Look at the long-promised book of rebel Stuart McRobert.

What book? Let me mention once again: “An Insider’s Tell-All Handbook on Weight-training Technique» by Stuart McRobert, 1995 (Russian title – “Comprehensive guide to the technique exercises with weights.”)

He calls himself a rebel:

“Sure I’m a rebel, but a rebel with a cause. You need a rebel’s perspective; otherwise you’re going to fall prey to the training mainstream due to ignorance. You’re never going to get this rebellious but liberating perspective from the mainstream, because the establishment isn’t going to go out of its way to undermine its power. That many
magazines and books give similarly irresponsible and even harmful advice will never make that advice right.
While repeated hammering away at the same lies and deception does make many if not most readers believe they are being given good advice and information, no degree of repetition of deceit and nonsense will ever produce something of truth and value.”
Yes, the endless repetition of the same lie leads to that, that many readers – perhaps most – are beginning to believe that they are given good information and advice, but no matter how many are inclined in different ways, these false claims and meaningless advice, they never lead to truth or to any benefit. ”
Here is how he begins his book:
” Are your training programs taken from popular magazines about bodybuilding? Are you fed up with their inefficiencies and their paltry progress?
This free book exposes the shocking state of the weight-training world—especially bodybuilding. Even more importantly, it reveals how you can turn your training into a terrific success story.
Below to your attention is proposed a report about the appalling inefficiency of conventional methods of training in bodybuilding.To someone an offered information will seem too overloaded with negativism, but I hope that an opening of the negative things in bodybuilding will help you find it lurking in the huge positive potential. ”
Well, well, let’s see what he offers us.
To begin with McRobert offers to think about that promoted conventional training methods.
He lists the reasons for which these techniques have become a parody of the current recommendations for training:

1. Conventional training methods overtrain everyone other than the genetically gifted and drug abusers, but overtraining will not help you.
2. Conventional training methods promote some high-risk exercises that injure many people. Getting injured will not help you build the physique you want.
3. Conventional training methods often promote specific dangerous techniques for otherwise good exercises, and those specific techniques injure many people. Again,
getting injured will not help build a good physique.
4. Conventional training methods promote a volume and frequency that are impractical for busy working and family people. But even sacrificing work, family,
education and a balanced life won’t make conventional training methods work for typical people, so there’s no value in extreme measures anyway.
5. Conventional training methods place exaggerated importance on food supplements. Food supplements can’t make lousy training programs work.
6. Conventional training methods promote exaggerated expectations, and invariably use drug-fed genetic freaks as gurus and role models, neither of which will help you to realize your potential.
7. Conventional training methods complicate training, and confuse people. Complication and confusion can’t help.
8. Conventional training methods are not personalized to meet individual needs, limitations, lifestyles and goals. This produces overtraining, injuries, frustration and
giving up—i.e., failure.

9. Conventional training methods actually encourage drug abuse, because without the drug assistance those methods just don’t work for most people.
Except for not very intelligible paragraphs 2 and 3 / about traumatic danger of some exercises and techniques, with the other items is simply impossible not to agree. On one subject only, if by traditional methods understands some chaotic mix of exercises, taken a little from everywhere.

Let`s take, for example, paragraphs 4, 6,7, 8 and 9. A system by Mike Mentzer, for example, such defects are not affected.

Let us now turn to the individual. Who is McRobert?

Born in 1958, in England, my “credentials” include over 25 years of training, over 350 published articles, having authored five books on training, having published and edited an independent training magazine since 1989, and having always been independent of food supplement companies.
As further McRobert tells about himself, he is genetically average, have never used performance enhancing drugs, have an extremely demanding job, and is a family man too, he can totally relate to the lot of the average person.
In addition, he is working at a very responsible, time-consuming work, and in addition , he fulfills family responsibilities of father and husband.
Alas, an average if not to say mediocre, in terms of results in bodybuilding. Is it because there is almost no his pictures on the platform – neither in the press nor in the Internet?
His system, we are not going to lead, because it, firstly, looks like dozens of such systems, for which McRoberts stands against. And secondly, I personally have heard vanishingly little feedback from those whom the system of Robert Mack has helped to achieve more or less significant results.
What, for example, costs such declaration of McRobert:
“In the bodybuilding literature could be found the opinion that, well, a real growth is given only to complete muscular failure. Maybe so, but such a way ha been ordered for an amateur. In fact, how can be squats or bench press done to complete failure? Another thing are professionals. Their trainings are served by team-assistants weightlifters. In addition, to sustain this training for many months, in principle, impossible without “drugs.” Ordinary amateur will be quickly driven”to failure” by the over-trainings, because of a huge waste of not only muscle but also nervous energy. Well, the amateur is already suffering of a lack of energy.

