The Weider Principles

The Weider System has been around for over 60 years and has been growing and updating as new discoveries are made. It is not only a training system but also a guide to help you design a system adapted to each individual, based on physique, goals, experience, strength, weaknesses, recovery capacity, and nutrition.

What are the Weider principles about?

THEY ARE DIVIDED INTO 3 CATEGORIES:

• * PRINCIPLES TO HELP YOU PLAN YOUR TRAINING CYCLES.
• * PRINCIPLES TO HELP YOU ORGANIZE YOUR EXERCISES IN EACH WORKOUT AND INCREASE INTENSITY.
• * PRINCIPLES TO HELP YOU PERFORM EACH EXERCISE.

One of the principles appears in all 3 categories: the Instinctive Training Principle. This principle is simple but extremely important. It's about applying your own experience and learning to listen to your body and how it responds to the stress of exercise when performing a high-intensity technique or a specific program. You should always use this principle. Today, we will explain the principles of the first category in a little more detail.

WEIDER PRINCIPLES TO HELP YOU PLAN YOUR TRAINING CYCLES:

1. CYCLIC TRAINING PRINCIPLE: This means dividing your workouts into cycles for strength gain, cycles for muscle volume, and cycles for definition or competition preparation. This will keep you away from injuries as much as possible and prevent your body from adapting, ensuring continued progress.
2. MUSCLE SPLIT PRINCIPLE: This involves dividing your routine between upper body one day and lower body another day, resulting in greater intensity for each area of the body.
3. DOUBLE OR TRIPLE MUSCLE SPLIT PRINCIPLE: Dividing your weekly routine into 2 or 3 shorter, and therefore more intense, sections for each muscle.
4. MUSCLE CONFUSION PRINCIPLE: Muscles adapt or accommodate to a specific stress or stimulus, leading to the famous stagnation or plateau when you continuously apply the same stress and stimulus to your muscles for a relatively long period. To avoid this, you must continuously vary the exercises, the order of execution, sets, repetitions, weight, and intensity techniques.
5. PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD PRINCIPLE: This is the most important of all, as basically, every fitness or bodybuilding parameter is based on making your muscles work harder than they are used to, and that is precisely what this principle is about. If you overlook it, say goodbye to your progress.
6. HOLISTIC TRAINING PRINCIPLE: The different types of cells in muscle mass respond differently to types of stress, so using a variety of repetitions, sets, and training frequency will ensure maximum muscle development.
7. ECLECTIC TRAINING PRINCIPLE: This involves combining exercises for mass and strength (compound) and isolation and refinement exercises to help you achieve more complete physical development, target weaknesses, and achieve better progress.
8. INSTINCTIVE TRAINING PRINCIPLE: Eventually, every athlete reaches a point where, instinctively and with a thorough knowledge of their body, they can build their own routines, intensity cycles, repetition ranges, sets, and everything else that works best for them, although these are usually very advanced and experienced athletes.

Who was Joe Weider?

Today, we all know and assume that to be healthy, you need to exercise and have a nutritionally balanced diet. But it wasn't always that way. The world owes this concept, in large part, to the lifelong efforts of Joe Weider. Joe Weider is recognized as the man who changed the way the world understands the connection between exercise, nutrition, and health.

He created the Muscle&Fitness empire, the magazine in which he published information about training, nutrition, and his beloved sport, bodybuilding. He popularized the machines and weights that today can be found in almost all gyms and even homes everywhere. But he also introduced nutritional supplements as indispensable tools in combination with physical exercise. Today, the Weider name is synonymous with health and wellness. A true pioneer in bringing strength and fitness to the collective public consciousness.

Since 1936, Joe's message has led athletes, coaches, and sports scientists worldwide to forever change their approach to training, nutrition, and recovery according to the “commandments” set forth in his training principles. He managed to get the medical community, always hostile and skeptical towards the world of bodybuilding, to embrace this type of training as a vital weapon in the fight against aging. He led psychologists to accept exercise as a vital factor for mental health. And his passion gave rise to the sport of bodybuilding, which emerged from the shadows and now has countless competitors worldwide.

The Life of Joe Weider

Born in 1920, Joe Weider grew up in a Montreal (Canada) neighborhood during the difficult years of the Great Depression. At the age of 12, he had to leave public school to work pulling a cart 10 hours a day delivering fruit and food to a market. Too scrawny for his age, Joe found a way to make weights out of railroad material and trained hard. At 17, he competed in an amateur contest in Montreal where he even beat the district's heavyweights, earning him a national ranking. This success, along with his physical transformation, inspired him to enlighten others. This was the late 1930s, a dark time for the iron sport, with gyms explicitly hidden from society. In 1946, Joe and his brother Ben rented the National Theater in Montreal to host the first Mr. Canada competition. In 1965, the Mr. Olympia contest was created, which is the most important contest in all bodybuilding. Among the most famous Mr. Olympia winners is Arnold Schwarzenegger, a seven-time champion. In recognition of women's dedication to the sport, Joe went on to create the Ms. Olympia contest in 1978, and added the Fitness Olympia contest in 1995. Today, there are 170 countries affiliated with the IFBB, and it is now ranked as one of the top seven international sports federations in the world.

YOU CAN FIND MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE WEIDER PRINCIPLES OR ABOUT JOE WEIDER ON HIS OFFICIAL WEBSITE: www.joeweider.com