Interview with Mirco Caselli, IFBB bodybuilder
Mirco Caselli is 38 years old, lives in Bologna, practices bodybuilding at a competitive level and currently works as a Personal Trainer in a gym in Vignola, in the province of Modena.
Interview carried out on May 29th 2012
Hello Riccardo. We have known each other for some years ... so you will already know that I do not live my work as a simple remunerative activity; for me, the "Body Building" athletic trainer is a vocation, or rather a passion that has become a reason for living!
Often those who approach Body-Building do it with superficiality, but as a technician, I know with certainty that to reach certain levels it is essential not to leave anything to chance. In this regard, what about the planning and preparation of a bodybuilder?
The importance of planning and preparation? Very important, primary ... indeed, essential!
First of all, it is crucial to determine how much time is available. With the certainty of being able to better manage the athlete's time resources, it is possible to program a period that we body-builders call MASS. During this time the athlete tries to reach the maximum level of muscular HYPERTROPHY and muscle PROPORTIONS-FORMS that emphasize the appearance and above all that improve the SYMMETRY.
Subsequently it is time to move on to the DEFINITION phase that currently must reach levels to say the least extreme, up to a 4/5% of subcutaneous body fat.
Everything is managed through training, nutrition and integration; obviously, the more time you have available, the more accurately these phases are managed. To be clear, I would like to emphasize that unlike the methods used in the 80s and 90s, where in the "mass" phase there was a tendency to increase weight without paying attention to the quality of the lean mass / fat mass ratio (up to 15 / 20 kg MORE than the tender weight), now we prefer not to exceed 6/8 kg of excess mass. A similar strategy is justifiable for the optimization of the saving of the mass being defined (which is known, in cutting generally tends to be reduced), and above all, minimally affects the general psycho-physical stress.
Let's talk about methods and techniques; in professional and secular gyms they use rather questionable principles, they sketch some physiological explanation but in my opinion nobody has an idea of what he says ... In your opinion, the endless disclosure of new techniques and new methods is really justified by the continuous research of perfection or are they exclusively advertising items?
If you ask me what the best technique is ... in my opinion there is no better strategy than another, but certainly there is an OPTIMAL technique for the INDIVIDUAL INDIVIDUAL! There are organisms that respond more to a Heavy Duty than to a Tri Set ... those who lose weight must add AEROBIC activity and those who MUST NOT SHOULD DO IT. Personally I tend to work with DIFFERENT techniques in parallel, characterized by long and intense work; ultimately, in the 25 years during which I raised cast iron I managed to create an absolutely personalized and constantly evolving super method. I must admit that the great difficulty I have always had, and now more than ever, is to enter into MUSCULAR ACIDOSIS (a fundamental aspect); with age the cellular metabolisms change and today I find it more difficult than 15 years ago. This means that the evolution of training must take into account both intra-individual and inter-individual variables.
