Why you shouldn't cooking up training programs.

In English - Ελληνικά

 

Preview of: Practical Programming for Strength Training by Mark Rippetoe & Lon Kilgore with Glenn Pendlay.

Cooking Up Training Programs for the Gym.

This is not a typical programming "cookbook." There are many weight training books for sale—some at rather

exorbitant prices—that lay out a program in current use by a winning sports team or an individual of some note (athlete, actor, model, etc.). These are "cookbooks"; they propose to provide recipes for training success. Follow the recipes, they promise, and you will be as good as the Spurs and as ripped as Vin Diesel.

Actual cookbooks are usually written by skilled chefs who design the dishes with their trained staff, test them

privately, and then cook them publicly—say, in restaurants or on TV shows—using their skills and experience, specific tools, fully equipped kitchens, and just the right high-quality ingredients. Many people have attempted to cook gourmet food from cookbooks and had results that failed to resemble the dish produced by the author. 

Why did the recipe fail? After reading a recipe, do you magically develop the skills of a chef? Did you

use the right tools? There is a big difference between a good Solingen steel French knife and a can opener. And the ingredients might not be quite the same. When the recipe called for a shitake mushroom, did you use a can of stems and pieces? When the recipe called for Maui onions, did you use onion salt?

If a coach decides to use a weight training cookbook, the following are required: 1) the coach must be trained and think the same way as the original coach (the chef who wrote the recipe), 2) the training equipment (cooking tools) used in the program must be available, and 3) the athletes to be trained (ingredients) must be exactly like the athletes who trained with the original program, the one that actually might have worked. Failure to meet these requirements will result in a less-thanideal performance (inedible mess). 

Following someone else's set program is usually a recipe for failure. Reading the training cookbooks and seeing how other people solve the programming puzzle is part of the education process, but coaches and athletes must understand why successful programs are put together the way they are so they can develop their own programs specific to their circumstances. Copying and cannibalizing successful programs without

understanding why they were successful is never a good idea. An understanding of the realities and practicalities of progressive training and periodization is.

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