The prevalence of bodybuilding-style weight training in virtually all sports has shown us a lot of things. We’ve seen that stronger athletes perform better almost across the board, including in baseball and golf, which used to be thought of as sports that depend more on “skill” than high-level athletic ability.
It has also demonstrated that women can build full, strong muscles just as much as men can and that the very same techniques that create muscular development in men work the same with women. And if you look at the aesthetically muscular physique of Rising Phoenix World Champion Alina Popa, it’s obvious she did not “train like a girl” to become a world champion — at least, not in any conventional sense.
Alina achieved her success doing traditional bodybuilding workouts, like almost all other male and female champions, using sufficient amounts of weight, performing the appropriate exercises, doing the necessary number of set and reps and working out consistently over time.
“There is essentially no difference between my workouts and those of male pro bodybuilders,” Alina says. “Although some of the mass monsters out there are so much bigger than I am, then of course they need to train with heavier weights than I do. But I train as heavy as I need to, and in some cases I am lifting heavier than some men. Remember, bodybuilding is about weight training, not weightlifting. So, nobody who wants results should use the amount of resistance appropriate for the sets and reps dictated by their own workout schedule.”
When a bodybuilder is posing on stage, the judges are going by what they see. They don’t take into consideration how much weight any given bodybuilder uses in his or her workouts. And while it is human nature to occasionally push yourself or show off in the gym, that is not going to increase your scores in a contest. And training injuries, which can come from working too heavy, poor technique or overtraining, are always going to get in the way of your success.
The Romanian-born bodybuilder, who has twice placed a close second in the Ms. Olympia competition and won the Wings of Strength Rising Phoenix World Championship in 2018, would be a favorite to win the upcoming Ms. Olympia 2020 competition. But because she’s working as vice president for European Operations and Athlete Representative for Jake Wood’s Wings of Strength organization, she doesn’t have the time necessary to adequately prepare for the competition.
Alina is adamant on the subject of weight training for women. Muscle is muscle, she says, and the workouts and techniques that develop muscle for men are the same as those a woman needs to use to achieve comparable results.
“I have heard from many women,” Alina explains, “that when they started training, they were discouraged from training heavy, in a really serious way. This makes no sense to me. It’s like telling a woman in track not to run too fast or pole vaulter not to jump too high. But limiting myself like that never occurred to me. Right from the beginning, I saw my body responding to the training and my goal was to carry this process on as far as I could.”
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Split-System Training
Alina describes her approach to training as very much traditional bodybuilding. She does split-system training, working a few body parts in each session, hitting all the muscle groups over a period of a week or 10 days.
She does mass-building power exercises like barbell or dumbbell chest presses, squats and deadlifts and quality-creating isolation movements like leg extensions, curls or dumbbell laterals. “I don’t think you would notice any major differences between the way I train and the workouts of the top Mr. Olympia contenders,” says Alina.
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Genetics
Alina certainly recognizes that there is a very important genetic component when it comes to success in bodybuilding. Nature has to be generous when it comes to things like skeletal proportions, distribution of type and number of muscle fibers, length of muscle belly, number and distribution of fat cells and all sorts of complex metabolic processes. But she says there are psychological and personality factors as well.
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Stay Highly Motivated
Arnold has always said he approached his training in the gym with “joy.” He always enjoyed his workouts and that kind of enthusiasm allowed him to push himself to his limits and beyond. The bodybuilder who remains highly motivated over time has a great advantage. Nobody had to twist their arms to get Serena Williams or Tiger Woods to practice.
There is a saying that the body will not go where the mind has not gone first. So, becoming a champion is a matter of training the mind as well as the body to achieve your maximum potential.
