Beyond Brawn

A holistic approach to weight-training allows me to benefit tremendously in many areas of my life. For example, in terms of increasing my intellectual capacity:

It enables me to rid myself of the many worries and frustrations that surface in everyday life as lifting weights, or going for 20 minute runs, encourages my mind and emotions (emotional intelligence) to refocus and attach to the things that I find most important. For me that means being able to overcome distractions, very quickly, and then return to completing books or consuming information after each workout.

Training hard systematically increases my heart rate, causing my blood stream and brain cells to be enriched with oxygen. As a result, for years, I have been able to work throughout the day and then stay up during the early hours of the morning absorbing more and more information. I have been intellectually profiting from the physical benefits of training since starting my law degree in 1999.

For a related discussion about how to discover and develop your numerous intelligences, which are all connected (that is Body, Self, People, Maths, Picture, and Music Intelligences), please see blog post: ‘Stop Others from Limiting Your 8 Intelligences Now!’

If you are curious or interested in improving your physical intelligence using weight-lifting then I highly recommend that you read ‘Beyond Brawn’ written by Steve McRobert.

In the meantime, this review will provide a brief but detailed summary of many of the key points mentioned within the book for anyone who want to start benefiting from the author’s work as soon as possible, especially if you have already started weight-training.

Introduction

Did you know that possibly the smartest man in the world, Christopher Langham, is into Weight-Training?

It is no coincidence that, due to the negative behaviour of some bodybuilders, most people do not know or understand how a holistic approach to weight-training can easily strengthen your fitness, flexibility, health, mind, self-esteem, and confidence.

Weight-training is truly one of the greatest activities on earth, as no matter where you are now – big or small, strong or weak, young (teenager) or old, male or female – it allows you to solely compete with yourself, and your progress will be visible and measurable.

Even though there are many people around the world who regularly attend a gym, for reasons mentioned within this review, the vast majority will always struggle to fulfil their full potential, especially in terms of gaining muscle and strength.

Therefore, regardless of who you are, to ensure that you are well informed and can enjoy all the benefits associated with bodybuilding well into your 60’s, I strongly recommend that you read the book ‘Beyond Brawn,’ written by Stuart McRobert.

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Holistic Weight-Training

Year after year, bodybuilders are depicted within pictures, documentaries, and videos (e.g. youtube.com) as extremely egotistical, drug consuming, all-image-and-no-substance kind of people, who possess abnormally sized muscular bodies, and may grunt and shout whilst lifting insane quantities of weight.

However, like most things in life, there is always more than one-way to do something, so you must not let the stereotypical behaviour of others misguide you!

Within ‘Beyond Brawn,’ McRobert advocates, and has demonstrated throughout his time, an approach to weight-training that is against the consumption of drugs, excessive narcissism, unhealthy preoccupations with body fat levels, or conventional training routines. Instead, he shows you how weight-training is about creating a physique that you are happy with in terms of the way you look and perform.

Within his approach your health is put before your appearance and performance, therefore, you are encouraged to carry out some form of aerobic conditioning (i.e. running, skipping, etc) 2 to 3 times a week, whilst also maintaining good nutrition such as the continuous consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables.

In contrast, most bodybuilders follow conventional training methods, and are primarily concerned with building muscle and strength. Typically, they do not prioritise aerobic work in their training programs, or consume a balanced diet.

With McRobert, bodybuilding is about selecting exercises that are best suited to you as an individual, and not pursuing routines that you will find harmful even though they have been proven to work excellently for others.

Ultimately, you are discouraged from becoming competitive, but encouraged to focus solely on your own improvement by, incrementally, increasing the weight (poundage) that you lift every week, for each exercise that you choose to do.

This approach to weight-training is designed to serve you for a lifetime, demonstrating that it is all about your health, physique, and strength, coupled with personal enjoyment and comradeship with fellow bodybuilders.

