Joel’s Bro-Fitness Tip
In the iron community, there are different types of competitive meatheads. Let’s see, you have:
a) Bodybuilders. (aka Bro-building) Their primary goal is to look good on stage. And within this culture, there are many types of physique categories as well.
b) Powerlifters. These guys compete in Squat, Bench Press, and Deadlift.
c) Weightlifters. Sometimes known as Olympic lifters. It is the only strength sport in the Olympics. The competition lifts are the snatch and clean & jerk.
d) Strongman. They do all kinds of weird but fun stuff.
e) Crossfitters. Fairly new to the community. They do a little bit of everything.
I will be 46-years-old this year. I am a late-comer as a Weightlifter. I entered the sport when I was 38. I have entered several Weightlifting meets to include state championships – which I have won 2 in my age and weight class.
In the beginning of this year, I suffered from mid-life crisis when my wife dropped a wok on my head. (Not really, but it makes for a cool story, bro.)
So I have decided to enter my first physique show sometime late this year.
The picture below was how I looked in 2016 as a weightlifter.
I started bro-building beginning of this year. One of my concern was that I may be ‘too old’ to gain some muscle mass. Additionally, and understandably so, my other concern was that my strength in weightlifting would drop and that my technique may suffer due to lack of volume.
To remedy my concerns, I created a hybrid brobuilding / weightlifting program. I brobuild 4 days out of the week and 2 days out of the week were geared toward weightlifting.
Here are the results as of today:
As far as losing strength in weightlifting, I believe if anything bodybuilding helped me tremendously as a weightlifter. As a result of doing high rep isolation, my joints actually got better. My squatting strength dropped a little bit, but my competition lifts surprisingly remained the same. Here is training vid from this Saturday.
All the sports within the iron community, may be apples and oranges in terms of goals and training protocol. But if you use them intelligently, you will get the best of all worlds.
Nice work. Stay strong.