Naturals are much more sensitive to errors. This is because a person who takes hormones is kind of protected by the hormone, as if it were armor. This means that if she makes a mistake, it doesn't negatively affect her as strongly as a natural athlete.
And mistake 9 on our list is the most common mistake that exists among naturals. Ah, because natural athlete, he can't do the same volume of series that other people do. Ah, because nine series per group is too much for the natural, it will catabolize.
There have been comments here on our channel like, this training volume is only for hormone-treated people, not for natural people. Everything I bring here on the channel, without exception, is based on scientific studies. And all studies are done with natural.
Everything I bring to you is natural. And that makes me a little pissed off, because it's become a bit of a litany that's gotten boring. So, stop talking about it, because the exception is to hormonize.
Now, one thing that you really have to pay close attention to, because otherwise you might interpret it like this. I'm going to fail the set and it'll be okay. No, it's not like that.
If you do nine sets for chest, for example, per week. And then you go there and see that the study showed that the group that did 46 sets had more hypertrophy. So what could be going through your head?
So, I'm not going to do 9 anymore, I'm going to do 46. It's not supposed to do that. You have to know how to interpret the study.
If you go from 9 to 36, you're going to have a problem. There is a need for you to apply what we call progression. And, of course, I'll cover this in even more depth in this video.
If you do 9 sets today and it's time for you to make this progression, you will jump, for example, to 12 sets. And then you will stay there for a while strengthening yourself. Then you will progress to 15 series.
I'm giving you an example. High volumes of sets are tolerated by naturals. However, there is a lot of work to be done to reach this volume.
This brings us directly to point 8 on our list, which is the need for periodization. Basically, the word periodization comes from you making a control, a plan for a training period. Eight weeks is a minimum period to have a very good visual response, right, a physical one.
And most studies are done taking this into consideration. Take a group, set a training protocol, follow that group for 8 weeks, for 12 weeks and see what happens. It's natural.
It's natural. Understand that everything I'm going to say here is natural, okay? If you simply do the same workout for 8 weeks, for 12 weeks, you may not have your maximum development, your maximum response to that training program.
As your body adapts over the weeks, you need to implement what we call progression. It's like you take your muscle that supports 10 kilos, give it 10, and there comes a time when it starts to get stronger, so you give it 13 kilos. And then it gets stronger, you do 15 kilos.
And then you progress. I just gave an example of how to do a progression with load, but there is also the possibility of doing a progression with the number of sets. Lala, what if I don't do this?
What if I don't put a periodization? Remember what I said at the beginning of the video, if you are natural, you are more sensitive to mistakes, you will have greater difficulty developing? So, if progression is very important for you to develop, the lack of progression will make it much easier for you to stagnate.
Applying this is very important. This will determine whether your workout will be good or bad. When you do your series, you take that muscle to a level of stress, to a very high level of exhaustion.
And that's the idea. If this doesn't happen, your training is bad from the start. When you enter a rest period, this recovery period is extremely important for you to be able to do your next set really well.
So if you fail at this point, you will be at a disadvantage for your next set and subsequent sets. Here I will bring you references to studies that were done with. .
. natural athlete. .
. For a long time we defended the 60-second, 40-second rest. We have studies today showing that rests of 1 and a half minutes, 2 minutes are more effective if you are looking to increase muscle mass and increase strength.
But I will now bring you what I propose both for you at this moment and what I teach to all my students. By the way, 99% or more are natural. When you are going to do an exercise, the rest will depend on the exercise you did.
If you do a free squat and you go all the way to failure, what do you look like? How long do you think you need to rest to do the next set? About 10 minutes.
Now imagine that you did a unilateral wrist curl. The Rani is laughing. .
. It's a forearm exercise. I know.
Do you think you will need the same rest time as you did for the free squat? Studies show that a minute and a half, two minutes is the best to put there, right? For what?
And that's my recommendation for you now. That you do not stick to a specific rest time, recovery time between sets. And yes, that you pay attention to yourself.
When you finish the set, most likely, if you did a good set, you will be more out of breath, feeling more tired because of that set. And then, the recovery time, you'll recover, won't you? You will start to feel more rested.
Your heart rate will decrease. And then there will come a time when you will realize that your heart rate is already close to the basal level. That's it, your body telling you.
