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Don't think you're any different than your buddy in the gym who still idolizes Arnold and keeps an ongoing yearbook of articles about the "Austrian Oak" tucked inside the drawer of his bedside table. Okay, granted, you may not be fanatical about it. It isn't likely that you're on the FBI's current stalker list - yet. You may just religiously comb the pages of the latest bodybuilding 'zines to find the freshest front double biceps shot of your "secret" hero. Innocent enough, but are you a fan, or an idol worshipper willing to do anything to have what the pros have?

Something is drawing you back to that sweaty, smelly dungeon you call a gym. We know it isn't the juice bar that catches your fancy, because there isn't one unless you count the spit on the floor. It's not the gleaming chrome equipment either, because you can't admire your reflection in standard issue black iron. So what is it? Somewhere in that psyche of yours is a guy who still gets starry-eyed every time he sees rippling mounds of muscle flexed into eye-popping, striated, rocky-ass-quarries of solid stone!

You might be too embarrassed to admit it in front of that macho group of friends you've worked so hard to hand pick, but lurking in that still-too-newbie body is a guy who'll put the gym before a job, a leg day before a season finale of "The Sopranos" AND a grueling back workout before any thought of group sex with the Swedish Lawn Bowling Team! (Now we KNOW you're sick!) BADA BING!

Whether it's the packaged balance of Chris Cormier, the impressive density of Jay Cutler, or the sheer volume of Ronnie Coleman, the point is, you're not a pro but you secretly wish you could look like one - even for a day. And that's precisely how you train.

Why not? After all, that's the advice that you've been reading, eating, breathing, and sleeping... since you picked up your first "Muscle-Book." What writer doesn't tell you to train like your favorite superhero friends? Truth is, you've practically been forced into it! There's Dexter over here, telling you to train arms using his routine, Orville pleading with you to train legs until you puke, Paul screaming at you like a workout partner from the pages of some magazine, telling you that big chests only come to those who finish all their sets to failure. What else can you do, after all?

Well, mimicry may be the sincerest form of flattery, but in this case, following a pro's workout when you're still developing a base is thwarting your potential as a bodybuilder, and creating a mistake that you may not be able to easily correct in the future.

If you're using an advanced routine within the first few years of your bodybuilding training career, then you're definitely not building the right foundation, and may not be building much else. What's more, you're opening yourself up to injuries that can and will crop up eventually as a result of the structural vulnerabilities that you are creating today.

The first few years of your time in the gym need to be spent focusing on different aspects of training than what someone like Schlierkamp or Fux may focus on when they train. Remember, you never saw them when they first started out. If you ask them, they'd probably confirm for you that the workouts they currently use are in no way recognizable in relation to the ones they first used.

Okay, sure, mistakes are inevitable, and they are an invaluable part of finding your way around in the gym. Anyone who doesn't advocate making mistakes hasn't really achieved anything in their life. It's through mistakes that we can see our paths more clearly. Trust me, no one is calling you a jackass for doing what, on the outside, makes sense. Taking expert advice is the most logical thing to want to do. Patterning oneself after those who are successful makes the likelihood of your success all the much greater. But when "success gurus" were busy thinking up quotable phrases, they forgot to tell you that there is a logical progression to everything.

Everyone Has A Beginning - Humble or Otherwise

The only problem with taking random expert advice is that it's just that - random along a scale of time that no one but that person can really reference! Who knows for sure where the path may have begun for their idol? His advice can only be as meaningful in your progression as his beginnings may have been to him. Maybe your idol had a gang of muscle from other sports, and genetics to die for, before he ever crossed over to bodybuilding. Perhaps your hero was a pencil-necked geek who trained with chrome dumbbells for the first year or two of his time in the gym. You just don't know. And since the task is to know where that beginning is, in order to make sense of pro training advice, you can see that it becomes complicated. Neither Rome, nor Ronnie Coleman, were built in a day! Remember that and you'll never go wrong.

So STOP training like you are stepping on to an Olympia stage tomorrow, and head for the CORE.

"I SACRIFICED IT ALL FOR THE CORE"

No doubt we've all heard the phrases: "core exercises" and "compound movements" as well as the term "basics" all the time in bodybuilding magazines. We ignore them because those phrases and terms are for the other guys... the pathetic ones who don't have the genetic potential that we have. Right! Well, they DO apply to all of us