Originally Posted by
liftheavy4life
Good article. I will fully admit I'm one of those people, and I paid the price for it. I did a few templates from Barbell Medicine (I know I know), and I wasted a lot of time. Here's what I found:
1) RPE is junk science. It just simply doesn’t work in practice. You cannot ascribe a subjective scale (perceived exertion) to an objective phenomenon (bar speed). Even after running three programs for about two years, I still cannot tell you the difference between an RPE 6, 7, 8, and 9. The only RPE I can tell you is RPE 10 and that’s only when I fail the next set. RPE simply allows you to “cheat” by choosing a lighter weight because today you are just not “feeling it” today.
2) Reps over 5 are not useful. Reps over 5 simply do not allow you to lift heavy enough. I remember some of the exercises requiring reps of 12. Have you ever tried to consistently do 12 reps of a barbell movement? All that happened was my form slowly broke down, and I chose lower and lower weights because the reps were so exhausting.
3) Too many exercises. More is not better. There are just too many exercises to do them all competently. The issue is the time it takes to learn proper form for 20+ exercises. Many lifts just don’t increase your strength., and some of them may increase strength overtime, but in a sub-optimal manner.
4) Too much time. I was spending 3+ hours on a single workout session trying to fit in all the exercises. I would skip workouts because they simply took too much time, or I was too exhausted from the previous exercise. I also would break the exercises on different days because they took too long to complete. Programs that should have taken 12 weeks took 24 weeks.
5) “Bodybuilding” or hypertrophy is a scam. Professional body builders are a product of time + genetics + diet + drugs. If you have good genes, a good diet, plenty of drugs, and spend 3+ hours in a gym 6 days a week, it doesn’t matter what you are doing, you are going to improve your physique. I ran the hypertrophy program from Barbell Medicine and my physique didn't approve. I just became weaker.
Now I have to eat my humble pie and admit I fucked up. I'm running the NLP model right now.