It would not be an overstatement to say that even in the age of Internet, the majority of people are entirely oblivious when it comes to fitness or bodybuilding and how to improve their overall health. Some go so far as to ask ludicrous questions like : how to build a muscular body by using supplements only, without ever having to go to the gym and lift weights.
You’ve got the supplement industry to blame for that scale of misinformation obviously. Of course, not all people are that clueless, however, your average recreational lifter still thinks that the optimal methods to build muscle and lose fat are by doing the standard bodybuilding body part split routines, increasing time under tension and using food supplements.
It all comes down to the fact that modern people in this age of instant gratification aren’t used to doing hard work anymore and nobody is willing to put the effort if they aren’t seeing results in the quickest time possible. The supplement industry made them believe in magic pills and powders and so-called fitness gurus shove all kinds of garbage on complex lifting techniques into their brain which would make even the most enthusiastic beginner frustrated.
As we previously said the fitness supplement industry isn’t making it any easier with the propagation of mentality of quick gratification, offering an easy way out, different shortcuts in the form of supplements, poor diet plans or ineffective video tutorials. In order to build muscle mass, strength and overall power the natural way, the only effective way to do it is by using a full-body training regimen, hard and heavy exercise and consistency.
Many fitness magazines mislead beginners that they should follow the training regimens that professional bodybuilders use, which are essentially body splits where each training day is assigned a different muscle group, for example, Monday chest, Tuesday back, Thursday shoulders etc. In fact, beginners should do the exact opposite and do full body workout routine, where every workout you’ll be stimulating every muscle group, which will induce more muscle growth.
So, instead of employing 6 different varieties of the same exercise while checking your Facebook between sets, you’ll be switching from deadlifts to bench press, from overhead press to squat, bringing your muscles to complete exhaustion and hammering your central nervous system. That way you’ll switch your mentality from chasing “the pump” to an effective training regimen that will save you time and be thrice as effective at building muscle.
Full-body training regimens were employed by every professional bodybuilder in the Golden Era when s******s weren’t as readily available as they are now, especially by the legend Steve Reeves, who was a great proponent of full-body training and he did it with a great intensity and discipline which gave him results that spoke for themselves.
The great Steve Reeves
Steve Reeves is regarded by the bodybuilding world as having had the ultimate classic, aesthetic physique. He won Mr. Universe and became a film icon of the 50s, owing a lot to his handsome look and perfect figure which had the perfect proportions, classic shape, a small waist with broad shoulders and chiseled muscles.
Reg Park himself admired Reeves for having the best looking body of all time, a combination of his godly genes, bodily proportions and physical aesthetics. In his senior years, Reeves was one of the most vocal critics of the rampant steroid use in modern bodybuilding, criticizing modern bodybuilders for exchanging physical beauty for sheer size, which is the exact opposite of the goals of bodybuilding to create a well-proportioned, aesthetically pleasing body.
Any part of the body which has been overdeveloped in comparison to other parts will stand out and throw the whole body out of proportion, nullifying the aesthetic effect.
Like all the other old school bodybuilders, including Reg Park, John Grimek, Leroy Colbert and George Eiferman, Reeves denounced the new training trends and steroid usage among bodybuilder and proceeded to become a proponent of the effectiveness of doing full-body workout sessions in many of his publications.
Continues on next page (Steve Reeves’ All-time Classic Physique Training Regimen) …
