You idiots,
First off, I can’t believe that you guys thought that this was FULLY serious. Who in their right mind would, without joking, name himself Minister of Propaganda, as if I am the Joseph Goebbels of the bodybuilding world. And that I was going to send people to hell. I am not god either. LOL.
Anyway, I was HALF serious. And yes, SENTOGUY has a very important point. It is the intermediates that are in the most danger. As a beginner, thinking back, I actually did things pretty good. I followed a full body routine (and this was before I saw T-Mag) similar to the Arthur Jones and Ellington Darden routines that I made up myself. Then I switched to a Bill Starr routine. Then I switched to a bodypart split. I should have kept on that bodypart split.
The trouble started when I saw a Muscle Media issue featuring Charles Poliquin. I then typed his name into a search engine and found T-Mag. Although I learned a shit load from T-Mag throughout the years, this is when the trouble started. This is also when T-Mag had a few authors bashing bodybuilders. Then I thought to myself, these guys know what they are talking about, those bodybuilding guys do not.
I specifically remember an article titled Question of Strength in which Poliquin was asked why he did’nt shave his forearms. He said if he did shave them, he would also have his eyebrows done by Eduardo of New York and would hang out at bodybuilding contests, where the audience has an IQ of 4 or something and that it took 5 to bark, indicating that bodybuilders are morons.
That is pretty bad to hear for a kid who wants to be a bodybuilder at 18 years old without proper guidance. Then I tried his routines, Ian King’s routines, Don Alessi’s routines, Bryan Haycock. As stated in other threads, these were lost years. People in my gym thought I was withering away and I was.
Some guy in my gym once wanted to beat the shit out of me, my friend told me. It was this big jacked guy. He said I was making him nervous as hell with my frantic pacing between stations, looking at the clock, and just looking like a general nutcase!
I also read Pavel Tsatsouline, who was constantly going on and on about how bodybuilders are idiots too and that it’s all about doing scientific shit like creating myofibrillar hypertrophy and that sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is shit, amongst other scientific foo foo dust.
You had guys like Bryan Haycock and Scott Abel stating that HST and Innervation Training were the only vaild forms of training in the entire world! I am not lying. Scott Abel once said something to this effect years ago in an article. I might be able to find it. My training had spun out of control. I went from being the guy that people called “who Brad? the gym guy?” when describing me, to a guy that hardly worked out properly. It was awful.
Sometimes I did not even work out for weeks because nothing was happening.
After awhile, I started to notice that Poliquin was publishing his same articles in various magazines. He would have the same Q&A article running in Mind Muscle Power, Iron Man and T-Mag at the same time or at various times. Then I heard how this guy was banned from training certain NFL athletes!
I followed Ian King routines. People would see me doing 1 & 1/4 reps, 1 & 1/2 reps, 8 second eccentrics, skipping on one toe, supersetting, giant setting, drop setting, etc. Shit was just out of control!
You had Poliquin speaking of parenteral (IV) vitamin C therapy, jacking up the T levels of athletes from <300 to 1000+ ng/dL from boatloading on zinc, of having female athletes with thighs bigger than those of Tom Platz and Ronnie Coleman, of outlifting juiced to the gills IFBB pros that are 30 to 40 lbs heavier than him, of having new information products that never come out on time or never do come out, of cavemen eating monkey brains, of shelling out loads of money for bison burgers.
Poliquin won’t even talk to you while he is eating his salad at a seminar you paid him to go to. He’ll look back at the clock and say “what time is it there?” No joke, someone told me this.
You got talk of guys stating that you do not need curls and tricep extensions. You got Pavel stating you can build a nice body on a routine of only deadlifts, bench press, and curls three times per week. He had he Bear Routine. I had to go to a chiropractor because of deadlifting three times per week with 5 rep sets. Your body would be an absolute mess, wrought with injuries and postural imbalances.
I also once developed muscle imbalances that sent me to the chiro after doing weeks of German Volume training.
You got this guy Pavel and a host of others stating that bodybuilding is the worst thing to happen to strength training. Meanwhile these guys would be out of a job, considering that nearly all of their articles appear in bodybuilding magazines! Isn’t that something?
You got guys that wanted me to count the tempo of reps. I lost my mind and couldn’t even concentrate on my sets. You had Mentzer, who wanted you to do a 5 set workout every 4 days. You had that Power Factor thing by the Cisco guy.
You had Dan Duchaine, who was pretty good, stating that you could get big on low calorie, high nutrient diets. Dante said he followed that diet and gained 1 lb of muscle in one year.
My training life spun out of control for about 5 years. I know a lot of other guys whom this happened to as well, some that are even well known! Some of them wrote for this site. They said the more complicated they made things, the worse their clients progressed.
You got Pavel stating you do not need a warmup before a max set because people could respond to the KGB knocking on their door without a warmup. How would this feel with 500+ on your back or in your hands?
You got Paul Chek, I saw him speak personally for personal trainers. No one knew what he was talking about. He showed a slide of him doing an overhead squat on a Swiss Ball. He looked like a fuckin’ nut! He basically ripped the bodybuilding world into shreds during his lecture. He said the bench press was not functional too.
I heard this guy got hit in the face with a dumbbell during a Swiss Ball exercise. You got this guy talking in interviews about the qualities of our shits, our feces.
You got this guy Dr. Mercola stating we shouldn’t swim in pools, shouldn’t carry cell phones, shouldn’t shave our faces with a razor, shouldn’t use a microwave, and so on.
You got this guy Waterbury recommending to lift at >90% of the max for ten sets. Your CNS would be fried! 17 sets of singles would put some powerlifters in the hospital.