Being athletic and participating in any type of physical pursuit, oftentimes brings with it the possibility of impending injury. As such, any athletic endeavor you decide to partake in always carries with it a certain degree of inherent risk. Whether you are playing contact sports that are highly susceptible to causing damage or you play a less aggressive sport which over time can cause injuries of wear and tear or you focus on training and walking that fine line between sane and insane, there’s always some level of risk associated with your actions. The caveat to all of this is that if you want to get to the top, you have to make big moves and take calculated risks to get there. The old saying, “no risk no reward” does hold some truth to it and in the world of weight training and bodybuilding, truer words have never been spoken. There will come a time when you have to decide if you’re willing to go to that next level in your training to bring out your genetic potential. If you are, the following decisions are the risks you’ll have to take to bring you to your version of greatness.
Always Overloading the Muscle, Always
To build massive amounts of muscle you have to settle in with the fact that you are always going to have to overload your muscles on a consistent basis to make them grow. Max-OT is going to be your best bet within this notion as it dictates that you lift more with every training week that passes. This means the weights keep getting heavier and heavier, no questions asked. There are no “light days”, there are no excuses for not forcing yourself to put more on the bar and achieving what you did the week before is a failure. You’re either using more weight for the same reps or you’re getting more reps with the same weight. That’s it, plain and simple. Do this for a solid decade and then get back to me on your progress.
The Scary Sets
If you have yet to load up a barbell or stare a certain lift in the face while brimming with anxiety and fear of what could happen, then you haven’t really pushed yourself to the limits yet. There were times in my training career when I knew I had to use a certain amount of weight for a certain exercise to maintain my progress and it would literally have me worrying about it two to three days prior to even doing it. For me, it was the squat and deadlift that gave me anxiety because I knew the weights we were using were so extreme that at any point in the lift, something could break or give away and that could be it for my training. Despite that, we did it anyway, faced that fear, conquered that fear and came out on the other side better because of it. As I said, if you haven’t experienced this yet, then you haven’t taken the necessary risks to grow.
Going All In
Perhaps the biggest risk you may have to take to achieve your goals is the simple act of going all-in on this whole bodybuilding thing and letting everything else go by the wayside. You can’t be the greatest bodybuilder that you could possibly be while still doing everything else. Because of this, some people have quit school to pursue their bodybuilding dreams, some have quit their jobs to focus on it, some people have let all of the other sports they enjoyed playing growing up go because they were impeding upon their training and some have spent all of their money ensuring they have the best trainers, the best training gear, the best gyms and so forth. I’m not saying that you have to go to these extremes, but I am saying that you will have to let some things go in your life to live the bodybuilding lifestyle to its fullest and that in itself could prove to be a very risky choice that you’ll have to make. My hope is that whatever decisions you make in this regard, serves you well in the end.
When all is said and done, the greatest risks you take in life should never be taken on a whim and should always come from a calculated and well-plotted out plan of action. One risk you should never take, however, is what you feed your body to grow and what you give it to power through those high-intensity workouts. Here at AST Sports Science, we’ve taken that risk out of the equation for you by providing you with the highest quality supplements in the world proven scientifically and anecdotally to give you the best results possible. Our VP2 Whey Isolate, Micronized Creatine Monohydrate, GL3 L-glutamine and BCAA 4500 are just a few examples of the types of products we offer that are risk-free and guaranteed to give you the results you’re looking for. So the next time you’re gearing up for those big lifts, remember no risk, no reward and the only thing you’ll be calculating is how much muscle you’ve put on!
