A couple years ago I was watching a youtube video of Leroy Colbert who is considered by many to be the first man to build 20 inch arms, and he did it before steroids were available to use. In the video, Leroy said something that would have barely registered as having any significance during my early days of working out with weights. It had to do with a feeling that he had when he trained. That feeling let him know when to stop training and it seemed to tell him how much and how hard to train.
There was a time in my past when training was all about finding out how many sets and how many reps a lifter did and then copying his sets and reps scheme. The concept that I refer to now as “being in the right training state” was not a concept that had entered into my mind. But with the huge variations of training information that swarmed around me, I was forced to think beyond training in simple terms of doing a certain amount of sets in reps. That’s why Leroy’s comments about having a certain feeling while he was training majorly caught my attention in this video. You can listen to his comments about this in the videos below.
Written version of Leroy’s Comments.
“I just had that you know…, it’s like something fascinating because you just know when you did enough, when to rest and when to stop, no more. It’s not a number that you wrote down, I just knew it was enough for the day.
Some of those guys spent a whole day training their arms completely oblivious to the rest, recovery aspect of training. They thought the more they would do, none of them ever got nowhere near me because they didn’t have that feeling. I could tell you the truth, I don’t know where that feeling comes from. If you paid me a billion dollars, I don’t know (how), I just know. I said, well that’s enough for now. And then I continued to train and continued to grow and added different exercises to the routine. And just kept growing and growing. Of course that’s the thing that we instinctively knew and a lot of people don’t know today.”
“If you want to continue to grow, you got a have a feeling of when to go next. If you stay too long, it’s detrimental to your growth, if you train too hard it’s detrimental to your growth and not a soul in the world can tell you that but yourself.”
Others Who Had a Great Feel for Training
I believe other bodybuilders and lifters had a tremendous feel for training, and sensed how hard to push to get into the right training state that would enable them to succeed. In my reading about Bill Pearl, I believe he had a great feel for training that allowed him to improve little by little, year after year for many years without steroids, which is something that is rare. I believe Ed Coan and others had that special sense and feel for training as well.
Why do I bring all of this up? Because that feeling is illusive. I needed a system that would help me stay on track and not train too hard or too easy, but to hit a workout just right. For me that system turned out to be the principles that I teach in accordance with Precision Point Training (see the basics of PPT if you are not familiar with Precision Point Training principles). Precision Point Training tells me how far to push into a set, how many sets to do, and how often to train, and it works better for me than trying to get a magic feeling.
Even though that magic feeling is hard to zero in on, I don’t discredit it, because it’s a simply a way that a lifter can know that they are in the right training state to achieve results. If you can tap into that feeling and make it work for you on a consistent basis, then keep utilizing it as a training method. However, if finding the right training state for consistent results seems illusive, my suggestion is to learn how to use Precision Point Training as it is a training state based method. Best of Training to you.