It’s why I have a problem with idea of “train movements, not muscles”.
If you bother to go read up on some basic anatomy and train all your muscles groups with equal intensity, there would be none of all this fucking overthinking about horizontal planes, vertical planes, ratios, etc.
This shit would inevitably resolve itself if you’re not an idiot who only trains chest and arms.
I think this is why people nowadays simply can’t fathom how experienced bodybuilders can train “instinctively”.
Solid thread idea.
Worst advice: You can get jacked with low reps. I’m sure some people can get jacked while doing low reps, but all I got was jacked up connective tissue. If I could go back and re-read all those articles now I’d have a much different understanding of them.
Best advice: Go sign up for a competition, now. That advice comes from this very forum. I wound up training and eating harder than I ever had to get ready for that, and it was a very eye opening experience.
That’s how I learned to really swim. I didn’t know how to swim very well, totally exhausted after 300 meters. So I signed up for an ironman… HEHEHE. Knowing that I had to swim 2.4 miles in open water made me focus and learn.
Competition is huge. I got the biggest and strongest I had ever been training myself up for a 275lb keg press in a competition that was eventually canceled for COVID. It didn’t take away any of the growth I got.
And people want to train FOREVER before they enter a competition. It’s crazy. When I wrestled in high school, I learned a double leg takedown and how to sprawl before I was in my first dual meet. It was a total of 3 weeks between when I started training and when I competed. You got good FAST in those situations.
I have gotten so much great advice off this forum. I knew nothing when I got here, and although I’ve struggled quite immensely to implement a lot of the advice, it’s all been solid and fitting and I know a lot more now. I joined this place skinny fat without an ounce of muscle, and although I’m not where I want to be, I’ve come a long way. I owe it all to the members of this sweet place.
Idk how I even found this place. Probably a google search 
I found this place because a friend of mine was telling me to try Androsol, which was some kind of old school prohormone. It was still LEGAL. I don’t know about the legal status now. It came in the form of a spray which you had to spray on your body like 20 times or more (can’t remember) at different locations so there would be no overlap while keeping clear of your genitalia. Yes, that’s what it said on the bottle. I was covered with some sticky, powder-like residue on the parts of my body under my clothes everyday for 2 weeks each “cycle” lol.
I think I bought a couple of bottles under another username on 2 or 3 occasions to save on shipping costs since a couple of others also wanted them along with a product called Ribose C or something which wasn’t any kind of anabolic. Not sure why I did but that tasted REALLY GOOD.
Then I stayed for the roid forum. After that it was for PX.
I found it simultaneously through both a guy who was helping me get sober early on, like 2001 or so, and a female powerlifter who had an independent retail supplement and lifting gear/equipment/you name it store.
I was lifting over at my buddies place and he had an original Testosterone poster, and gave me a yellow on black Testosterone shirt, and Grow! post workout.
Then, wearing the shirt and stopped into the shop, the woman then sold me a tub of Grow! And a couple of bottles of the original Mag-10. She said that stuff was really good. She was right!
Anyways, that all came together which led me to this.
I never tried Mag-10 but I still remember the marketing material stating it was made with new “nano-dispersion technology”. It was the FIRST thing I thought of when I watched Infinity War and Iron Man had a new nano tech suit.
I think TC may be the real Tony Stark.
That was the second iteration of it, in capsule form. That must have been around '04-'05, right before the ban. I tried that a couple of times too.
The stuff I got was liquid in a little 5hr. Energy sized bottle and you could either take a cap full, or little dose sized scoop thingy. Had kind of a hot, ester/cinnamon kind of flavor.
Hot ester cinnamon DEFINITELY sounds like an over-the-hill stripper…
T Nation was always where the “bad boys” hung out for training/nutrition discussion. You knew you were going to get flamed when you posted there. I lurked for years before finally signing on to answer a thread about “how much milk do you drink a day”, comically enough while I was doing Super Squats and putting in a gallon a day. It all comes full circle.
Haha, I think I didn’t really bother with the first iteration as it would have been redundant, if you know what I mean, at the time. But the copywriting was so bloody good, especially the one for that product that was supposed to be able to bypass the myostatin gene that prevents muscle growth.
Same results. Furniture broken, cops called, mysterious stab wounds upon waking.
Thats why I stay off the drugs.
Actually, that was some really good advice I received from another buddy/fellow lifter, and psychiatrist- He said “Don’t do steroids. You’re too high strung and bad things will happen.”.
He was right too. That was after the Mag-10 though.
True. Alot of them half ass the pulling accessory work just to get in the reps.
