We all love a ‘bro-sesh’
There is no doubt that a few of you reading this have trained in the classic body part split routine in the past. But what can bodybuilding techniques bring to our fitness?
~ James Molden
First off when I say bodybuilding, I am sure the things that come to mind are tupperware full of chicken and broccoli, mirrors, and excessive biceps curls. Although this may be true in many cases, bodybuilding can actually offer us some benefits when it comes to health, stress management, and of course building strength and muscle capacity to cope with intensity. There are numerous reasons why the average person should be utilising training methods derived from bodybuilding.
When we train there are so many contractions happening in the body, and it is through bodybuilding that we can strengthen these contractions to aid our functional movements.
I want to focus on three advantages of bodybuilding techniques in relation to health and fitness:
Stress management
Motor control
Fit for function, fit for life
Stress! We all feel it at some point. Have you ever trained yourself into a hole? The honeymoon phase of your early days of fitness feels like a long-distant memory, and you can't find your way out. You want to love it again, but you dread the grind and feel like you're fighting your body every step of the way. "Eat more, sleep more, read this motivation book" - even the well-meaning advice of coaches and friends doesn't seem to help. You’ve hit burnout!!!
Training is a process by which repeated stimulus and stress creates a physical adaptation. (I have previously written articles on progessive overload and supercompensation) That adaptation is the body making itself stronger, more aerobically fit, more flexible, etc, in order to better deal with the stresses that you are placing your body under. The cycle of adaptation requires an appropriate amount of stress and an adequate amount of recovery time for the neural, physical, and hormonal changes to take place.
That is all well and good as training is often quite easy to control, you're in the correct environment (gym), there are many control variables at hand (weights) and you are able to choose the intensity for the day (scale). However, stresses from everyday life are less easy to control - workload, annoying co-worker, late transport, etc and these stress levels can cause long lasting damage to the body if not alleviated. It is at these times that we want to hit the gym, and rightly so. It is maybe the type of training that you choose that could offer benefits to stress management.
It is the combination of over cooking training and life that can lead to burnout.
“Burnout arises when this delicate balance of stress and recovery gets out of whack. When you have too much stress for the given amount of recovery time you are allowing your body, then your body gets behind in the adaptation process.” ~ Marcus Filly 2019
The result is that you're constantly under recovered. This leaves you with lower energy throughout the day (not necessarily in your training since you are often using stimulants and adrenaline to get you through), feeling achy, and often feeling mentally cloudy.
Bodybuilding focused your attention to the contractions rather than the intensity and this can help you to get a good training session without maxing out the intensity and stressing the body to burnout. Let's be honest training isolation muscle groups feels good, who doesn’t love a pump! It is ok to walk away from a training session without feeling sick.
TEMPO Resistance Training ( A common sight now )
We see this all the time in the gyms these days, but has long been a favourite of the bodybuilding old-schoolers to create time under tension. Control your lifting with purposeful TEMPO resistance training (see Connor’s article for more information). Tempo resistance training is a great way to build some control into your lifting loads. Tempos can purposefully keep you from constantly maxing out your weights every day.
Isolation
Don't neglect the small muscles and isolated movements. Improve your strength foundation by training stability muscles that can get compensated for by bigger muscles during compound lifts. Isolation movements will be lower stress on the body which can be a great thing in staying ahead of the burnout process.
This leads to the next advantage of increased motor control (the regulation of movement by the central nervous system). This is crucial because motor control is the base of support for all types of exercise. What does this mean? Well it is simple really, we are building our bodies to be robust machines that will kick ass into our 90’s. Plus if you are wanting to master a complex movement like a muscle up you will need to spend enough time bodybuilding to learn the motor control in similar patterns such as pulling and pushing to make the high skill feel familiar in its components.
“I spent five years mastering the basics when I first started bodybuilding . . . The problem with fitness today is that no one wants to take the time to master the basics.” ~ Ben Pakulski
At Eleven Nexus we believe that the work we do in the gym is to elevate health, not a quick fix, and should be viewed with value as something that is integral to life.
“In order for it to be successful we have to not see it as something we ‘have to do’, ‘should do’, or ‘ought to do’ for our health, but as something that we do because we personally value its positive benefits to our wellbeing.”
When you work backwards from living the best life possible and look at the type of exercise needed to support this you will arrive at functional movements, and as previously mentioned life and training is full of different contractions and to develop stability and control we need to train the muscles required for the functional pattern. Bodybuilding supports living a larger life because the contractions found within it directly support our function in our everyday lives and it causes relatively low stress on the central nervous system. Put simply, bodybuilding keeps us fit for our daily lives without adding unnecessary stress.
Curls anyone???
