[quote]Professor X wrote:
sharetrader wrote:
At 6ft 1 and 185, I don’t think the OP is quite ready for this yet. His main need is overall mass.
And you think isolation exercises cause someone to not gain overall mass? I can only say I am glad I didn’t have this line of thinking thrown at me when I started. That may be why I didn’t have all of these problems. This shit is common sense. Anyone will have lagging muscle groups if they do NO isolation exercises AT ALL. Some of you sound like you listen to some of the stuff you read way more than you listen to your own body. [/quote]
I completely agree with this. “Listening” to one’s own body should take precedent over following any sort of cookie cutter routine that they find on the internet or in a book, regardless of how convincing the “logic” behind any such routine is.
I do have a caveat to this though. Most people don’t have a fucking clue what to listen for. They need to first “learn how to listen” to their body by developing greater sensory acuity within their kinesthic, or tacile, representation system.
FEEL the muscles being involved in the exercise you’re doing, DON’T recall the picture of it you saw in some article while you’re doing it.
Just walk into any gym and see all of the trainees who have mind-boggling muscleo-skeletal imbalances, terribly impinged shoulders, and pronounced kyphotic, lordosic, and scoliosic spines.
Everyone thinks they are a champ in their own minds, but very few of them even know how to FEEL the muscles being worked. Even fewer of them have any idea what a “healthy”, properly functioning body should even FEEL like. Hence, they have do idea how to even start listening to their bodies.
OP, you mentioned that you don’t do flat bench because you have shoulder problems. Don’t you think your main worry should be taking care of that?
Fixing any scapular winging or muscle imbalances within the rotator cuff and adding in the neccessay soft-tissue work/dynamic&static stretching to get and keep your shoulders functioning properly is an absolute pre-req to building huges delts.
Wouldn’t you agree?
Also, please be wary of some of John Berardi’s articles. A few tend to be written with a very all-or-nothing mindset (i.e. I HAVE to be 5%bf year-round!). Also the fact that he repeatedly goes out of his way to use his (former) stats of 200-210lbs, 5%bf in practically every nutritional paradigm he creates gives off the false impression that keeping that bf year-round is something a sane person can do.
Last I read, even salad-obessed , fat-phobic Berardi was toting around a “whooping” 10%bf. (Not that I have a problem with the author or that there is anything wrong with the info in his articles…)