Also, somewhere along the line, people wanting to be bodybuilders became fascinated with powerlifters. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s a popular internet guru–a nice guy I believe, but is looked upon as some sort of genius even though he says and does some goofy stuff–stated several times that powerlifters who crossed over to bodybuilding smoked their competitions. Who he was referring to, nobody knows.
Then some nerds came on the scene and started to incessantly talk about protein synthesis and stated that because protein synthesis in a muscle takes place for 48 to 72 hours versus the proteins synthesis that is extended for time with anabolic drugs, naturals should train each muscle group twice per week at the minimum. So full body programs and upper-lower splits, which are not inherently bad and actually needed for other goals or training situations, became the mainstay recommendation for naturals. This, coupled with the notion that one should earn their strength bones or go through “strength phases” because after improving their relative strength, they would return to typical bodybuilding programs being able to handle bigger poundages versus what could’ve been done had they not gone through such phases.
It seemed very few people, including myself, didn’t use common sense and think to themselves, “Wait… no one recommending this shit has competed or done well in bodybuilding or looks or has looked like a bodybuilder!”
Even guys with programs that never intended for people to use them for bodybuilding-purist goals have people using them for such purposes, only for them to come on a forum like this and say, “I was doing _____ for some time,” but I don’t look like a bodybuilder. Granted, one can get pretty big on damn near any strength program, but to get everything popping, I believe the vast majority of people wanting to look like bodybuilders need a serious bodybuilding program.
A similar thing happened in powerlifting that I noticed, even though I have only read about powerlifting programs but did not participate. If any powerlifter reads this and I have things wrong, please point it out. But here it goes. We had great powerlifters and bench press specialists here, training with linear periodization and largely bodybuilding methods for everything but the competitive lifts and a few lifts that some powerlifters for which a linear scheme was appropriate (e.g., close grip bench press, military press).
Then Louie Simmons’ methods started being popularized on the net, with the aid of Dave Tate, with a subsequent fascination with European strength training methods. So seemingly everyone started going buck wild with bench, dead, and squat variations, chains, bands, speed work, and so on. We often read about Dave Tate and his earlier injuries and how he met Louie at a meet at which he said something like, “If you keep training like that (linear periodization), you’re going to wind up hurt and not be able to compete,” or something like that. People seemed to gloss over that both these men seemed to be constantly injured anyway and that the very best did not do as they recommended. Not only that, but some powerlifters reported their training stagnated or went backwards despite such seemingly novel training technology and methods (Dan Greene for one).
Others went batshit crazy with frequency, squatting, deadlifting, and benching three or more times per week , again, ignoring that some of the best, never tampered with high frequency on the big lifts and only performed them once per week. This lead to some people getting thoroughly busted.
And so it goes with bodybuilding. People searching for something, trying unorthodox methods, and then realizing they went in a circle!
Again, for any powerlifters who noticed if I got anything wrong in my observation, feel free to point it out and correct me. I followed powerlifters because I was amazed by some.
