The Weider Bodybuilding System was developed by weight training guru Joe Weider over 50 years ago. According to Bodybuilding.com, Joe Weider is known as the father of bodybuilding, a trainer of some of the best bodybuilders and the publisher of several fitness magazines. The Weider System is a series of training methods developed and adapted by Joe Weider over the years. The concepts are broken up into three training principles to plan training, arrange workouts and perform exercises.
History
According to Bodybuilding.com, Joe Weider has been training athletes and weightlifters since 1936. His program has evolved over the years to incorporate newer training concepts. The program, according to the website MuscleNet, is not a true system in that it consists of training principles that athletes and bodybuilders can use to design their own workout routines. These principles have helped shape bodybuilding and weightlifting styles for years.
Planning Principles
There are eight principles in the Weider system to help you plan your training cycle, all involving styles of how to divide up, or cycle, your workouts. Weider advises to break your training into cycles for strength, mass or competition to challenge the body and keep it healthy. The program advocates split training, meaning breaking up workouts into upper body and lower body, or having a few separate workouts each day. The system says to confuse the muscles with different weights, exercises and techniques so that the muscles are always challenged. Lastly, MuscleNet calls Weider's overload principle the basis of increasing any parameter of fitness, which is to overload or make the muscles work harder than they are used to.
Workout Principles
These system principles are methods to arrange your workout so that the muscles are challenged in different ways to the max. The first idea that Weider developed was to perform multiple sets of exercises instead of just doing one set per movement. This can be done by doing supersets, which are alternating sets of opposite muscle groups, like triceps and biceps, with little or no rest between sets. The Weider system takes this idea further by advocating compound sets which alternate exercises on one body part, to tri-sets and giant sets which do up to six exercises for one body part with minimal rest between sets. Other important principles involve exhaustion. Weider advises working some muscles to exhaustion through "pyradmiding," or extra work, so that you can isolate other muscles more.
Exercise Principles
These training principles are ideas to help you get a little bit more out of your exercises. Weider advocates isolating muscles as much as possible and reducing rest between sets to add a challenge. To confuse muscles, the Weider system says techniques like lifting slower and then lifting at "super speed" are effective. Two other important principles are the peak contraction and the forced reps. In the peak contraction, you hold the weight at the maximum contraction point for a few seconds. The forced reps idea is that even if you can't finish a set by yourself, you benefit from having a partner or spotter help you finish your reps.
Instinctive Training Principle
The instinctive training principle is a key underlying principle of the entire Weider System of Bodybuilding. The idea is that, over time, bodybuilders develop the ability to know what diet, training methods and levels work best for them. In other words, Weider is saying that there is no perfect system and that each body and muscle group is different for different people.
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