. . Look, I'm fine, we can move on to the next series.
It's beautiful to see it happen. Because if you do heavy squats, you will need two minutes, three minutes, even more, depending on the situation. Now, if you do a wrist curl, maybe 30, 40 seconds is enough for you to do it again.
And at this moment, what I'm teaching you is to forget the clock, forget these numbers that are imposed and instead pay attention to your body. because it will be talking to you all the time and giving you signs of what is best to do with him at this or that moment. This works for naturals who will most likely need slightly longer breaks, while hormone-treated people may need shorter breaks.
The hormone builds an entire system with a slightly faster recovery. But why did I bring you, most likely? Because it will depend on the load.
The natural one doing it with a low load and the hormonal one doing it with a very high load, you already understand what will happen. This brings us back to what I said. Forget all those patterns.
Pay attention to your body. It will tell you the right time to enter the next series to get the best performance out of it. But there's a question here, huh?
Our next topic will explore this issue of recovery between sets. Many naturals make the mistake of thinking that it will hinder muscle development. I'm talking about aerobic exercises.
Many naturals run away from cardio and say, "but that will catabolize a lot, I'm natural. " A person who does their cardio will need less rest than a person who doesn't do cardio. When your ability to bring oxygen into your body and utilize it within your body, your body needs less time to do the entire recovery process.
Because when you enter this recovery phase, what is happening inside your body, basically, is that it is taking oxygen to this muscle that was trained to do all the work inside and get this muscle ready for the next set. But not only that. When you're on top of your cardio, you have better mitochondrial activity.
And you will already understand where this will help you. When you are doing some kind of diet to reduce fat, your body will look for energy somewhere and if you have this better mitochondrial activity, it will look for energy in fat instead of muscle. All this effect of aerobic training will create a protection for your muscle mass.
Because at this point, yes, you have to be very careful. A person on hormones ends up catabolizing this muscle much more easily than someone who doesn't take any hormones. I want you to understand that this aerobic exercise will create a barrier against muscle catabolism.
But Laércio, aerobics, doesn't it make me lose muscle mass? Won't this make me catabolize? And this happens a lot, because during aerobic exercise, there is the connection of some metabolic pathways that are catabolic to your muscle.
But it's only during exercise. Just as these pathways are also turned on when you are weight training. And you won't grow or catabolize during training, but rather in what you do in the other 23 hours of your day.
This is what will determine whether you will catabolize or not. You also need to analyze how many calories you are losing in this aerobic workout so that you can replace them, because then, without any problem, your muscle mass will be completely preserved. And regarding this issue of nutrition, it is the most important thing and what you need to be most aware of so as not to harm yourself while being natural.
The theme of the video is mistakes that people make when training, but I'm going to open a parenthesis here and bring you these points that I want you to receive as a bonus from the video. It wouldn't be part of the video, but it's extremely important to help you on this development journey, both to grow muscle and to reduce fat naturally. Remember when I said that a person on hormones is kind of shielded?
This is very strong in food. When a person uses the hormone, they can follow a much more restrictive diet if they are trying to lose fat. Because it will catabolize very little, due to the hormone that is there supporting this muscle mass.
Now, on the opposite side, a person who is using hormones, if they are on a diet to gain weight, increase muscle, they can follow a much higher calorie diet and they will gain very little weight, because the hormone makes these extra calories be well used. Now, if you are a natural, if you stick to your diet too much, you will lose a lot of muscle. And if you eat a lot in the phase that you are gaining muscle, you will gain a lot of fat.
At this point, you need to do a much more thorough, much more careful job. Because otherwise, imagine, I'm going to do some work here to gain weight. And then you gain a lot of fat.
Now I'm going to do a cutting, I'm going to get lean. And then you lose a lot of muscle. You need to have your diet very well calculated, your quantity of each macronutrient very well adjusted.
We've already made a video here on the channel where I teach all of this, including how to calculate your own diet and how to adjust how much of each macronutrient you need. This takes into account weight, age, gender, objective, among other things. This is extremely important.
It is so important that everyone who registers to become my student receives a personalized diet from my team of nutritionists. And not only that. You will receive full support from my team throughout the entire process with us.
