated high school I dropped about 40 pounds of fat and gained about 20 pounds of muscle. I scored myself two girlfriends, started to make friends with some of the kids in my class, and eventually by senior year I had somewhat of a normal social life. Thank you Ted, thank you Worlds Gym, and thank you free weights!
So, what is your story? When did you start? Why did you start? How did you start? What were your results? Let us know by voting and leaving a comment.
Allow me to introduce the first ever Project Swole Question of the Week. In this section we will be tackling all those important questions like, “What is the best tasting protein bar?”, and “Should gym bunnies be allowed to distract us by wearing spandex while they workout?”
This week’s question is one that has been much debated throughout the years.
Loading ...My opinion is this: when you squat all the way down, it does put unnecessary pressure on the patella (knee). A lifetime of squatting this way could cause one to need knee surgery in their later years. Often someone that squats as low as they can go, will squat down with a greater velocity than if they had to stop themselves at a certain point (parallel). This greater velocity, combined with the stretch reflex used if they bounce out of the hole, could certainly lead to unnecessary tendon and ligament damage over time. So if you know how to squat correctly, and you do not bounce, and you are not attempting a max effort PR, then I guess I don’t see a problem with squatting to the floor; I just don’t recommend ass-to-grass barbell back squats for the average trainee.
Under no circumstances should you execute a half squat or a quarter squat, unless you are making a rare attempt at a super-heavy load that is higher than your 1 rep max. Occasionally I used this protocol to feel out a new weight just to expose my legs to the load. At one point (e.g. back in college) when I was squatting on average 405 lbs for 3-5 reps, I loaded up the bar to 475 and completed 3 half squats with that weight. Using this strategy helped me to attain a 465 1 rep max, because I already knew what that heavier weight felt like, so I had more confidence when I tried to attempt a similar weight for a 1 rep max.
In conclusion, I would say that 90% of the time, one should only squat to parallel or just below parallel. It is not worth sacrificing your knees just to be able to say “I squat ass-to-grass”. Perhaps you might squat all the way down with dynamic effort low box squats, jump squats, or strongman training when practicing events such as the Atlas Stones.
What do you think?
Feel free to vote and leave a comment explaining your opinion.
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