Beyond Brawn - The Insider's Encyclopedia on How to Build Muscle && Might

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. When establishing your current maximum single for an exercise, in order to

calculate your singles progression scheme, you do not have to actually lift a

maximum weight and risk injuring yourself. Use the conversion charts given

in Chapter . en no matter what rep count you normally use you can

compute the equivalent single-rep maximum.

Exercise selection

. Choose exercises you can safely perform over the long term. With experi-

ence you will find the exercises that best suit your body structure and per-

sonal preferences. Once you have found your preferred major core exercises,

then you can stick with them over the long term. It is a fallacy that you must

regularly change your exercises in order to keep progressing. Changing your

exercises around excessively is even counterproductive because it stops you

from applying yourself to a given group of exercises for long enough to really

milk them dry.

. One person’s selection of a safe, enjoyable and productive core group of

exercises may be very different from another’s. is is why many exercises

and variations are described in  ’ -  

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. In my youth, the squat and bench press were core exercises that I did with

almost religious consistency, and later on the barbell deadlift became a core

exercise. But due to abusive exercise technique, and downright foolishness, I

damaged my back and knees. I was not using good exercise technique, and I

paid a heavy price. As a result I now cannot safely perform the barbell squat

Once you have designed a good program along the lines promoted

by this book, and have fine-tuned it according to the guidelines

of this chapter, stop looking for another way to train. Instead, get

set for a long training period steadily accumulating gains. Rather

than look for a better way to train, look for ways to recover better

between workouts, and to focus better during your workouts so

that you can train harder and with better form. ese two strate-

gies will improve your gains, for sure. But looking for another way

to train, when you have already found a good one, is almost cer-

tainly not going to improve your gains.

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