Are You Majoring in the Minors?

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Earlier this week, I hit the gym for what I was hoping would be a full-on squat session. I was pumped, and I was ready. However, I got through my warm-ups and made my way to the squat rack...only to find someone using it do, yep, you guessed it—curls. I thought I’d wait a couple of minutes to see if the rack became free, but after about five minutes, I gave up and switched out squats for deadlifts. Not exactly what I had planned, but I managed to get in a decent enough session. All during my workout, I kept an eye on the rack and watched this gentlemen move from barbell curls to some variation on 21s to EZ curls (all still in the squat rack), all before finally exiting the squat rack to finish off with dumbbell curls, hammer curls, and concentration curls. As near as I could figure it, there were six different biceps exercises done for multiple sets of who knows how many repetitions. Was this gentleman a competitive bodybuilder? I would guess not based on the physique that was on display. As I finished my session and as Biceps Guy continued with his biceps destruction odyssey, I remembered the immortal words of the Lord of the Darkside, Jim Wendler, "Don’t major in the minors." Thus, I offer to the readers of elitefts.com Exhibit A for majoring in the minors. Given that elitefts™ strives to educate lifters of all ages and interests, I thought that I would get the ball rolling with a list of clues that indicate that you may be majoring in the minors. I’ll then throw it open to the good readers of this site to expand upon my list and help us build the definitive list of clues that you are, indeed, majoring in the minors. Being a bit of a Jeff Foxworthy fan and his “You might be a redneck” series, I thought it would be fun to do this whole thing in Foxworthy-style. So here we go:

• If you can’t describe your current training philosophy in ten words or less, you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you have more than one current focus for your training, you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you can't identify the key lifts for your current training cycle (let alone training session), you may me majoring in the minors.
• If you don’t go balls out on your main lift for the day (because you want to have energy for the multitude of supplemental and accessory lifts that you need to complete because some Schmo at the gym told you to do them), you may be majoring in the minors.
• If the amount of time you spend on your supplemental or accessory lifts is more than twice the time spent on the main lift for the day, you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you are doing a bodybuilding-type training program to improve the powerlifting lifts, you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you really do think that the squat rack is for doing curls, you may be majoring in the minors.
  
  
  
  
• If you think bands play at bars and chains belong in dungeons, you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you want to know all about circa-max phases, yet you can’t do a double bodyweight repetition in any of the three major lifts, you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you are obsessed with training muscles rather than movements, you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you change programs more often than most people change their underwear, you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you know more than two variations on the biceps curl, you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you spend more time working on technique than getting stronger (by a factor of more than two to one), you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you want to isolate some part of a muscle with a specific exercise, you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you list the Pec Deck amongst your favorite exercises, you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you prefer the leg press to the squat rack, you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you think tattoos, beards, and heavy metal music will make you a better lifter, you may be majoring in the minors (although you will fit in better at the gym).
• If you think automatic entry to Rhodestown will make you a better lifter (so you hoover up any piece of food that is not nailed down), you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you listen to experts other than those on elitefts™, you may be majoring in the minors.
• If you watched the Learn to Train Seminar posts and didn’t immediately identify five ways to improve your training and put them into practice, you may be majoring in the minors.

So there we go—twenty different, random, and potentially incoherent items that jumped into my head. I figure this should be enough to the get the creative juices of all you elitefts™ readers flowing. Let’s see how many more clues for majoring in the minors we can come up with.