Of course, my students also receive training, among other things. If you are interested in learning more about the work we do, click on the link in the description and you will be surprised by the amount of things we deliver. And now let's get back to training and a point that is extremely neglected by naturals and it is very, very important.
Stretching. Stretching is good for you both because it will help you avoid injuries, and because it will help you build more muscle mass. When you don't stretch, you make your body stiffer.
This is natural, because strength training, by its essence, is contraction. Lots of contraction, tension. The stretching stimulus is exactly to relax this muscle and make it maintain its elasticity, so to speak.
Why does this prevent injury? I'll give you an example of a specific joint and you can apply it to your entire body. Let's think about the gluteus, and then we're thinking about the hip joint.
If you train very intensely, squats, leg presses, etc. , and that's what I want, you'll develop this muscle, right? Just like thigh and etc.
However, if you don't do the stretches for this area, your hips will start to become increasingly stiff. What's the problem with that? When you do squats, leg raises, etc.
, the lack of mobility in your hips will cause your body to borrow that mobility from your lower back. And the lower back is not there to give you mobility. The function of the lower back is to provide stability.
And then you can understand why so many people end up with lower back pain when they work out. Due to lack of hip mobility. Look how crazy.
You will find this in several other regions of your body. Lack of mobility in the chest, causing shoulder problems. Lack of quadriceps mobility, causing knee pain.
Anyway, the list is long and the advice I give you is, if you want to keep your body functional, without pain, without injuries, stretching is important. But, Laércio, why will stretching help me with hypertrophy? It doesn't make sense, right?
Yes, it does. What happens is this. When you do an exercise, you must have heard a lot, even from my own mouth, that the range of motion is an important factor in generating hypertrophic stimulus, right?
So if you don't stretch, you get it now. I'm going to go back to the hip itself, thinking about the glutes and their mobility. Studies show that a deeper squat generates more hypertrophy.
But for it to be deeper, it needs mobility. So stretching is not just a question of one thing or another. It's not a joke either.
It has its function and it is very, very important. If you don't stretch, start doing it. This may raise the following question.
Lala, when do I stretch? Do I stretch before training? Do I stretch afterwards?
Can I stretch during training? And I'll tell you that the answer to all of these questions is yes, just stretch. To give you an idea, for a while we believed that we couldn't stretch before training because it would be harmful and we couldn't stretch during training because it would be harmful.
We already have studies showing that this is not the case. You can stretch whenever you want. If you are one of those people who have little time, I will even give you a tip.
On the day you are training, for example, chest, do some back stretches during your sets. If you are training your back, do some chest stretches. And I'll tell you that it will even improve the exercise you're doing right there.
It is possible for you to stretch the same muscle, but then other more delicate issues come into play and I prefer not to bring them up in this video. The top 3, many people think it's nonsense, but it will make a bizarre difference in your training. I'm talking about warming up.
You know that thing about doing 5, 10 minutes on the treadmill before training? So, this is important. When you arrive at the gym, unless you walked to the gym, you arrived at the gym, your body is in a state of balance, but calm.
We call it "being at rest. " Wisely, our body keeps the large amount of blood in the organs, mainly by filtering. Our temperature here is balanced, low, nice.
This is all called homeostasis. Now, when you start doing an exercise, your body understands and says, oops, your chest is exerting force. So, I'm going to send more blood there, because along with the blood comes oxygen, nutrients and this chest will need it.
So, it vasodilates the chest and it vasoconstricts the other regions of the body, exactly so that this blood goes there. But not only that. Our body is kind of like those old alcohol-powered cars, you know?
Which only works better when it's hot. I'm with that one. It works exactly like this.
So, our enzymatic activities in energy production work better when our body temperature is a little higher. Precisely because the body understands that there are things happening, then energy production needs to happen better and faster. What's the problem if you arrive at the gym and go straight to the machine and don't do this warm-up, you warm up on the machine.
Many people end up missing the first exercise because their body was warming up. Have you ever had that feeling? It seems like the training really picked up from the second exercise onwards?
That's exactly why. And there is still a psychological issue on top of all this. Now, if you arrive at the gym and warm up, you will already be raising your body temperature.
Since you'll be active, your body will also. . .
