Scourge
03-12-2005, 22:47
General Rules of Training for Beginners.
As we’ve got a new Beginners Section, I thought I’d write us some articles for beginners. I’ve tried to address many common areas of misconception with basic rules of training in language that isn’t too technical. If anybody reading this has any ideas for areas I haven’t covered, or wants an explanation for a term or idea addressed below, let us know.
Please note that, in writing this article, I have assumed that the vast majority of visitors to Iron City will be training for either gains in strength, or gains in muscle mass, or a combination of the two. If your aims differ significantly from these two, some of the advice in this article might not be relevant to you.
So, without any further ado...
1) Free weights are better than machines.
Contrary to what you might have been told, machine exercises are an inferior method of training for almost all lifters, and especially for those who have even the slightest interest in training to improve their ability to perform a given functional activity.
Machines force the user to exert force against a resistance in an unnatural fixed movement pattern, effectively decreasing the user’s ability to perform ‘natural’ actions, inflicting significant shearing forces on the joints involved in the prescribed movement and increasing the injury risk of the user in a number of ways, particularly if the user plays some kind of physical sport.
While many top-level bodybuilders seem to be fond of incorporating machines into their training, remember that they are a) training at a completely different level to you or I, b) very well looked after from a medical point of view and c) training purely for muscle tissue development.
In short, machines have a lot of drawbacks to them and not a lot to recommend them. They are only really useful for hypertrophy training (training for size) and are almost certainly inferior in all respects for beginners.
For more information on the advantages of free weights over machines, read http://www.iron-city.net/showthread.php?p=34879.
1) a) The Smith Machine counts as a machine.
It does. And a really bad one at that.
2) Compound exercises are better than isolation exercises
Isolation exercises are those that require movement around only one joint i.e. strict bicep curls, where movement occurs at the elbow joint alone. Compound exercises are those that require movement around more than one joint i.e. close grip chin-ups, which requires flexion/extension of both the elbow and shoulder joints to be performed correctly.
Generally speaking, more muscle groups will be used in performing a compound exercise than an isolation exercise. As such, compound exercises will often allow you to lift more weight than isolation exercises.
Although this rule is less clear cut than the one on free weight vs. machine exercises, it is broadly and quite instinctively correct: If one exercise uses one muscle as a primary mover with a few others in supporting roles and another exercises employs three or four major muscle groups plus hundreds of others in stabilising and supporting roles, which do you think is going to be the most effective in terms of building strength and muscle mass?
In general, assuming that you’re training for muscular strength and/or hypertrophy, your training routine should consist primarily of major compound exercises. Isolation exercises can be added in moderation to target areas of particular importance to the trainer or to areas which sometimes do not respond well to a compound-only routines e.g. the calves.
Please note that some exercises do not fit well into either of the ‘compound’ or ‘isolation’ classifications. The main examples of this are the goodmorning, the stiff-legged deadlift and the Romanian deadlift, which are often performed so as to appear to be isolation exercises according to the definition given above (with major conscious joint movement occurring only at the hip) yet which have many of the characteristics of compound exercises (being heavy exercises recruiting many muscle groups). In such cases, a degree of common sense is required to establish how to treat the exercise in question.
3) Squat.
A wise man once said that, “Any routine without squats is, at best, flawed.”.
He wasn’t wrong either. The barbell back squat is the daddy of all exercises and should normally be trained at least once per week, and maybe as often as twice or three times per week for extended periods.
The squat is an incredibly effective exercise for achieving all-body gains in strength and hypertrophy at an incredibly rapid rate. The drawbacks to this exercise are that it a) takes a certain amount of practice to perform with correct technique and b) is hard work if performed with enough weight. For this reason, free weight barbell squats are seldom seen these days in commercial gyms: a fact that belies their effectiveness.
While a decent squat technique may take several sessions to grasp fully, it is not the most difficult exercise out there by a long way. Videos and descriptions of how to proper squat technique are widely available on the web and should help in understanding how to perform this exercise if you cannot get an experience lifter to show it to you. Many people find that squatting down onto a box or some kind of low seat helps them to understand the basic technique for the squat faster. To be properly effective, squats need to be performed to a decent depth: Having your upper leg parallel to the floor is probably a good guide for beginners, although you may need to squat deeper than that if you are interested in weightlifting or powerlifting.