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Hard Gainers & Easy Gainers

Setting the scene, McRobert informs us that weight trainers can be separated into two distinct groups: hard gainers and easy gainers.

Hard gainers are the genetically average or disadvantaged drug-free individuals, who respond poorly, if at all, to conventional training methods.

Easy gainers, are the few genetically talented, who find it easy to gain muscle and strength almost regardless of whatever type of training program that they follow. As long as they train, they grow.

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Conventional Training

A conventional approach to weight-training consists of carrying out more weight-training days than non-weight-training days during the week, with multiple exercises per body part, and a great number of sets per workout.

McRobert informs us that since the 1960’s, the widespread, but secretive, use of steroids lead to increasingly unrealistic training goals, and conventional training approaches, being promoted to the majority of people.

However, the genetically typical and non-drug taking individual has a body that is light years away from the bodybuilding elite, therefore, unless you have a terrific genetic inheritance for building muscle, he claims that you will find the conventional approach to weight-training unproductive.

Perversely, it is often the easy gainers within the training world, who become coaches and instructors, and advise the masses on how to build muscle with the use of conventional training methods.

After personally experiencing many years of weight-training failure, McRobert (a hard gainer) designed or discovered an unconventional approach to training, which he claims will, relatively speaking, make hard gainers become easy gainers.

On the other hand, he asserts that if you have better than average genetics for building muscle and strength (easy gainer), then you will make more progress using his methods as oppose to following any conventional approach to training.

‘… unless you see through all the fraud, and stop imitating the training of people who have an exceptional genetic talent, it is highly likely that if you too will be added to the list of training failures.’

Unconventional Training

In regards to his unconventional approach to weight-training, McRobert states that:

Bodybuilding is not about individually hitting all the bits and pieces of the body to ensure complete and balanced development. It is only by applying yourself to getting stronger in the big exercises that you will then get bigger all over.

Fundamentally, you (hard or easy gainer) need to pick the biggest and best exercises that work for you, and then devote years to getting strong and stronger using your selection.

You must adopt this radical and abbreviated training method right from the start, rather than first wasting perhaps many years on conventional and inappropriate training instructions.

No single, universally effective, training routine caters for the needs and purposes of all individuals. Therefore, you need to adjust my approach to fit with your requirements, age, level of development, and lifestyle. You have to create routines that fit your uniqueness.

It will still be necessary for you to train hard, at times pushing yourself through considerable discomfort. However, you must never train if you do not feel carefully rested from your previous workout, and if in doubt you should train less, as some exercises will need more than ninety-six hours of rest for organised recovery, and even more time for your body to grow additional muscle.

You should not train flat out during every session, as this will impair your recuperation abilities, motivation, tolerance to exercise, quality of diet, and ability to increase the weight for every exercise each week.

To be able to lift a slightly heavier weight each week, it is essential to let your body fully recover from your training. This means that rest and sleep should be at the top of your priorities if you are to make as much progress as quickly as possible.
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Abbreviated Training

Abbreviated training involves dedicating 5 years to making progress with the amount of weights (poundage) that you lift using five of the biggest exercises such as those listed below:

Squat
Dead-lift
Bench Press
Seated Press
Pull Down

You should do both the bent legged and stiff legged dead-lift variations, though not both in the same training cycle.

Your weight-training life should revolve around adding a little more poundage to each exercise every week or two, whilst maintaining excellent form. A little means one or two pounds except, very early in your training cycle, where you may be able to add larger increments each week without over extending yourself. For instance, you may start-off early within a cycle with adding around 10% to each exercise. Later, you drop to adding only about 5%, and so on, as the total weight that you lift starts to get heavier and heavier.

Even though the majority of your training focus should be on five of the biggest exercises, you should also carry out secondary exercise after the main areas have been trained. Secondary exercises include mid-section work (i.e. sit-ups, side bends, crunches, etc), shoulder work, calf work, neck work, arm work, and finger and hand work.

