Carl:
How you doing Rob? What's new with you. Coach 

Rob:
I'm healthy back on the training bandwagon, so to speak. I'm actually about one week away from a test to tell me whether it goes to the next level- otherwise just trying to stay healthy. Life is good.

Carl:
First question comes from Jerry sags.
I read an article by Arther Jones and he claimed negative only training gave him the best gains, like far and away.

Is he right? 

Rob:
I think it's fair to say that negatives do have some value, but not as a standalone training method. I can say that pretty conclusively.  Heavy negatives can really tax your body and not just your muscles, but also the tendons and ligaments and so forth. I have yet to meet anyone, including myself that could do it long-term. Short-term you can do it, but I think it needs to be done sparingly given most people can handle anywhere between 120 and 140% of their one rep max on a controlled negative.

Here's the pattern that I see many times throughout my training career; you’re doing one thing and then you switch to this new method. If it's sufficiently different, such as heavy duty, high intensity training coming off of a volume phase you will make great games for a while, until your body adapts to that new training stimulus. The problem is that in between while you're getting these incredible results you become almost a religious zealot in terms of, no, this is the way, and this is the only way. 

You're never going to get to your destination unless you're aware of other methods and you have a way of structuring them, such that they build one upon another, but here's the bottom line. As far as negative, only training, can you identify other ways to gain by all means, get everything you can out of heavy negatives, but have half dozen others that you can use in a cohesive logical framework and always be working through them.

Anything else quite honestly, is just running the clock, which a lot of people are doing. Unfortunately. 

Carl:
The next question comes from Terry Gibbs. I've heard you say you don't use creatine much and it doesn't do much for you, but I've also heard you say you put 10 pounds on with the stuff in nine days. Why the discrepancy?

Rob:
Both statements are true. So why they discrepancy? They represent two different points in time. When I first used creatine, it was in 1993 when it first came out. This was priorto EAs introducing phosphoragen, when creatine would go on to become a household word. The product was genuine.

I loaded up on the stuff 20 grams a day for a week, maybe longer, and then cut back to 10 grams a day and the real kick in the ass was I didn't get a thing from it. I didn't get Jack.

So I thought, how can that be? I looked further into it. Just prior to hopping on it, I was gifted a whole lot of venison by a Hunter friend of mine. I had eaten a lot of venison and I had also been eating a lot of tuna, which come to find out are all very rich natural sources of creatine.

So long story short, I was probably already loaded or, or at least close to it. I was also likely using gobs of caffeine which some studies have shown impair or negate most creatine benefits. Since then other studies have disputed it but we’ll save that issue for a different day. So I more or less stayed away from the stuff for a year. 

Then I tried EAs and I put on maybe three to five pounds, nothing earth shattering. That was pretty much it for a long time until one day I got to reading about insulin's effect on protein storage.

I then used lots of dextrose, simple sugar, 75 grams with every creatine dose. Remember when you load, youre dosing four times a day. Then, boom, I see this gain from it. It was anywhere between seven and nine pounds. Needless to say, that is incredibly unhealthy, all that sugar.

The best I ever did on creatine was 10 pounds in nine days and that was straight creatine. I never saw a massive strength increase from that, I don’t even remember a small increase.

I just remember the scale going up and getting a few extra reps here or there. It should be an ACE that you have up your sleeve for when you really need it. It should not be what these kids are doing today. Save it for when you really need it. When you do use it, run it for eight to 12 weeks then come off for at least a month. It takes that long for creatine stores to get back to baseline, at which point you should start seeing results. Again, there are all different sorts of theories, all about how to load out, not to load but the important things are:  get it consistently. take it with food,  add a dash of sodium- creatine is sodium dependent for transport across the muscle cell gradient.

Carl:
Ricky Phelps says, what's your take on BCAAs with extra leucine? Do these formulas work? How much do I need and why can't I just get BCAAs from the way. 

Rob:
The recent research will certainly give you pause and I believe rightfully so. If branch chain aminos, are dosed high enough and timed correctly they can be used for energy, or otherwise stop the body from breaking down muscle during an intense energy demand. Recent research is pointing you to some big problems not the least of which is blood sugar issues.

You don't hear much about this out there today since branch chain amino acids are so prevalent and such a big moneymaker for the supplement industry. Some studies have shown that increased circulating levels of branch chain amino acids have been associated with insulin resistance and type two diabetes. So before you're tempted to reach for the next bottle of BCAA. I would think about that long and hard.

There's no evidence that jacking up the leucine content from a two to one-to-one ratio, which is what has historically been used in the literature. I've seen companies get it up as high as eight one to one and say, this is better. It's not, in fact it actually may make things worse.

Carl:
Next question:  Is left ventricle hypertrophy common among those who lift weights, and can the heart muscle be balanced out by doing steady state cardio? 

Carl:
It is, but there are two different types of Hypertrophy when we talk about the heart, Pathological and physiological. Physiological is good. This would be the left ventricle getting larger, the sinus getting larger so the capacity to handle more blood is increased, but pathological hypertrophy is when the wall gets thicker and the sinus gets smaller, which means that the heart has to work harder to pump the same amount of blood. 

So, if you have been diagnosed with left ventricle hypertrophy, the next thing would be to have an echocardiogram done, to determine if the walls have gotten thicker or the whole sinus has gotten larger.

