1. Don't train heavy all year long.
OK fine. But instead of suggesting a week or month cycle. Colgan suggests training heavy for 6 months and then lighter for roughly the other 6 months....
Personally I can't see going that long without some good hard lifting.
2. You can only give a maximum effort for about 5 seconds during which time the body uses up it's stored instant energy of ATP (adenosine triphosphate). After that you have about 5 or 6 seconds where you can work at about 10% less than max by using the ATP-CP (creatine phosphate) shuttle. Creatine donates it's phosphate to create more ATP. But this takes some time/a chemical reaction. And how much creatine you have in the muscle determines how much more energy you will have. (So eating meat, or taking creatine will make a difference if your effort last more than 5 seconds.)
After 10 seconds, that's it. Now you have to convert glycogen to ATP. This greatly reduces strength and begins training mainly the capillaries, slow twitch fibers, etc around the muscle fibers instead of mainly the muscles. The fast twitch muscle fibers have dropped out at this point. If you do a lot of high rep lifting, some of the fast twitch fibers will even convert to slow twitch.
Finally fast twitch fibers grow stronger more quickly and easily with heavy exercise than slow twitch.
Furthermore study after study has shown that anything above 6 reps greatly decreases strength gains.[b]
Personally I no longer take creatine phosphate or eat meat so I don't think I'm going to get as much out of the 6th to 10th second of a hard effort. So I'm thinking I should only lift heavy for no more than 5 seconds at a time????
This would mean sets of at most 2 reps. (I do know a couple people who've had success with that. Champion powerlifter Doug Hepburn (vegetarian) did 15 sets of 2 reps back in the 50's. Also knew a 60 years old man who could bench almost twice his bodyweight who only did 2 or 3 reps per set. Isaac Nesser primarily did singles (he was in Guiness for largest muscular chest).
3. [b] Colgan says that it takes 2 minutes to replenish 50% of the creatine in a muscle (which is then converted to the instant energy of ATP)and 4 minutes to replenish 90%.
Thus he suggests resting at least 4 minutes between sets, I'm thinking this means if doing multiple sets I should make sure to rest at least say 6 minutes between sets since I'm not worried about getting done is less than an hour. (I'm doing less exercises.)
4. Eccentrics, of course the eccentric portion is more important than the concentric, but Colgan goes on to strongly advocate negatives EVERY workout. He produces studies that show negatives are superior, increasing muscle gains by almost double IF DONE CORRECTLY. He says you should never use more than 125% of your max. Beyond that they become useless.
5. Colgan says that 72 to 96 hours after a workout, your body is still breaking down and then your body is still building up an additional 72 to 96 hours after that. This means that you shouldn't work out a muscle anymore then once a week and maybe even once every 8 days.
6. I'll mention one last thing although there's plenty more. Shoulders are easily injured and Colgan says to never do wide grip presses or even close to straightened dumbell flyes because of possible injury. But he goes even further in apparently thinking any overhead pressing at all is too dangerous
The only pressing movement for shoulders he recommends is a bench press. (I think I disagree on this one.)
So based on this book, I'm thinking I should workout a muscle only once a week and doing no more than 2 reps per set (although this can cause injury eventually, so I'll see how it goes) plus negatives at around 120%.
). I'd say around the 120%ish is a safe amount, but bear in mind that these are very intense moves & the risk of overtraining is bigger than using normal training, as is the chance of injury.
). I'd say wide or very narrow grips are as safe as "normal" grip in most cases.