You should do a moderate amount of stretching a few times a week, which will ensure that you maintain a certain level of flexibility. It will assist your body’s ability to recuperate or recover from strenuous exercise. However, you must not be troubled by it, but also not neglect your stretching.

With progressive weights being the key, you must not let yourself become too concerned on the number of reps or sets that you perform. But it is important that you stick with the rep number you choose for each exercise, changing it only from cycle to cycle if desired. Generally, 5-8 reps would be used for most exercises, but squats and secondary movements would usually have higher reps.

For those who do not know, ‘rep’ stands for repetition. If you hang with both arms from an overhead bar, pull yourself up, and then lower yourself back to your starting position that would be considered a rep. If you perform this same action 3 times, then that will be 3 reps, etcetera. A series of reps consist of a set. For example, if you pulled yourself up 3 times, took a rest for a minute or so and then pulled yourself up another 3 times, you would have completed 2 sets of 3 reps. Time is the difference between a rep and a set. There is no time taken for rest between reps, but always a minute or more taken for a rest between sets.

As a rule, generally, you should train both the dead-lift and squat, at most, once per week each, and the three other major exercises twice a week, or three times every two weeks.

You should do two of the five big exercises during the same workout, and the other three large exercises within another session during the week.

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Training Cycle

The exact length of any training cycle should not be predetermined unless you are locked into a deadline that cannot be extended. Stretch each cycle out for as long as you can, adding a little poundage to each of your core exercises. For instance, a medium to long term cycle could run in these four stages.

3 or 4 weeks of concentrating on form and consolidation with the weights being built-up from 85-90% to 95% of your previous best weight.
Next few weeks creep back to your previous best weights
Then the growth phase, the first few weeks of moving into new poundage territory, reducing the number of sets, and even reducing the training frequency of some of the secondary exercises (if total demand feels excessive)
Keep the growth phase going for as long as possible, notching up a pound or two a week on each of your core exercises. Keep the secondary exercises progressing too if they are not inhibiting the core movements.

If you are stuck for three or at most four weeks at the same weight and reps in most of your big exercises, this may indicate that you are temporarily at the end of your training progression, and that is the time to stop.

At the end of your cycle, relax for 7-10 days, in order to be fully rested and recovered from your previous cycle, and then start your next training period.

Conclusion

Having carried out conventional weight training approaches for over 15 years, in support of the author, I confirm that they have always caused me to:

Over train due to the high intensity of my workouts
Sustain injuries due to insufficient recovery before I start another high intensity training session
Neglect stretching due to experiencing severe muscle soreness and a busy training schedule (4 to 5 training sessions per week)

As a result, despite being an easy gainer, during the long term I had failed to achieve my full potential for developing muscle and strength due to, frequently, needing long periods to recover from my injuries.

With my years of experience, overtime, I realised that following a conventional approach was not completely right for me so I started to carry out a form of abbreviated training similar to that recommend by McRobert.

Using my abbreviated training approach (i.e. squats, bench press and pull downs), I found that I was able to build more strength and muscle consistently without overtraining or sustaining any injuries.

In further agreement with the author’s approach to weight-training, I have always put my health before my appearance and performance. Therefore, as well as watching my diet, I do aerobic work (20 minute runs) 2 to 3 times a week, and regularly stretch in order to maintain my flexibility.

Nonetheless, reading ‘Beyond Brawn’ still enabled me to improve my training program drastically, and become aware of many of the things that I did, which would have caused me problems in the future.

McRobert wrote this book as a referencing source that you will need to return to again and again for crucial bits of information. As a result, I was unable to mention within the scope of this review many of the other significant factors to training that he emphasizes and highlights.

As a concluding point, even though ‘Beyond Brawn’ is primarily about being able to build more muscle and strength, for those who are already big or strong, weight-training is also about holistically reducing muscle or body fat, or becoming more defined by improving one’s strength endurance.

Until next time, “get scientific!”

Tom