Category: Weight Training

Weight training related articles.

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The Yogic Advantage for Body Builders

By Alexis Louise Reda

In the world of body building likely due to the ‘external’ nature of the process and culture surrounding their sport, many amateur athletes lack a deeper awareness required during training. This very awareness which I will be discussing here, that I have had to relinquish from yoga and apply in the weight room due to chronic pain, has anecdotally, turned out to dramatically affect adaptive volume progression requirements*.

Bodybuilding is quite a demanding sport. You are required to progressively and systematically overload your body both structurally and overall. To grow muscle and to lose fat, you can’t always go by “how you feel” to sustain progress. As we know from quantum science and emerging research on yoga, very simply, your mental states affect your physical; so as your ‘mental’ subtly gets ‘messed up’ when pushed deeper into a program’s progression set on taking your body to places it doesn’t naturally want to go, intuition becomes somewhat unreliable. Moreover, I’ve realized several yogic-practice integrations that are imperative to being the bodybuilder who is in it for the long-run. Let’s check them out:

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The Fallacy of Optimality

By Alexis Louise Reda

Optimality is a measured, focused effort progressed over time – it is not the most output you can achieve at once. 

          Achieving optimality is not necessarily doing the absolute best and most you can do – that, by definition, is “absolute optimality”. It is great, but it does not correlate with maintaining desired outcomes such as dependable progress mid-term or long-term. We have other functions that demand energy in our lives, you know. Therefore what is more worth caring about is more often “relative optimality”:  the most you can do WITH CONSIDERATION of all the other things you must dedicate energy for in your day, in your life. So don’t feel like you have to hurt after your workout or leave the computer with a headache and eyeache and buttache to have achieved something “optimally”, because that’s a fallacy. Even athletes 100% dedicated to their sport know that they cannot be their best by going 100% effort every session. In intelligent weight training, you don’t push to failure more than I’d say 20% of the time – and those events are programmed at very specific intervals in a training cycle (analogous to a life cycle). They will get you to another level, but never in isolation – never without the prerequisite of doing focus-based, quality repetitions relatively much farther away from maximum effort, around 80% of the time. This is focused action that results in providing just enough of a stimulus to get a positive training effect – an adaptation to the skill you are practicing that will make you better over time. Why not consider this for everything else in life, too? 

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