poor use of time.

In sculpting, you slap the clay on first and shape it later. In much the same way, muscle growth is
about putting on a foundation of size before going in and trying to balance things out a lot. If you
try to balance too much instead of focusing on general growth, you’ll get a balanced physique
that’s too small to compete or be noticed ini n clothes. And if you want to get big from there, you
still have to do the heavy work and you’ll throw that balance off again and have to focus on it
AGAIN later… kind of a waste
waste of the first balance run!

An important feature of career-length muscle

muscle growth is that your younger
younger years are much better
better
suited for building your core muscularity. You have fewer injuries (just due to less time spent
training heavy up to that point), and
a nd the injuries you do get can recover more quickly than they
do in older lifters. But once you’re older, “chiseling” training is ideal because it’s not overly taxing
or injury-causing, but as long as you have your base of muscularity already, this kind of training
is exactly what you need at that point. Almost the quintessential example of such an approach is
John Meadows. If you look at his earlier training (back when he wasn’t famous), it was chock-full
of heavy compounds to give him most of his muscle. In the last several years (and now that he’s
well into his 40s), John has been focusing on perfecting hishis physique with much moremore targeted
training, and in fact inventing many excellent exercises that do just that.

The thing is, you’re not John Meadows, and neither am I. For younger folks looking to get their
best possible results,
results, the heavy
heavy basics should be the best
best focus. But what are too many younger
lifters doing? Looking to copy what the older pros are doing verbatim. Not a good idea, because
what the pros are doing now is good for them NOW.
NOW. And unless you’re already
already a lean 250lbs, it
might be a better idea for you to focus on the heavy basics more and on the twists and tweaks less
until you’re older, bigger, and actually have something to shape.

PS, I have a video on just this same topic as well. I’ll post it in the next post.