Alan wants us (by which I think he means men and male-identified people) to avoid the allure of taking exogenous hormones and learn how to progress by improving our training. (Honestly, it’s super-funny, but the joke lands a bit flat for me as someone who isn’t in the primary population of potential steroid users.) The program he lays out looks fun, and I like the emphasis on not going to failure with everything.
‘Bert is a bit hungover and starting to “get serious”. This looks like riding his stationary bike, eating papaya, and paying the “dog tax” for his 8-oz of chicken eaten two and a half times a day. He gives a little speech about scarcity mindset at the end which I think shows an important difference between the psychology of folks who succeed with traditional bodybuilding and a recreational bodybuilder like myself with a long history of emotional eating. He says that for himself “if you’ve done this enough times, the scarcity mindset goes away.” But for plenty of folks, I think it would work the other way around–that the longer you do this, the worse the scarcity mindset would become. Definitely putting a dieting/diet culture TW on this video!
And finally, Omar wants us to know we may be able to maintain strength by only training a lift once a month. He makes the point that a person could switch up their training block to focus on new skills, and just rotate through strength-specific skills occasionally to maintain them. In this way, we’re diversifying our training, keeping motivation higher and potentially improving our overall strength and hypertrophy. I do wonder how individual this is, as I’m pretty sure for me once every 4 weeks isn’t frequent enough for a heavy lift to feel good, but the general point is a good one.
Any recommendations for what I should watch next?
Progressive Strength 