Chad Shaw

I have 2 older brothers, one is 7 years older and the other is 10 years older. They introduced me to weightlifting and I fell in love with it. It was also very theraputic for my severe asthma which I suffered from throughout my entire childhood. All the months spent in the hospital with only machines and drugs keeping me alive caused my body to remain very weak and underdeveloped. This went on for 14 years. It was a tough childhood! My parents had to learn how to give shots of epinepherine and suspherine to give me at home to keep me alive long enough to get to the emergency room. At home I had to keep a nebuelizer machine to administer asthma drugs and also had to use 3 different inhalers plus continuously take 3 different oral medications including prednisone which really messed up my body. When I wasn't in the hospital and was able to go to school, I could never participate in gym class because my health was too poor. There were 3 seperate occasions when the doctors told my parents I was too far gone, too weak, and at the max amount of drugs that I could be on and things kept getting worse and that they should start planning my funeral. Along with the grace of God, bodybuilding was my answer to reverse the effects of this life threatening disease. Beyond that, bodybuilding has helped me cope with a number of different injuries. It has helped me recover from ruptured discs in my spine due to a severe back injury, scoliosis, a ruptured bicep tendon, ulnar nerve damage, a torn rotator cuff, and being absent an anterior cruciate ligament and also a medial meniscus in one knee which resulted in many dislocations and cartilage tears that required surgery and then also the opposite leg was 4 inches longer than the other leg which also required intense surgery to correct. I was a train wreck! I had several top orthapedic doctors tell me I would never ever be able to get into bodybuilding or lift heavy weights again because some of those injuries were impossible to recover from. I couldn't take no for an answer, I just refused to accept that would be the end of my bodybuilding dreams. I made a decision that I would never give up and I was gonna either become a bodybuilder or die trying. At the age of 16, I entered and won my first bodybuilding competition, it was greatest feeling I had ever experienced! I know now from experience that you should never ever give up on your dreams or anything your passionate about and don't ever let anyone tell you that you can't realize your dreams and make them come true no matter what your circumstances are! Developing my physique for me was like building a suit of armor to protect the frail sick little kid that I remember being. I love bodybuilding and I will do it till I can do it no more. I choose to follow this path without the use of drugs, I've got stronger forces that drive me. Hopelessness is only a state of mind, therefore impossibilities are only illusions.

Besides using bodybuilding to rebound from illness and injuries, I just love doing it. It's the ultimate rush for me to feel stronger, watching my weights move up and watching my appearance change. Bodybuilding is my mistress and it keeps me real!

Currently I am 5'10" and weigh 188 lbs.

