Do not be fooled by the photo above of Kai Greene incline pressing 220kg. Kai Greene is NOT a weightlifter. He is a bodybuilder. See, bodybuilders lift ever increasing weights over time, for hypertrophy. Whereas weightlifters lift ever increasing weights over time, and hypertrophy is incidental. Obviously, they are completely unrelated activities. Watch Kai’s explanation here…
As Kai explains, bodybuilders are concerned with making their muscles CONTRACT. This is VERY difficult to achieve. Muscles causing movement by contracting is not something that happens naturally or thoughtlessly. It is very rare for it to ever happen in nature; except always, in every living mammal, even asleep, including babies still in their mothers womb. But aside from every mammal, always, without conscious awareness, muscle contractions are very rare, complicated and involving. Muscles just keep wanting to run off and do all those other things that muscles do, aside from contracting. This is why the only successful bodybuilders are the most deeply intelligent, thoughtful, self-reflective, spiritual beings you will ever meet. That’s what it takes to make muscles contract. But you probably don’t understand because you are not as intelligent as the typical bodybuilder.
Weightlifters, by contrast, don’t even think about their muscles contracting. As a result, weightlifters lift weights without using their muscles at all! Instead, weightlifters use all the other kinetic abilities humans are imbued with to cause movement, aside from muscular contraction. As a result of weightlifters only lifting weights – instead of contracting their muscles to lift weights – they do not look big, like bodybuilders.
Bodybuilders often look hugely muscular, despite not being extraordinarily large or strong people. This is absolutely NOT because their sport literally awards the person who imparts the greatest illusion of being more massively muscular than they actually are. No. It is because the most powerful adaptive stimulus for a human to transform into a huge, hulking, muscular beast, is to train like a geriatric cripple rehabilitating from severe neuromuscular disease, while fantasising that half-assed, BS, light-weight muscle-flexing is really hard.
Champion powerlifters and weightlifters, on the other hand, can be disproportionately small and un-muscular for their incredible strength. This is absolutely NOT because their sport is literally based on awarding the smallest person with disproportionately incredible strength. No. It is because weightlifters don’t train like they are geriatric cripples trying to rehabilitate from severe neuromuscular disease.
It is also important to recognise that the physiques displayed by champion bodybuilders and powerlifters/weightlifters are 100% a function of their training, and not of any genetic factors. For example, short limbs and wide hips do not create favourable leverages for powerlifting; powerlifting training shortens your limbs, widens your hips. Similarly, wide clavicles, narrow hips, perfect muscle attachments and a height approaching 4-foot does not provide a good platform for bodybuilding; being a low-IQ, delusional narcissist, who trains like a rehabilitating geriatric cripple, makes you short with wide shoulders and a tiny waist.
So the lesson from Kai is clear: If weightlifters started focusing on their muscles lifting the weight – instead of using all the other attributes humans use to cause physical movement – they would restructure their entire skeleton and muscle attachments and sprout a muscular physique exactly like Kai’s. All it takes is a little imagination…. or a LOT of imagination… and not much thought.
