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Old school bodybuilding dates back to the days of progressive resistance basics. Ideally, this is what safe and healthy efforts towards gaining muscles should be about. Living through the contemporary era when information is readily available and easily accessible can be a curse and a blessing.
Although you can easily access information about bodybuilding, you can also be misinformed and misguided. You come across information about training, pursuing bodybuilding goals and dieting every day.
But how true and accurate is this information? Perhaps, to achieve your bodybuilding goals in a healthy and safe manner, you should leave the fashionable babble behind and embrace the old school basics of bodybuilding.
Old School Bodybuilding Techniques
Old school approaches to gaining muscles advocate for no-frills, full-body routines, rest and consumption of wholesome food . Here are some of the best approaches to bodybuilding in an old school style:
1. Perform compound exercises to ensure full-body workouts
Successful bodybuilders of the pre-steroid era performed full-body workouts to build their amazing physiques. Such workouts were based on compound movements that included deadlift, squat, military press and bench .
These provided the most efficient way of not just building muscles but also gaining strength. Split routines became fashionable only after steroids were invented. They introduced the use of drugs to complement the high volume of isolation work.
2. Fuel your body with natural foods
Perhaps, this is an all-time key to successful bodybuilding. If you don’t fuel your body with the right foods, you will become sickly or gain more fat than muscles. Regardless of how often you train, lift or learn about bodybuilding, if you don’t provide the fuel that your body needs you will not put on muscles.
Therefore, fuel your body with natural foods like fish, vegetables, red meat, whole milk, nuts, whole eggs, and olive oil. Ideally, eat what your grandparents ate in the past.
3. Get strong to get bigger
This is a major principle for successful old-school bodybuilders. In fact, most successful bodybuilders who also competed in the world-class weightlifters tournaments had routines that were programmed around the principle of getting stronger.
The idea behind this principle is the fact that compound movements stimulate more growth by recruiting more muscle fibers when combined with heavy weight. The difference between bodybuilding and strength training is basically that bodybuilders need increasing caloric intake in order to achieve improved muscle growth.
4. Perfect the form
When it comes to lifting weights, form is very important. For instance, when performing heavy lifts, old school bodybuilders ensured that their spines maintained a neutral position rather than a hyper-extended or arched position.
Most lifting injuries happen when this issue is not fixed. That’s precisely why old-school bodybuilding emphasized on improving the form.
5. Have a good rest
The body grows while resting not when training. Old school bodybuilders used to rest like babies. Therefore, to achieve your bodybuilding goals, give your body time to rest and recover.
Otherwise, all your bodybuilding efforts will not yield your desired outcomes. Ideally, have uninterrupted sleep for 8 to 10 hours every night.
6. Old school bodybuilding focuses on ensuring overall wellness
For old school bodybuilders, overall well-being was as important as building muscles.
Thus, health and strength had equal weight for them. Improving wellbeing and health was a major goal of bodybuilding or training.
Therefore, to ensure your safety and health while training, listen to your body and look after it. Stay healthy so that you can remain strong and eager for any workout.
7. Take note of your progress
Having bodybuilding goals was very important for old-school bodybuilders. Whatever the goal was, these bodybuilders kept track of the progress that they made towards accomplishing that goal.
This not only enabled them to ensure that they were on track, but it also helped them in determining what worked and what did not. Thus, tracking progress allowed them to tweak their workout regimen as necessary.
As a modern bodybuilder, you should embrace this technique too. Take note of weight that you lift, the number of reps and sets that you do, the rests that you take, daily macros and body weight. Make sure that the data is aligned with your bodybuilding goals.
8. Don’t replace whole foods with supplements
Modern bodybuilders are faced with a supplement boom. Supplements come in the form of powders, potions, and pills. Some of these bodybuilding supplements promise almost everything including six pack abs, superhuman energy, and lean muscles.
However, old-school bodybuilding was based on the principle that no supplement is capable of substituting a disciplined diet and hard work. Ideally, bodybuilding supplements should be used for purposes of supplementing healthy food intakes.
They should not replace healthy foods. The most recommended supplements include decent multivitamins, whey protein shake and omega-3s that help in meeting the daily target for protein when meals fail to do so.
9. Maintain a progressive overload
To achieve strength and size gains from training, old school bodybuilders added weight that they lifted in a progressive manner. The idea was to ramp up weight progressively and train more in order to make progress. If an old-school bodybuilder hit the gym every day without making progress, they would increase their caloric intake.
10. Be consistent
For old school bodybuilders, consistency in training trumped all the other aspects of bodybuilding. Although many bodybuilders maintain other elements of bodybuilding regimens, they are not consistent in other areas.
These areas include sleep, diet and exercise selection. Consequently, they miss out on precious gains of bodybuilding. An old-school bodybuilder will tell you that you can gain more muscles if you maintain consistent training for one month than when you undergo sloppy training for six months.
These are some of the Golden Era’s bodybuilding techniques that made bodybuilding better and simpler. Clearly, these techniques should not have been forgotten or eroded with fashionable babble. Try some of these old-school bodybuilding techniques and you will build muscles faster and in a healthier, safer manner than your compatriots.
