Bodybuilding and Powerlifting.com was founded as a tool to bring simplification back to muscle and strength building. What is simplification, and why should you care? Well, let me break down the purpose of this website in a few words:
Most weight training information is unnecessary and based on the training habits of lifters who can make consistent gains via the use of steroids.
If you aren’t using the same chemicals as this lifter, you’re not playing the same game. It’s as simple as that. No matter how hard you train, you cannot gain like an enhanced lifter.
More than that, the modern muscle and strength building landscape is cluttered with competing ideas, many of them trying to sell you on why program X is the next great thing. You don’t need program X. What do you need? You need the following:
- Persistent effort.
- A simple workout.
- Basic lifts.
- Progression of weight.
- Effective eating.
Gaining muscle and building strength isn’t like solving calculus problems. You don’t need to follow Jay Cutler’s latest workout, and despite the hype, you don’t need to know a darn thing about the science of muscle building.
Understand that I am not asking you to stay ignorant, nor am I telling you that science and research is worthless. They have their place. What I am telling you is that the importance of this “research” is way overblown, and you can make amazing gains without it.
The magic of muscle and strength building lies in progression of weight. Everything else, from obsessing about reps ranges, to the performing of super slow reps, to an unhealthy focus on time under tension (TUT), simply is misguided. Especially if you are a natural lifter!
What you do need to understand is that complication, elaborate split training, advanced training techniques and switching programs every 8 weeks simply isn’t needed. Learn to work smart, hard and efficiently. Don’t replace the effective basics with complicated nonsense, just because it makes you feel important, or provides you with the false security that you will expedite gains.
Proper training and a solid diet always maximizes results. Adding crazy amounts of volume, training 6 days a week, or performing triple super-duper rest-pause drop sets to failure will do little to speed this process. In fact, there is a good chance that if you go crazy like this before learning to gain with the basics, you will burn out, over-train or injure yourself.
This website will tip a few sacred cows, but I strongly believe that those cows being tipped deserve to be tipped. I do want you to understand one thing though: I am not here to convert you. If you do not believe what I have to say, then go your own way. I wish you the best either way.
It is my challenge that you open your mind to some of the ideas presented on this site. The iron game has become a landscaped cluttered with foolishness, over-thinking and complication. You do not need complication. You need simplification. Hard work on basic exercises pays off, and then some.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask on any of the pages on this site. I will personally respond.
–Steve Shaw, aka Bendthebar