The latter is not a bad thing. Bodybuilders and weightlifters all see this. It's actually an up-regulation. It's an increase in functionality in the pumping ability of the heart, but if the sinus has actually gotten smaller because the walls have gotten thicker, that is not good.

That's usually followed by some sort of fibrosis of the heart tissue. IGF one can actually help with that or growth hormone, by reversing the fibrosis in the tissue. 

Can can steady state cardio help?

Rob:
Absolutely. Too many bodybuilders and athletes of strength shy away from cardio because they've been told it's going to make you weak.  Bullshit. Your heart is working both when it's pumping blood and when it's expanding to pull in more blood, The heart is always working. One is called eccentric and one is called concentric. Walking steady state cardio, just taking a walk in the morning not doing four miles an hour. Just casually walking, getting your heart rate into the one 120’s, and keeping it there for a long period of time actually improves the eccentric part of the job that actually allows the heart to open up further and relax the muscles and further oxygen coming through. It's a rhythmicity type of function. So yes, steady state cardio is gold.

Carl:
follow-up question.

Last week I had an EKG. I asked how it was and he said good but I'm going to send you for a stress test. I asked why and he said, “well you’ve got an athlete’s heart, I just need to make sure that everything's okay.

Carl:
That is good and they need to look at the type of athlete.

We think that because we did stuff when we were young, that somehow it's going to convey protective mechanisms later on in life. That's not true. You get out what you put in. I would be careful of that generalization, because I know a lot of guys who are still athletes and still in great shape and they're in their sixties and seventies and even eighties.

When you talk to your cardiologists say, is this pathological or physiological? If he asks what you mean, say, well, I know with heavy weightlifting, the heart actually up-regulates, it becomes a bigger, stronger pump that it can pump more blood, the sinuses get bigger.

I also know in pathological changes the walls, get thicker, making the heart less efficient and work harder. Which one do I have? 

He may say you need an echocardiogram to tell that. Then you say, well let's schedule one, show your doctor. You know what you're talking about.

Carl:
Question from Andrew McCabe. 

I read somewhere that pullovers were dangerous. Is that true? If so, are all pullovers dangerous, like a machine pull over vs a dumbbell pullover?

Rob:
Well, first off here are many different variables. You're unique in anatomical makeup and biomechanics. I've also seen some really good and some really bad pullover machines. Pullovers with a dumbbell should offer you more flexibility, at least in that you're not locked into a particular motion as you would be with the machine. On the other hand, with a dumbbell there's no mechanism to press from the elbows, which I think is a key advantage as far as engaging the lats.  Notice I didn't say isolating… engaging the lats. 

There are other things that can be problematic. Some people struggle with imbalances that can really skew things. Meaning if you have a, a bum right elbow or shoulder, and you try to compensate by using more of the left side during the pullover and you start playing with big weights you're gonna get hurt. I would imagine anyone with an imbalance like that would be asking for problems.

The power of pullovers is there to add mass to the upper body, which is tremendous unequaled by, some would say, any other movement for the upper body.

If you're doing pullovers for your lats and your back use a machine, whether it's a Nautilus or some other machine, and don't hold onto the handles, just use your elbows in the pads o when you come down, you spread your hands and you let your elbows go completely behind your back for a full rep. If you're doing pullovers for your chest and shoulders, do them on a bench with free weights 

In the mid to late nineties, I came across an article written by John Perillo, the Canadian trainer who in the early to mid nineties accurately predicted the rise of the 300 pound rip to shreds bodybuilder that nobody at that point could foresee.

He was having his guys eat 10,000 calories a day, a large part of that coming from MCT oils, they absolutely loved medium chain triglycerides. While the high protein low carb, high-fat revolution was really taking off, Perillo advocated putting several tablespoons of MCT oil over rice or other starchy carbs.

He wasn’t going low carb or limiting other food groups, he had a lot of everything in there. Note from experience, if you're going to try to duplicate that with MCTs, you need to build up to it slowly.

There was one column in particular; essentially what he was advocating was doing a 180 from whatever it is that you're currently doing. Be that training, diet, supplements, drugs, whatever, if things weren't working out the way you wanted them to he wanted you to do something rather drastic.

That was actually one of his best tips. 

I can vividly recall one friend who was eating 2,500 calories a day  and shooting 750 milligrams of testosterone a week plus an oral. He dropped the oral. He started eating 4,000 calories a day and brought his testosterone all the way down to two, 300 milligrams a day, and guess what happened? He grew a hell of a lot better and even more incredibly he lost body fat or at least appeared to get leaner because I'm guessing a large part of those calories were from MTT and your body only can do two things with it

Tapering, hyper acceleration, hyper adaptation, accumulation, intensification, training, whatever you want to call it. It works. And it works really well if you know how to cultivate.

Doing something different than what you're doing today. Bottom line, whatever it is you're doing. Take that straight line up for a curve right over the next three to four weeks. Not only will your body likely respond favorably, the mind really gets lit up like Christmas tree. 

Carl:
That was the premise of the book. Big beyond belief with Leo Costa. Yeah. Leo had gone to Bulgaria to train with the Bulgarians and learn from the boat Bulgarian coaches. What he learned was to flirt with over-training right. Then back off and you come back with a power curve. It worked every time you got yourself to that point where, wow, if you really went on for another week, like this, you're going to be completely over-trained and then you backed off.

See you tomorrow. This is the superhuman channel doing reps with the weight of the world.