A word on injuries and squatting: While I don’t deny that previous injuries, skeletal deformities and a number of other medical conditions may preclude a trainer from squatting, my own experience suggests than injuries (of which ‘bad knees’ seems to be the favourite) are often used as an excuse for not squatting because it is hard work. If your knees/back/whatever genuinely do hurt when squatting, reassess your technique, as poor technique can be a major cause of discomfort when squatting.
4) You do not need to completely recover from your last workout before performing another.
While it was once a popular belief that optimum progress in weight training could only be achieved if the trainer completely recovered between workouts. Nowadays, intelligent trainers use a rather more sophisticated theory known as the “Dual-Factor Training Theory”, or merely the “Dual-Factor Theory”. I won’t explain the theory in full here, but the basic gist of it is that you can ‘build up’ fatigue between workouts (train again when you’re still a bit tired from your last workout) without any adverse effect on your progress, so long as you make sure you allow this fatigue to dissipate by ‘deloading’ (either ‘taking some time off training to rest’ or ‘reducing the amount of training you do or the weights you’re using to train with for a period, allowing you to recover from fatigue without stopping training altogether’) after a number of weeks of building up fatigue.
This process of building up fatigue from one workout to the next is known as ‘overreaching’, although uneducated trainers may label it as ‘overtraining’. While it is hard to completely distinguish between overtraining and overreaching with a single definition for each, as they are essentially different degrees of the same phenomenon, broad and functional descriptions of the two may be:
Overtraining: The act of training so often as to limit further progress in ones training.
Overreaching: The act of intentionally and harmlessly building up fatigue between workouts as a means to further progress in the future i.e. after deloading.
Overreaching is a major means to further progress for more experienced trainers and is the foundation for many advanced training routines.
5) You cannot build muscle on hopes and dreams.
A common mistake made by beginners in search of muscular strength and/or size is that they do lots of training and not a lot of eating. It is a fundamental tenet of modern physics that you cannot make something out of nothing: The same is also true of muscle.
If you want to get bigger or stronger than you are, you will need to eat more than you do. It’s as simple as that. Without sufficient nutritional resources (a calories surplus with reasonable proportions of macronutrients and sufficient micronutrients), your body cannot grow more muscle tissue and cannot repair itself optimally after bouts of physical exercise. As a beginner, I suggest you follow Scourge's “Easy Guide to Eating for Weight Training”.
Step 1: Get your protein.
Step 2: Don’t eat like crap.
Step one can easily be achieved by eating more meat and dairy (or just dairy for vegetarians, or soy and pulses for vegans), although you may also use supplements to increase your protein intake. Step two is achieved by eating a balanced diet (eat some protein, eat some carbs, eat some fat, eat your veggies, eat your fruit), eating less processed food and avoiding as much as possible the sugar-saturated rubbish that seems to make up a large proportion of the modern diet.
While I appreciate the above is rather simplistic, I feel it’s not a bad approach, especially for a beginner. Also, it’ll have to do unless somebody wants to write a sticky on ‘Diet for Beginners’. If you’re an aspiring strength guy like myself, this approach should last you for a fair while. If you’re a potential bodybuilder, you may find that diet is a rather more important factor in achieving your goals and want to start researching proper nutrition in more depth.
6) Food supplements are not that important.
Beginners should read this part carefully. This part of my post could potentially save you hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds: My Christmas 2005 present to newbie readers of Iron City.
Ho ho ho.
Many beginners are suckered into the supplements market by the very clever (and nowadays, seemingly all-pervasive) advertising of supplement companies and made to believe that supplements are the absolute be-all and end-all of training. The reality is that this is not the case: Many supplements put on the market by many supplement companies, including the large, well-known ones, range from the dubiously ineffective to downright scams. Not only that, but those supplements that are proven to work are likely to only make a small difference to your training, so also beware well-reputed supplements being hawked at extortionate prices.
So far as I am concerned, there are only a few supplements that are worth paying for if you’re serious about your training: Whey protein works well and can be purchased very cheaply if unflavoured and in bulk. Creatine works well for most, although some people seem to get no benefit from it. Vitamin pills are well-established and while some people doubt their effectiveness, they are pretty cheap by supplement standards, so worth the risk in my book. While I am aware that some other supplements may be useful for some people, these three are the main supplements of real use to most trainers. Use other supplements at your own risk.
If your not really that serious about your training, I wouldn’t bother with supplements at all unless you’re really loaded.