"Hey, you started a physical exercise there, huh? Let's start sending blood to those muscles that are struggling. " When you get to your exercise, the first one on your list, your body will already be more prepared.
Don't worry, I'll still talk about the specific warm-up. Now that you understand this whole issue, think with me. Ranizito, I'm going to do some chest training.
I'm going to warm up on the bike. It's not going to work out very well. Why?
It's warming up the leg. That's it. More or less, right?
The body will heat up, however, it will not send blood to the region that I am going to work on. What if I train my legs, Ranizito? Then, it's worth it.
I will be warming up my body, secondly, I will already be sending blood exactly to my legs. And then you might be thinking, Lala, so what do I do? If I'm going to train my chest or my back, which exercise is best for me to warm up?
More or less the treadmill, because at least you will be moving your body. But I really recommend that you do those ellipticals, you know? And hold on to the arm of the thing there, because you can also do the elliptical by holding on just below.
Then you will have movement practically only in your legs. Because then you will already be moving your body and your body will already be sending blood to that entire region. Once this dynamic or general warm-up is complete, which we call it, we will now move on to the specific warm-up, which is basically you taking one to two sets of the first exercise of your workout and doing it with loads that are around 30% to 50% of your normal workload.
This warm-up will not get you to failure or even close to it. The idea is for you to send an even more intense message to your body that, "look, it's your chest that I'm going to work on now. " "Look, now it's the biceps that I'm going to work on.
" And then, not only will it send more blood to this region, it will also start to vasodilate this region more, but it will also start to lubricate the joints involved in this exercise more. I know, it's boring. I also think it's boring, but it will help you a lot.
There is an idea among natural athlete that training for more than an hour harms, catabolizes. Is it true? I'll guide you through a process of reasoning that will allow you to realize that the problem is much deeper.
Imagine that I put together a workout for you full of bisets, trisets, drop sets, etc. With a short rest time of 40 seconds and this workout lasts 59 minutes. How much will this workout catabolize you?
How much will this require of you? It'll leave you exhausted, right? Let's put on another workout.
This training doesn't have all these series. These are normal series, two-minute rests. But this training lasts an hour and a half.
Which of the two do you think will catabolize more? The first one. Why, Ranizito?
It's because it was more intense. So, do you understand? It has to do with the duration of the training or the intensity of the training.
Obviously, if you spend an hour and a half, two hours doing a super intense workout, you will catabolize a lot. A person who is on hormones can afford to do more intense and longer workouts, because the hormone will shield this catabolism. Natural people have to keep a closer eye on this.
But I don't want you to be stuck on the clock. I want you to feel how exhausting this workout is for you or not. So, your workout is over an hour long and you feel like halfway through the workout you were already very tired, dragging yourself along, you need to adjust this workout.
Now, do you feel like your workout lasts an hour and a half, but you're doing great and you only feel super tired at the end of the workout? Dude, it's all right. I understand the whole issue of wanting to stay more on the safe side of the bridge.
So, your workout, yes, it can last more than an hour and you won't catabolize because of it. But nothing will help if you adjust your training time and mess up with the number one on our list. Exercise technique.
Accept it. If you are natural, your body has more difficulty increasing muscle mass and more ease in losing muscle mass. The movement technique is extremely important for you.
A guy on hormones can even do the exercise on his thighs anyway and it will work. Now it's much more difficult for you. I need you to get into the exercise and optimize every detail of it.
Because it will make a huge difference to you. First, range of motion, the cadence at which you do this exercise, the speed at which you perform it, how refined your technique will be so that there are no compensation points during the execution. And with that, I’m even talking about possible cheats and so on.
How much more aware you will be of the contraction. paying attention to the muscle you are working and even the peaks of contraction, etc. A mantra that I put in the heads of all our students and I want you to do it in your next training session to feel the difference.
Before you start the exercise, I want you to have very clear in your head which muscle you are going to work, which movement you are going to do. What joints will you use? And then, when you have this clear in your head, you start the exercise.
Completely focused and directing all your effort towards working that muscle. This will make an incredible difference. This kind of awareness in training will take you to a very high level.
And by doing all this, you will have stimulated your body. Now you need to watch this video here. What are the things you will do right after training?
And I want it to be clear in your head that training is just the stimulus for your body to develop. In this video here, you will see what will really make it grow.