ARE YOU OVERTRAINING?  By Chad Shaw
 
 
By far the number one mistake that I see people making at the gym is overtraining. Are you stuck at a platue and feel like when you go workout, your exhausting yourself, pushing your body so hard but nothing good seems to come of it? When itʼs time to hit the gym do think to yourself " oh s**t!, I donʼt feel like doing this today"? Do you feel sluggish, low on energy, and depressed? If you answered yes to any of these questions your most likely a victim of over training. How does this happen? The reason this happens to so many people is this: When, you perform a set on an exercise, and push yourself 100% squeezing every last rep out that you possibly can until you cant do no more, then you have gone to complete muscle failure on that set. Once this happens there is an inroad cut deep into that particular muscleʼs recovery system. This inroad puts that muscle in a state of undercompensation, meaning that muscle has less than it did before you performed that set to total muscle failure. So what next? What needs to happen in order for that muscle to get bigger? That muscle now needs to compensate (to back what was there before) before it can overcompensate (put back more than was there before) which is building the muscle, making it bigger and stronger than it was. So how do we get the muscle to go from an undercompensated state to an overcompensated state? The answer to that depends on the number of sets you perform to muscle failure and the amount of recuperation time you give that muscle before you start tearing it down again. As far as the number of sets go, When I train a body part like biceps for example, I never do more than 1 set to failure on any exercise. I may do 2-3 warm up sets using lighter weight just enough to get my muscles and joints warm and stretched out a little. For example, if Iʼm gonna do barbell curls, I will do a warm up set with 135 lbs and complete it for 5-6 reps even though I could do 20 reps if I wanted. Then for my second set I will put on 155 lbs and perform 3-4 reps even though I could do it for 15 reps if I wanted. At this point my biceps are warm and stretched and ready to do my one big set of barbell curls and push till complete failure. So now I load 185 lbs on the bar and perform 9 reps and at that point I have reached 100% muscle failure, I go all out to get that 9th rep and now the job is done. No more barbell curls until my next arm workout! The body contains a mechanism in which it will send off an alarm when it detects that itʼs own physiology is being threatened or under assault. This alarm goes off when a muscle has been pushed to complete failure on a set. Like my bicep example I gave earlier, doing that set of barbell curls at 185 lbs X 9 reps. The switch has been tripped in my body, it detects a threat to itʼs physiology where the biceps originate. Now, via multiple chemical reactions the body collects itʼs resources it needs and directs them to strengthen that muscle to compensate for the stress it was just put under. At this point the compensation will begin. Putting back what was already there. Now understand this! The biochemical resources the body uses to recover and grow are strictly limited. So limited that if I were to perform a second set of barbell curls to failure, I would be cutting an even deaper inroad into my muscles recovery system, delaying the recovery and growth process, now making my efforts counter-productive. You see the body is very mechanistic. Doing one set to complete muscle failure activates that switch that tells the body itʼs time to make that muscle recover and grow to protect against further assault. Once this switch has been activated, itʼs on! Just like when you walk into a dark room and flip the light switch on you are confident that the mechanism within that switch will turn on the light. There is no need to keep flipping that switch up and down over and over again, it wont make the light any brighter, it will just wear out the switch! Make sense? So how often should you train each muscle group? Well that depends on your level of strength. If you do a set on bench press with 135 lbs X 10 reps, you wonʼt need as much time to recover as would someone who does 315 lbs X 10 reps. As a general rule of thumb, I suggest that nobody should hit a particular muscle group more than ounce per week. People seem to do well on a varying split style routine in which they weight train 3 times per week and not train any one muscle group more than once per week. This style of training yields very good results for most. This will allow you to recover and grow for a while but remember that as your level of strength increases so does the necessary recovery time in order to make that muscle grow. So if you hit a platue where your strength ceases to increase, I recommend adding in two more recovery days between all weight training sessions from that point on and you will see your strength begin to move up again. Iʼve had people comment to me that " well yeh training like that might make you stronger but it wonʼt make you bigger." My response to that is " well ok, if you donʼt get bigger by getting stronger, then how do you get bigger? By getting weaker?" Make no mistake about it, if your getting stronger than your moving in the right direction. Now I donʼt want you to take my word for it just because Iʼve done a few physique competitions. I want you to believe it because itʼs logical. You see, Im not an advocate for less training, however, I am an advocate for the precise amount of training to produce muscle growth. Itʼs sad to see all the same people that have shown up at the gym every night to lift for 2-3 hours per day, and have for the last 10 years of their lives, and have absolutely nothing to show for their time and effort. Going through the motions day in and day out thinking that one day the routine they are doing is just going to magicaly start producing results. If a workout routine hasnʼt produced results for months let alone years, then itʼs not going to, EVER! What about the pro bodybuilders I read about in Flex magazine? They have their workouts printed and they do 4-5 sets to failure on each exercise and they train each muscle group 2-3 times per week? Yes, true but let us not underestimate the power of anabolic steroids. And your kidding yourself if you think there are IFBB proʼs out there that arenʼt using multiple combinations of steroids! Steroids alter the chemistry of the body on multple levels, two of them being the ability to greatly enhance nitrogen retention and protein synthesis. Yes this will make you recover much, much faster so you can train much harder, more frequently and yet not overtrain. This information is directed more at people like myself who have chosen to follow this path the natural way. Best of luck to all of you out there. I hope the information Iʼve provided will help you take a second look at your current training routine and make a clear judgement on whether or not itʼs an effective one.