Cheating on exercise form produces inferior results. If you don’t do a weight training exercise right, the right thing never happens. Powerlifters must learn the art of positioning their bodies to lift the most weight. In contrast, bodybuilders must learn the art of positioning their bodies in a manner that produces the strongest muscle contraction. Those who never master these things through correct lifting form cheat themselves of making the most of their workouts and never reach their potential. Cheating on exercise form is just one form of cheating as there are other aspects of weight training that you can cheat on.
Cheating on Effort
Lack of effort is considered a form of cheating among those who practice high intensity training. Cheating on high intensity effort basically refers to stopping a set before reaching the point of failure. In other words, don’t cheat on the amount of effort required to obtain maximum benefit from the exercise. Perhaps the biggest voice in bodybuilding who spoke out on this subject was Mike Mentzer. Mike insisted that intensity was they key to success for anyone who desired to build the biggest muscles possible. He constantly emphasized intensity and the need to repeat reps until the muscles were completely exhausted.
Cheating On Volume
Arnold Schwarzenegger also addressed the need for hard training. He insisted that the only way to be a top bodybuilder was to do those last one or two reps that most people are unwilling to do at the end of each set. In addition to putting forth a high amount of effort on each set, he felt you needed to do a lot of sets. He didn’t believe that you could succeed if you cheated by trying to get by on a few sets per muscle group once or twice per week. If you are willing to do a lot of sets for your strongest body parts, but you only do a few sets for your weaker body parts, you are cheating on your weaker body parts and will not succeed. You must be honest about putting in the necessary work to succeed and be willing to do it or you are cheating yourself out of results.
Cheating on The Time It Takes To Develop Capacity for High-Volume
Many of the old school bodybuilders from the 1960’s and 1970’s used high volume training to build their bodies. It was not uncommon for these bodybuilders to do 20 sets per body part while training each body part three times per week. That’s 60 sets per week. They believed that this was the type of training that was necessary to make the most of your potential. Bill Pearl was one such bodybuilder who practiced and advocated this type of high-volume training, but he was very careful to stress that it took a lot of time to work up to high volume training.
20 Months
If you go to Bill Pearl’s website, he has a 20 month bodybuilding course. Why 20 months? Because that is how long he believes it takes to work up to the type of high-volume training that he did. If you rush into it, and aren’t willing to gradually build up to it, he will flat out tell you that high volume training won’t work. In other words, if you cheat on the time it takes to achieve the conditioning that it takes to benefit from high volume training, it will fail. You can’t cheat or cut corners on the time it takes to develop the workload tolerance that is necessary to succeed with this type of training. The same could be said for those who prefer high frequency training. If you start out training each body part hard every day, you will fail to recover. You will also fail to improve, and you’ll think that the whole idea of high frequency training is stupid, which it is if you don’t gradually work your way up to it over several months, or even a couple of years.
Cheating On The Pump
Vince Gironda had his own philosophy about honest training versus cheating on your workouts. He believed in an honest workout in which you push yourself hard enough to get a pump in a fairly short amount of time. You had to work out hard enough to get a pump, but not so hard or so long that you ended up losing your pump in the middle of the workout. Your body will only stay pumped for a certain amount of sets that is based on your individual physiology and level of conditioning. You must learn how many sets you can do while maintaining a pump. If you don’t do enough sets, you are cheating yourself out of a pump. If you do too many sets, you are also cheating yourself out of a pump. Vince believed that if you cheat yourself out of a pump, you will cheat yourself out of the results you are hoping for.
Cheating On Quality
Cheating has a different meaning among powerlifters who believe in quality reps. A quality rep is a rep that is performed forcefully, powerfully, and with perfect form. If you can bench press 300 pounds for 8 reps, but the last three reps are slower, weaker, and lack the force, power and drive of the first five reps, then you cheated on the last three reps in order to get to 8 reps. It is better to stop before quality drops or you are cheating. This is almost the exact opposite of the way in which high intensity lifters think about cheating as they believe that those last three reps are the most beneficial.
Many of the Russian powerlifters avoid the strenuous grinder reps that occur at the end of a set. For these lifters, it’s much more important to focus on quality in terms of force, power, drive, and perfect form. They also tend to utilize more training volume, more frequency, and lighter loads to build their strength, but they do this in order to practice perfection. In their way of thinking, quality reps are better than strenuous reps, and if strenuous reps interfere with the quality of each rep, then straining is cheating.
Cheating On Results
When you consider that there a many styles of weight training, you will find that each style of training has its own form of correctness, and its own form of cheating. What is correct in the context of one type of training may be cheating in the context of another type of training and vice versa. If you suspect that you are cheating on your exercises, ask yourself if it is true within the context of the type of training that you are doing. One person may tell you that you are cheating on effort because you are not pushing your sets hard enough. Another may tell you that you are pushing your sets too hard. One person may tell you that you are cheating on recovery because you are training too much, another may tell you that you are cheating on training volume because you are not training enough. In the end, results should always have the last word in regard to whether you are cheating or not. You can consider what others say about cheating, but your chief consideration should always be results. Don’t cheat yourself out of results. Best of training to you.