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SIZES AND AVAILABILITY BASED ON CURRENT INVENTORY. OFFICIAL 20th
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For prices and ordering information go to:
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From the IRON MAN PRO Style Store
www.ironmanmagazine.com \ MARCH 2006 73
ecently, we’ve been getting comments like these: “You guys are full of it! Trainees can build lots of muscle by adding sets. Volume training works.” Um, we never said it didn’t. We think you have us con- fused with some other high-intensi- ty proponents—who may have been high when they proposed that.
It’s obvious that volume train- ing can work—if it’s used correctly. We simply don’t have time for it, which is why we’re always looking for ways to build the most muscle in the shortest time possible. (As we’ve said before, we have jobs and fami- lies, for crissake. We have no time for three-hour workouts.)
At this point we train four days a week, during our lunch hour. We hit our first heavy set around 10:15 a.m. and finish about an hour later. Studies show that intense workouts lasting more than about an hour can raise cortisol and deplete tes- tosterone—and we don’t have any to spare (especially Steve, who’s 46 years old).
So what if you don’t have even an hour four days a week? You’ve come to the right place, because we’re convinced that you can get most of the mass-building job done in less time, as you’ll see in a moment. Before we get to that, let’s go in the other direction to clarify something.
Volume training can work, as it did for Bill Pearl and many other bodybuilders in the pre-steroid- abuse era; however, keep in mind that Pearl did around 20 sets per bodypart and rarely took his sets to failure. Subfailure training is necessary because if you use a lot of volume and go to nervous sys- tem exhaustion on even a few sets, you’ll burn out faster than Britney Spear’s first marriage. In other words, if you try to train long and intensely—drug-free—overtraining is inevitable.
It’s all anchored to the size prin- ciple of muscle fiber recruitment: During any set you bring in the low-threshold motor units first, followed by the mediums, followed by the highs. So, basically, you don’t get at the key fast-twitch fibers with the most growth potential—the high-threshold motor units—till the end of the set. If you stop short, you
don’t make much of an inroad into fast-twitch territory.
You also must do a lot of sets to get at enough of those key fast- twitch fibers to initiate a growth re- sponse. Each medium-intensity set brings in a few different fast-twitch fibers, due to a slightly altered recruitment pattern. Of course, if you do a lot of sets and take many of them to failure or beyond, you’ll hit a lot of the same fibers over and over. To avoid overtraining, you have to either have superhuman recovery ability and/or use anabolic steroids.
So if you’re drug-free, you have two choices: 1) Do a lot of sets for each bodypart at medium intensity, à la Bill Pearl, or 2) do only a few sets per bodypart, but take a lot of them past nervous system exhaus- tion with X Reps and X-Rep-hy- brid techniques so you activate as many fast-twitch fibers as possible. With intensity techniques like X Reps—end-of-set partials done at the max-force point—you leapfrog nervous system failure and ramp up fast-twitch-fiber activation.
By the way, if you go to positive failure only, without X Reps, your nervous system craps out, leaving a lot of fast-twitch fibers still sleep- ing. X Reps done at the max-force point extend the set and make sure you blast as many fast-twitchers as possible.
From all we’ve been able to as- certain, it appears that the majority of bodybuilders are like us—they want to get the muscle-building job done as quickly as possible so they have more time for work and life outside the gym. Unfortunately, it ain’t easy. You have to train hard to make more-abbreviated training work. You also need to understand what makes a muscle grow. Accord- ing to Michael Wolf, Ph.D., there are actions that must take place for the body to build X-treme muscle size:
1) The actin and myosin protein
filaments increase in size.
2) The number of myofibrils
increases.
3) The amount of connective
tissue within the muscle may increase.
4) The number of blood capillar-
ies within the fiber may increase.
5) The number of muscle fibers
may increase.
Most bodybuilding programs focus on points 1, 2 and 3. For ex- ample, if you choose a compound movement for each bodypart that’s ergonomically suited to it so the exercise can produce the most force—the ultimate exercises, which are described in The Ultimate Mass Workout e-book—you attack the actin and myosin protein filaments, the myofibrils and the connective tissue. Force is the key here, along with progressive resistance—as you get stronger on the core exercises, you add weight and progressively overload those three items with max force so they increase in size. Result: Somewhat bigger muscles.
We say “somewhat bigger” be- cause using heavy weights for about 10 reps to positive failure on the key exercises, like close-grip bench presses for triceps, can only do so much for size. Sure, you touch on the big three, but nervous system failure is a big stumbling block, as we mentioned (going past failure with X Reps will do a better job). And you haven’t done all that much for items 4 and 5 (not to mention
Models: Steve Holman and Jonathan Lawson
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