On the other hand, in the arsenal of an amateur, there is one exercise in which it is worth trying a complete failure. It’s about chins. You can learn total failure even alone. Start by the eccentric phase of movement. You put a high bench under the bar and immediately find yourself in the top position when the crossbar is near the collarbone. From this position, you slowly lowering with all your might opposing force of gravity. You stop a set when you are no longer able to low to the lowest point smoothly. ”

Here’s how! Just pull-ups! Come on, dear reader, take a look at three sets of Joe Weider and find exercises that can be performed to the muscle “failure” without being crushed by the barbell. A dozen or so we have found ? Excellent. Even an amateur can do the same deadlift to the “failure”, of course, not with the limit weights and the number of reps 6-10.

But the reader must know some fragments of a book. Particularly, McRobert describes very accurately the commercialization of modern bodybuilding and powerlifting.

“Train like a champion to become a champion” has long been the message promoted by the weight-training world, especially bodybuilding. This message has been trumpeted in one form or another by almost all the magazines and books in the field—both mainstream and “sidestream”— and by most trainers and gyms too. The motive is simple— it attracts great interest and sells magazines, books, courses, food supplements and gym equipment. While it’s been a big commercial success in some respects, it’s been a disaster for the training masses.
Some of the ghost writers do know the real score, however, but because they are the lackeys of the big names they are writing on behalf of, they have to fuel the flames of bull, nonsense and fraud.
In some ways it’s in the best interests of many companies that people fail in their
training. This failure creates the reservoir of frustrated masses that produces the fodder for those making exaggerated or fraudulent claims for food supplements. The food supplement industry is where serious money is made, not the training instruction industry.
Most mainstream magazines don’t exist to promote practical training information that works for typical trainees. They exist largely to maintain the high circulation figures needed for obtaining a lot of high-priced advertising. Also, keep in
mind that some magazines are used as catalogs for the sister or master food supplement companies that are associated with those publications.
Sensible training information that works for the masses won’t sell hundreds of thousands of copies of magazines or books. Photographs are the prime factor behind big sales of bodybuilding magazines and books. In many cases, the more awesome the photographs, the better. This leads to glorification of drug-fed excesses, and a glaring contradiction with any espoused principles of good health.

The focus on the visual has also led to the presentation of as much female flesh as possible (whether trained or untrained), and as much use of sex as possible. Consider
how often that word crops up in cover blurb. The use of the word “sex” seems to have greater importance than the word “muscle” on the covers of some bodybuilding magazines. This has nothing to do with training instruction, or the best interests of readers, but simply the commercial imperative of attracting buyers in sufficient numbers to make a newsstand magazine economically viable.
When numbers are the bottom line, publication content will be tailored to meet the primary need, not the best interests of readers. And that, in the bodybuilding world in particular, usually means a focus on the elite, the freaks and the most awesome, along with as frequent as possible connections with sex. Of course, the use of sex as a sales technique is not unique to bodybuilding. It’s used in many other fields too.
The failure rate of bodybuilding is enormous, and not just because of the lousy results that conventional training methods deliver for most people. The number of people who get turned off by the dishonesty, clear contradictions and nonsensical training advice that abound in most of the mainstream publications, is vast.
Additionally, the drug-fed muscular monstrosities (male and female) that some magazines publicize and admire repel many people from bodybuilding, and make the
activity a freak show and laughing-stock.
So long as there are plenty of gullible newcomers—usually young men—to replace the former “discarded” readers, all is well on the numbers front. And why change a proven formula? It has “worked” for decades.
The training mainstream is very adept at presenting bull, nonsense and deception as truth. Even people who are well educated and very discriminating in their professional lives often become utterly irrational in what they accept as truth in the training world; until, that is, they’ve invested a year or two of training and learned that conventional routines don’t work well for conventional people. But by then most of them have given up, and written off bodybuilding (and perhaps exercise in general) as something that doesn’t work for them. Thus they fail to obtain the wonderful benefits that accrue from a lifetime of regular exercise.
So continues the old and familiar story of the training masses getting shafted by swallowing the mentality of “train like a champion if you want to become a champion.”
There’s quite a bit of information and advice in the mainstream that is accurate, but the promotion of accurate information is a vital part of the game of deception. An illusion of credibility is produced through presenting accurate information and drawing upon people with apparently impressive academic qualifications and “reputations.” This “softens up” the readers so that they are easily conned by the lies, deceit and bull which are mixed in with the accurate material.

by Stuart Mc Robert

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