as “wimps” and “underachievers.” Who wanted to be conservative? Who was
interested in being “realistic”? I wanted to be huge!. Being very young at the time I could apparently get away with harmful
exercises, techniques, and abuse of intensity enhancers, at least over the short
term. So I continued with those harmful practices. ose dangerous prac-
tices included gross overtraining, squatting with my heels raised on a board,
performing hack machine squats, squatting with the bar too high on my
shoulders, bench pressing with a very wide grip, bench pressing to my upper
chest, performing deep flyes and lying and standing triceps extensions, per-
forming stiff-legged deadlifts with an exaggerated full range of motion, and
including specific “cheating” movements. Some of those techniques came to
haunt me a few years later, when knee and back problems permanently limi-
ted my training.. Had I listened to those “wimps” who urged a conservative approach to train-
ing, and had I listened more to my own body, then I would not have caused
the long-term damage that I did. Today I promote a conservative approach
to training in general, and to exercise selection and technique in particular.
Experience has taught me that the conservative approach is not only the saf-
est way, it is actually the most productive and satisfying, over the long term.. e conservative approach is not just limited to exercise selection and
technique. It also concerns exercise program design. Most people train too
much. Not only is this counterproductive for short-term results, it produces
the overtraining that wears the body down and causes long-term structural
problems.. All this assumes that you actually keep training over the long term. An
obsession leads to burnout because it produces poor results for most people.
It causes so much frustration that most people give up training after a year
or few, or they turn to drugs.. When you are obsessed you tend to discard reason and intelligence, and
become all passion and emotion. is leads to gullibility and following poor
training programs, skewed diets, bad exercises, and destructive ways of per-
forming exercises that should be safe and super productive. is is precisely
what happened to me. I trained too much (and thus wasted a big chunk of
my life), followed skewed diets, used harmful exercises, and when I did use
the best exercises I often used perverted and destructive variations.