I might be the only one, but I honestly have trouble getting the feel I want with this machine; I’m able to feel my lats better with dumbbells rows or cable straight-arm pull-downs. I know I’m a weirdo, because everyone that has access to the Nautilus machine says it’s the way to go, but there you go.
Worst advice:
You gotta get stronger to get bigger. (usually spoken by someone who is fairly strong by not as big as you would expect)
You gotta eat big to grow big. (usually spoken by someone who needs to “eat big” a little less)
This is what worked for me! (usually spoken by someone who thinks they’re better than they are)
Best advice:
Try everything for sufficient time to honestly assess if it’s working
If something isn’t working, you can change it. Everyone is different.
Not everyone has the same goals, so their training won’t be the same.
S
I started lifting weights in February 1968 in the sophomore year in college at the university weight room. For you youngsters info, our football team did not have a weight room and only two team members did lift weights in the weight room along side of the rest of us. (Our football team had just defeated Georgia in the Liberty Bowl.) I knew absolutely nothing about lifting weights and was way too intimidated to ask those two football players anything. But there was a recommended weight program on the wall that was used my students that took the weight training 8 week class (I did not take the class, but I did incorporate the routine).
All that said, I had little knowledge as I pursued the best body I could get. And I was making pretty good progress.
Worst Advice: Any weight training program suggested in a Weider magazine (I think it was called Muscle Builder back in those days.) Example: I found an arm specialization routine by Sergio Oliva in Muscle Builder. It involved 6 bicep exercises and 6 tricep exercise super-setted for 6 sets of 8 reps. I got a huge pump by the mid point of the 3rd round, or a total of about 240 reps. From there on I began to lose my pump. But I wanted arm the size of The Myth, so I had to press on. By the time I accomplished the 576th arm rep, my arms felt like noodles and looked smaller than when I started.
Best Advice: I had tried various Weider suggested routines from his magazines from time to time. I good friend who liked Iron Man magazine best suggested I try the basics as most Iron Man magazine routines were. After a few months of sanity training I never looked back at a Weider article for training advice.
This is a good thread idea…
Worst : pretty much everything that my junior high gym teacher said…“dont squat or deadlift cause its bad for you…do leg extentions instead” is the one that i remember the most.
Best : this is hard to narrow down so i will say it like this…following certain YouTube channels like john meadows, dave tate and brian alsruhe ( @alpha ) gave me a lot of good things to keep in mind. I also have pulled some good things from jujimufu as well.
Awesome thread idea PWN.
BEST: Strong, Fast, and Brutal
WORST: You have to extend your lower back as hard as you can when you deadlift/squat/row. Maybe this works for a lot of people, but it has fucked my back up a minimum of 10 times. Not just a little bit either, my wife had to help me put on pants, socks, and shoes for a week or two at a time.
Before I ever went on, I rode the bus with two guys who would go through the rate my physique sub, and flame almost everyone. This was probably around 2010.
I don’t know what the best advice I’ve ever gotten is. I’ll think about it.
THE WORST:
Being told not to do things.
Don’t run! You’ll lose muscle. Well, I was running miles daily at one point in my life and was in amazing shape. When I stopped, I got out of shape. (Other options besides running, I know.)
Don’t train abs! Squats and deadlifts will take care of that. Well, I used to and had strong, somewhat visible abs. When I stopped, they got weak and went away.
Don’t train arms! Benching and rowing will take care of that. Nope.
Don’t go high rep! Low reps are the best (I was influenced by Rippetoe here). I’m not using barbells right now, but when I begin again, I’m thinking about sticking in the 6-12 rep range for a while.
Don’t squat if you have any buttwink! Believing this just led to me trying fifty thousand different ankle mobility moves that led nowhere. I don’t even know why I cared. I wasn’t worried about getting hurt, I just thought my squat needed to look a certain way. I do think a certain amount of rounding on the squat can lead to some issues, and that some people could stand to fix a few things, but it’s not the end of the world. This kneesovertoes guy seems to have better advice here than most. If I had to try to fix buttwink ever, I’d probably go his route.
I’m sure there’s more but I can’t think of it. The whole keeping your pushes and pulls within the right ratio thing has been touched on, but I fell for that too. Like Pwn said, how do you even calculate that?
Lesson: do it all. Work all the muscles, in all the rep ranges, and do a variety of activities - lifting, calisthenics, running, biking, playing sports.
I still find myself reading articles on nutrition and getting worried about what I’m doing, haha. Working on that. No longer care much about what people say about lifting.