The best food supplement in my opinion? More food.
7) You won’t get ‘too big’.
While the statement in question (“I want to train, but I don’t want to get too big.”) will often draw derisory laughs from more experienced trainers, it seems to be a significant concern among beginners.
Bottom line: You’re not going to get ‘too big’. It takes months and years of dedicated training and eating for the intended purpose of gaining muscle mass to make noticeable gains in size. Very few men and almost no women can gain muscle mass by accident. You are not going to wake up one morning the size of a bus and think “Oh gods! I never meant for this to happen!”.
I mentioned earlier than a continued calorie surplus is required to gain muscle mass. The flip-side of this is that gains in muscle mass can be reduced or avoided, if that is your concern, by keeping your diet in check and not eating too much.
8) You are probably not a hardgainer.
It's quite possible that I would never get tired of hurting people who label themselves as 'hardgainers' because they've made poor progress over their first few months and years of training. Nevermind, their poor diet, badly-constructed training routines, crap lifestyle and other assorted half-assed attempts to get the basics of a decent training regime together - The reason that these people can't get bigger and/or stronger is because of their shoddy genetics.
'Genetics' is the archetypal defence of the trainer who is making unsatisfactory progress, but is too lazy or ignorant to help themselves do anything about it. While I'm not arguing that genetics has no effect on how much progress you will make with a given training regime, its importance is widely overstated, and this explanation of a trainer's poor progress is massively overused: Christian Thibaudeau (well-respected strength and conditioning coach) recently estimated that approximately 0.13% of trainers were 'true' hardgainers, whose genetics made it very difficult for them to gain size and strength, regardless of their training methods. Now, you tell me - Is it possible that damn-nearly all of this 0.13% of trainers posts on the same online training forums as I do, or that almost all of the people I see claiming to be 'hardgainers' are in fact 'full of it'?
It constantly amazes me why anybody would be willing to label themselves as an evolutionary dropout rather than try to re-evalute and improve their training, diet and lifestyle. The scoop? If you're making unsatisfactory progress in the gym and you haven't subjected yourself to a muscular biopsy, take a look at these aspects of your training before making any unfounded assumptions about your genetic predisposition.
9) You are not special.
If "I'm a hardgainer" is the archetypal excuse for making poor progress, "I know what works best for me" is the archetypal excuse for not doing anything about it.
Too often have I seen inexperienced trainers reject a blinding piece of training advice or a well thought-out routine that would keep them in decent progress for months on the basis that 'they know what works best for them, and this isn't it'. Sadly, a lot of these people seem to have some irrational preference for their chosen training method, despite having only limited experience of other methods and the logic behind them. What if their chosen routine or series of routines is widely held to be ineffective by the majority of the educated training community? It doesn't matter - These people KNOW it works for them. In short, they're special.
The fact of the matter is that human beings are not all that different from each other. IIRC it is widely believed (although don't quote me on it) that there is less genetic distinction between all humans than between all the members of your average social group of chimpanzees. You are not special - You are just like everybody else.
The point that I'm trying to make is that if one routine works for lots of people, it will almost certainly work for you. Likewise, if another routine is widely derided by the training community (listen up Mike Mentzer fanboys), it's probably not worth looking at. A scientific approach to training methodology exists for a number of reasons, one of which is to allow training cycles to be accurately constructed and appraised without the need to run a study on every single one to see if it works. Odds are that some guy in a lab knows more about how your body reacts to exercise than you do.
Conclusion: Don't get too attached to a certain way of training or eating and be prepared to try new training methods or ideas if they're widely regarded by your peers and experts in the field of physical training.
More to come, when I’ve got time... :024:
Please read.
The above article was written by Scourge for www.iron-city.net on the 03 December 2005. If some misguided individual thinks it's good enough to want to copy-and-paste it onto another website or forum, please do the decent thing and provide the link to it, or credit me and IC for it. Don't be a prick and try to pass it off as your own.
Disclaimer: Please note that the author i.e. Scourge, accepts that any or all of the above may be merely the opinion of Scourge and/or plain wrong and might not necessarily be based on any facts known to man or beast whatsoever. Scourge accepts no liability in general for anything ever, and in particular for any injury, illness, death, discomfort, pain, financial loss, adverse emotions, boredom etc. that may occur either as a result of yourself or others reading and/or following any of the advice contained or not contained in this article.
