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My Lone Wolf Muscle Building Training System
Posted by Jean-Marc
Whether you like it or not, agree with me or not you are a fashion victim to some extent. As humans we are social animals, as social animals we tend to follow other people in our social circle and even beyond with the media being highly influential. Lets look at off roaders for example, anyone that knows about cars will tell you that they are slow, uneconomical, soggy to drive, expensive to insure and not as safe as you would imagine in the unlikely event of an accident. Faced with these facts why are there so many of them on the road and not just on farms? Easy, they look so cool that for people with money a Range Rover or a Rav4 is almost an essential purchase.
Ok we are not all quite that bad and what the fuck has this got to do with getting huge which is I assume what you want to know how to do or you would be reading GQ or some other mag. with lots of girls, clothes and cars in. I am just trying to point out that we naturally follow other people even when what they are doing is not always in our best interest. As an example the other day I dug out a late seventies muscle magazine with a feature on Frank Zane talking about his training for the Olympia which involved two workouts a day each lasting two hours! Holy shit, how do you recover from that or just as importantly when do you get anything else done? It sounds crazy now but I bet that there were plenty of up and coming bodybuilders doing the same thing and usually not getting out of it what they put in. These days most of us follow some variation of the "Heavy Duty" system devised by Mike Mentzer and pulled back in to the limelight by the all conquering Dorian Yates. This style of brief, heavy, intense and infrequent training works for sure, I for one would not have followed it if I hadn't made gains but after a while I questioned whether there might be a system that could yield even better results. The way to train we are told is to hit each muscle every six to eight days with about two or three all out, super heavy sets and we spend about half an hour in the gym no more than four days a week. In theory this is fine but in reality it has it's drawbacks, for a start if the two big sets don't go as well as planned then where does that leave us? The next chance to stimulate growth in that muscle is a week away, another potential problem is the idea that you must constantly try to increase your poundage's and you tend to feel like a failure if you can't; I think that with a lot of exercises you tend to get better results by sticking with a lighter weight that you can handle.
A couple of years ago I stumbled upon a huge advert for a training book called "Big Beyond Belief", the childish name put me off a bit but I thought it was worth a look so I sent off for it. It was written by Leo Costa, Russ Horine and Tom Platz as a sort of follow up to the "Bulgarian Power Burst System" and "Serious Growth" training manuals which were devised and developed from the training systems followed by the highly successful Bulgarian weight lifters. I read the book from cover to cover thinking about it as I took it all in and planned my new workout not following it to the letter but incorporating the theories that seemed rational and practical. Like most training systems the authors of this book are not content with giving us an effective and workable program; they have to let us know that what we have been doing up till now was a total waste of time and anyone who has made any gains following any other system was just lucky. This is obviously not the case however good their system is it doesn't mean the other ones don't work. This method I will outline based on the "Big Beyond Belief" program is one of the most effective systems I have ever used but it's by no means the only effective system.
This is the program:
Monday, Wednesday, Friday - Chest, Back & Delts
Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday - Thighs, Calves & Arms
Each body part is trained very fast as we need to finish the workout within 45 minutes. The reason for this is that Bulgarian research has shown that you can recover fully and quickly so long as the intense exercise took no longer than this time. Once we start going beyond this timeframe we will excessively deplete our hormones thus not allowing us to recover enough to be back in the gym the next day and still make gains. Obviously trying to get so many body parts into one session means very little rest between sets and fast warm ups. To get things done in time I suggest supersetting, say, chest & back, biceps & triceps and using drop sets to up the intensity as you will not be able to do too many sets. Weight wise you won't be doing any PB's on this system, at least to start with, you just don't have the psyching up time to squat and deadlift on your limit weights but in many ways this is a good thing as you tend to go lighter and stricter, the intensity is built up through the lack of rest that the muscle has rather than the sheer weight. For many of you this goes against the grain as the more you lift, the bigger you get theory is indisputable. I am living proof that this works though. Over the last year I have made noticeable gains in thickness especially in my arms, thighs, lats and delts but have been training lighter, if anything. Strict form is the most important aspect of my training since being shown how to train properly, you get less injuries this way, therefore progress is more consistent. The rep range and exercise selection should vary each workout. Say, Monday and Tuesday you could do 6 to 10 reps, Wednesday and Thursday 10 to 15 reps, Friday and Saturday 15 to 20. An example would be for chest, Monday you could do flat bench and pec deck, Wednesday incline bench and cable crossovers, Friday incline dumbell press and flat bench fly's. After each workout you should load up big time on a glutamine, creatine and glucose mixture also incorporating insulin if you want to go that route, this should be followed by a big whey based protein drink containing 50-100g of protein. Training 6 days a week means that you have 6 windows of opportunity to fill with intelligent nutrition another advantage of this system is that in one week do three weeks worth of workouts. You will need more sleep, I found when I started following this system I went to bed an hour earlier each evening. Cardio is out I just don't feel you can recover from all the tough workouts and add extra stuff in. When you start this program you will feel fucked, as your body adapts you will find it easier to eat well and so long as you do you will look full most of the time and very probably loose some body fat - I did. I urge you to have a go at this, modify it to suit yourself but if you are not 100% satisfied with the gains you are making under your current program what do you have to loose? If you come across any problems or are unsure about anything write into the governor and I will answer it in the next issue. Don't be a sheep it doesn't get you anywhere! A wise man once said "reasonable men adapt themselves to the world, unreasonable men attempt to adapt the world to themselves. That is why all progress depends upon unreasonable men".
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