"Beyond Bodybuilding" by Pavel Tsatsouline

• Experience is the best teacher as long as you learn from your mistakes.
• More often than not, a lack of progress in your muscle-building efforts can be linked to nutritional shortcoming in your diet.
• Given that a hard workout depletes your muscles of their glycogen stores, the post-workout meal is especially crucial.
• Nothing happens by accident.
• Bodybuilding plays a major role in building lean muscle tissue and reducing body fat.
• An increase in muscles tissue corresponds to an increase in your metabolic rate.
• Stronger muscles, bones, and connective tissue reduce your risk of injury.
• You must have a sincere and burning desire to achieve what you dream, dedicate yourself to making progress, and take control of your circumstances to change your body.
• At a certain point, gaining more size detracts from rather than increases your ability to perform in a given sport.
• The fundamentals of muscle training and diet programs are essentially the same for both sexes.
• Bodybuilding as a system of exercise is the most effective and efficient way to strengthen and develop the muscles of the body.
• Bodybuilding is a sport of form, but instead of movement the form involved is that of the body itself--the size, shape, proportion, detail, and aesthetic quality of the physique as developed in the gym, prepared by dieting, and displayed by performing bodybuilding poses.
• All muscle-building done correctly depends for its results on the same basic exercise principle, that of progressive-resistance training.
• Progressive-resistance training works because the body is designed to adapt and grow stronger in response to greater amounts of stress than it is used to.
• When you increase the amount of weight and/or intensity, your muscles have to become bigger and stronger to deal with it.
• You have to do the right kind of exercises, using the right techniques, so that you send a specific message to the nervous system that tells the body what kind of adaptation you wish to achieve. This is called specificity of training and it is why learning how to train the right way is so important.
• The athletes who are most concerned with ultimate strength are weightlifters.
• Today there are two basic types of recognized competition weightlifting: Olympic lifting (involving the snatch & clean and jerk) and powerlifting (with three events--the deadlift, bench press, and squat).
• The major difference in programs between a weightlifter's strength training and bodybuilding is that the lifter works in a much lower rep range.
• The ideal bodybuilding physique would look something like this: wide shoulders and back tapering down to a tight waist; legs in proper proportion to the torso. Big shapely, and proportionate muscular development, with full muscles tapering down to small joints. Every body part developed, including such areas as rear delts, lower back, abdominals, forearms, and calves. Good muscular definition and muscle separation.
• The kind of training you do is what influences the type of muscular development you achieve.
• To be a really good bodybuilder, you need to create muscle shape, and this happens when you train every part of a muscle or muscle group, at every angle possible, so that the entire muscle is stimulated and every possible bit of fiber is involved.
• The amount of weight you can lift is determined by three things:
• how much fiber you are able to recruit
• how strong the individual fibers are
• your lifting technique.
• As a general rule, the best way to get maximum development of muscle volume is by lifting about 75 percent of your one-rep capacity--that is, the maximum amount you could lift for one repetition. It should come as no surprise that, for most people, using a weight that is 75 percent of your one-rep maximum allows you to do--that's right--about 8 to 12 reps for the upper body and 12 to 15 reps for the legs.
• To grow, a muscle also needs to rest and to absorb sufficient nutrients for it to recover and recuperate.
• Muscular endurance is the ability of the muscle to contract over and over during exercise and to recruit the maximum number of fibers to perform that exercise.
• Cardiovascular endurance is the ability of the heart, lungs, and circulatory system to deliver oxygen to the muscles to fuel further exercise and to carry away waste products (lactic acid).
• You increase cardiovascular capacity by doing high volumes of aerobic exercise--exercise that makes you breathe hard, causes your heart to race, and that you can keep up for long periods of time.
• You increase muscular endurance by performing a relatively high volume of muscular contractions.
• There are basically two types of muscle fiber:
• White, fast-twitch fiber is anaerobic power fiber that contracts very hard for short periods but has little endurance and a relatively long recovery period.
• Red, slow-twitch fiber is 20 percent smaller than and not as powerful as white fiber, but is aerobic and can continue to contract for long periods as long as sufficient oxygen is available.
• Bodybuilders tend to train at a pace which is just below the threshold of cardiovascular failure--that is, they train as fast as they can without overwhelming the ability of the body to provide oxygen to the muscles.
• The fact is, the better conditioned your heart, lungs, and circulatory system, the more intense training you will be able to do in the gym and the more progress you will make as a bodybuilder.