As we’ve got a new Beginners Section, I thought I’d write us some articles for beginners. I’ve tried to address many common areas of misconception with basic rules of training in language that isn’t too technical. If anybody reading this has any ideas for areas I haven’t covered, or wants an explanation for a term or idea addressed below, let us know.
Please note that, in writing this article, I have assumed that the vast majority of visitors to Iron City will be training for either gains in strength, or gains in muscle mass, or a combination of the two. If your aims differ significantly from these two, some of the advice in this article might not be relevant to you.
So, without any further ado...
1) Free weights are better than machines.
Contrary to what you might have been told, machine exercises are an inferior method of training for almost all lifters, and especially for those who have even the slightest interest in training to improve their ability to perform a given functional activity.
Machines force the user to exert force against a resistance in an unnatural fixed movement pattern, effectively decreasing the user’s ability to perform ‘natural’ actions, inflicting significant shearing forces on the joints involved in the prescribed movement and increasing the injury risk of the user in a number of ways, particularly if the user plays some kind of physical sport.
While many top-level bodybuilders seem to be fond of incorporating machines into their training, remember that they are a) training at a completely different level to you or I, b) very well looked after from a medical point of view and c) training purely for muscle tissue development.
In short, machines have a lot of drawbacks to them and not a lot to recommend them. They are only really useful for hypertrophy training (training for size) and are almost certainly inferior in all respects for beginners.
For more information on the advantages of free weights over machines, read http://www.iron-city.net/showthread.php?p=34879.
1) a) The Smith Machine counts as a machine.
It does. And a really bad one at that.
2) Compound exercises are better than isolation exercises
Isolation exercises are those that require movement around only one joint i.e. strict bicep curls, where movement occurs at the elbow joint alone. Compound exercises are those that require movement around more than one joint i.e. close grip chin-ups, which requires flexion/extension of both the elbow and shoulder joints to be performed correctly.
Generally speaking, more muscle groups will be used in performing a compound exercise than an isolation exercise. As such, compound exercises will often allow you to lift more weight than isolation exercises.
Although this rule is less clear cut than the one on free weight vs. machine exercises, it is broadly and quite instinctively correct: If one exercise uses one muscle as a primary mover with a few others in supporting roles and another exercises employs three or four major muscle groups plus hundreds of others in stabilising and supporting roles, which do you think is going to be the most effective in terms of building strength and muscle mass?
In general, assuming that you’re training for muscular strength and/or hypertrophy, your training routine should consist primarily of major compound exercises. Isolation exercises can be added in moderation to target areas of particular importance to the trainer or to areas which sometimes do not respond well to a compound-only routines e.g. the calves.
Please note that some exercises do not fit well into either of the ‘compound’ or ‘isolation’ classifications. The main examples of this are the goodmorning, the stiff-legged deadlift and the Romanian deadlift, which are often performed so as to appear to be isolation exercises according to the definition given above (with major conscious joint movement occurring only at the hip) yet which have many of the characteristics of compound exercises (being heavy exercises recruiting many muscle groups). In such cases, a degree of common sense is required to establish how to treat the exercise in question.
3) Squat.
A wise man once said that, “Any routine without squats is, at best, flawed.”.
He wasn’t wrong either. The barbell back squat is the daddy of all exercises and should normally be trained at least once per week, and maybe as often as twice or three times per week for extended periods.
The squat is an incredibly effective exercise for achieving all-body gains in strength and hypertrophy at an incredibly rapid rate. The drawbacks to this exercise are that it a) takes a certain amount of practice to perform with correct technique and b) is hard work if performed with enough weight. For this reason, free weight barbell squats are seldom seen these days in commercial gyms: a fact that belies their effectiveness.
While a decent squat technique may take several sessions to grasp fully, it is not the most difficult exercise out there by a long way. Videos and descriptions of how to proper squat technique are widely available on the web and should help in understanding how to perform this exercise if you cannot get an experience lifter to show it to you. Many people find that squatting down onto a box or some kind of low seat helps them to understand the basic technique for the squat faster. To be properly effective, squats need to be performed to a decent depth: Having your upper leg parallel to the floor is probably a good guide for beginners, although you may need to squat deeper than that if you are interested in weightlifting or powerlifting.
A word on injuries and squatting: While I don’t deny that previous injuries, skeletal deformities and a number of other medical conditions may preclude a trainer from squatting, my own experience suggests than injuries (of which ‘bad knees’ seems to be the favourite) are often used as an excuse for not squatting because it is hard work. If your knees/back/whatever genuinely do hurt when squatting, reassess your technique, as poor technique can be a major cause of discomfort when squatting.
4) You do not need to completely recover from your last workout before performing another.
While it was once a popular belief that optimum progress in weight training could only be achieved if the trainer completely recovered between workouts. Nowadays, intelligent trainers use a rather more sophisticated theory known as the “Dual-Factor Training Theory”, or merely the “Dual-Factor Theory”. I won’t explain the theory in full here, but the basic gist of it is that you can ‘build up’ fatigue between workouts (train again when you’re still a bit tired from your last workout) without any adverse effect on your progress, so long as you make sure you allow this fatigue to dissipate by ‘deloading’ (either ‘taking some time off training to rest’ or ‘reducing the amount of training you do or the weights you’re using to train with for a period, allowing you to recover from fatigue without stopping training altogether’) after a number of weeks of building up fatigue.
This process of building up fatigue from one workout to the next is known as ‘overreaching’, although uneducated trainers may label it as ‘overtraining’. While it is hard to completely distinguish between overtraining and overreaching with a single definition for each, as they are essentially different degrees of the same phenomenon, broad and functional descriptions of the two may be:
Overtraining: The act of training so often as to limit further progress in ones training.
Overreaching: The act of intentionally and harmlessly building up fatigue between workouts as a means to further progress in the future i.e. after deloading.
Overreaching is a major means to further progress for more experienced trainers and is the foundation for many advanced training routines.
5) You cannot build muscle on hopes and dreams.
A common mistake made by beginners in search of muscular strength and/or size is that they do lots of training and not a lot of eating. It is a fundamental tenet of modern physics that you cannot make something out of nothing: The same is also true of muscle.
If you want to get bigger or stronger than you are, you will need to eat more than you do. It’s as simple as that. Without sufficient nutritional resources (a calories surplus with reasonable proportions of macronutrients and sufficient micronutrients), your body cannot grow more muscle tissue and cannot repair itself optimally after bouts of physical exercise. As a beginner, I suggest you follow Scourge's “Easy Guide to Eating for Weight Training”.
Step 1: Get your protein.
Step 2: Don’t eat like crap.
Step one can easily be achieved by eating more meat and dairy (or just dairy for vegetarians, or soy and pulses for vegans), although you may also use supplements to increase your protein intake. Step two is achieved by eating a balanced diet (eat some protein, eat some carbs, eat some fat, eat your veggies, eat your fruit), eating less processed food and avoiding as much as possible the sugar-saturated rubbish that seems to make up a large proportion of the modern diet.
While I appreciate the above is rather simplistic, I feel it’s not a bad approach, especially for a beginner. Also, it’ll have to do unless somebody wants to write a sticky on ‘Diet for Beginners’. If you’re an aspiring strength guy like myself, this approach should last you for a fair while. If you’re a potential bodybuilder, you may find that diet is a rather more important factor in achieving your goals and want to start researching proper nutrition in more depth.
6) Food supplements are not that important.
Beginners should read this part carefully. This part of my post could potentially save you hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds: My Christmas 2005 present to newbie readers of Iron City.
Ho ho ho.
Many beginners are suckered into the supplements market by the very clever (and nowadays, seemingly all-pervasive) advertising of supplement companies and made to believe that supplements are the absolute be-all and end-all of training. The reality is that this is not the case: Many supplements put on the market by many supplement companies, including the large, well-known ones, range from the dubiously ineffective to downright scams. Not only that, but those supplements that are proven to work are likely to only make a small difference to your training, so also beware well-reputed supplements being hawked at extortionate prices.
So far as I am concerned, there are only a few supplements that are worth paying for if you’re serious about your training: Whey protein works well and can be purchased very cheaply if unflavoured and in bulk. Creatine works well for most, although some people seem to get no benefit from it. Vitamin pills are well-established and while some people doubt their effectiveness, they are pretty cheap by supplement standards, so worth the risk in my book. While I am aware that some other supplements may be useful for some people, these three are the main supplements of real use to most trainers. Use other supplements at your own risk.
If your not really that serious about your training, I wouldn’t bother with supplements at all unless you’re really loaded.
The best food supplement in my opinion? More food.
7) You won’t get ‘too big’.
While the statement in question (“I want to train, but I don’t want to get too big.”) will often draw derisory laughs from more experienced trainers, it seems to be a significant concern among beginners.
Bottom line: You’re not going to get ‘too big’. It takes months and years of dedicated training and eating for the intended purpose of gaining muscle mass to make noticeable gains in size. Very few men and almost no women can gain muscle mass by accident. You are not going to wake up one morning the size of a bus and think “Oh gods! I never meant for this to happen!”.
I mentioned earlier than a continued calorie surplus is required to gain muscle mass. The flip-side of this is that gains in muscle mass can be reduced or avoided, if that is your concern, by keeping your diet in check and not eating too much.
8) You are probably not a hardgainer.
It's quite possible that I would never get tired of hurting people who label themselves as 'hardgainers' because they've made poor progress over their first few months and years of training. Nevermind, their poor diet, badly-constructed training routines, crap lifestyle and other assorted half-assed attempts to get the basics of a decent training regime together - The reason that these people can't get bigger and/or stronger is because of their shoddy genetics.
'Genetics' is the archetypal defence of the trainer who is making unsatisfactory progress, but is too lazy or ignorant to help themselves do anything about it. While I'm not arguing that genetics has no effect on how much progress you will make with a given training regime, its importance is widely overstated, and this explanation of a trainer's poor progress is massively overused: Christian Thibaudeau (well-respected strength and conditioning coach) recently estimated that approximately 0.13% of trainers were 'true' hardgainers, whose genetics made it very difficult for them to gain size and strength, regardless of their training methods. Now, you tell me - Is it possible that damn-nearly all of this 0.13% of trainers posts on the same online training forums as I do, or that almost all of the people I see claiming to be 'hardgainers' are in fact 'full of it'?
It constantly amazes me why anybody would be willing to label themselves as an evolutionary dropout rather than try to re-evalute and improve their training, diet and lifestyle. The scoop? If you're making unsatisfactory progress in the gym and you haven't subjected yourself to a muscular biopsy, take a look at these aspects of your training before making any unfounded assumptions about your genetic predisposition.
9) You are not special.
If "I'm a hardgainer" is the archetypal excuse for making poor progress, "I know what works best for me" is the archetypal excuse for not doing anything about it.
Too often have I seen inexperienced trainers reject a blinding piece of training advice or a well thought-out routine that would keep them in decent progress for months on the basis that 'they know what works best for them, and this isn't it'. Sadly, a lot of these people seem to have some irrational preference for their chosen training method, despite having only limited experience of other methods and the logic behind them. What if their chosen routine or series of routines is widely held to be ineffective by the majority of the educated training community? It doesn't matter - These people KNOW it works for them. In short, they're special.
The fact of the matter is that human beings are not all that different from each other. IIRC it is widely believed (although don't quote me on it) that there is less genetic distinction between all humans than between all the members of your average social group of chimpanzees. You are not special - You are just like everybody else.
The point that I'm trying to make is that if one routine works for lots of people, it will almost certainly work for you. Likewise, if another routine is widely derided by the training community (listen up Mike Mentzer fanboys), it's probably not worth looking at. A scientific approach to training methodology exists for a number of reasons, one of which is to allow training cycles to be accurately constructed and appraised without the need to run a study on every single one to see if it works. Odds are that some guy in a lab knows more about how your body reacts to exercise than you do.
Conclusion: Don't get too attached to a certain way of training or eating and be prepared to try new training methods or ideas if they're widely regarded by your peers and experts in the field of physical training.
More to come, when I’ve got time... :024:
Please read.
The above article was written by Scourge for www.iron-city.net on the 03 December 2005. If some misguided individual thinks it's good enough to want to copy-and-paste it onto another website or forum, please do the decent thing and provide the link to it, or credit me and IC for it. Don't be a prick and try to pass it off as your own.
Disclaimer: Please note that the author i.e. Scourge, accepts that any or all of the above may be merely the opinion of Scourge and/or plain wrong and might not necessarily be based on any facts known to man or beast whatsoever. Scourge accepts no liability in general for anything ever, and in particular for any injury, illness, death, discomfort, pain, financial loss, adverse emotions, boredom etc. that may occur either as a result of yourself or others reading and/or following any of the advice contained or not contained in this article.