Getting Big: What Works

Training Bodybuilding
181

First, please let me thank Mr. Pump for his advise months ago on my question about BDSM muscle, I am now happily married and it’s thanks to you, also thanks to Mr Vandal who didn’t have the kindest words at some times but who said the truest. Now I pay you back.

I received some advise from a person in this website once, GoHeavyFool, and also from other people from my BDSM muscle thread, and speaking of Mr GoHeavy, he once said to me that hypertrophy training is a neverending story, in which there was an everlasting workout to avoid confusion over variations and changes. He did say that a weight should be selected in order to get the good pump feeling after the first rep, and to stop lifting the weight after I stop feeling the reps produce an effect, like he said, do not keep adding sugar to your coffee if it it’s already very sweet.

He said that the easiest way for a person to grow big is to simply start the set in one way and end it on another. he said that at the first reps, people should try to lift as fast as possible, putting as much force out as they can, and lower slow, doing pauses, anything they like, and as the set progresses and they get tired, that it was ok to lift with less force output, lower in shorter eccentrics than at the first reps, even do pauses to manage fatigue, as long as you neevr go more than 1 or 2 reps past the moment when you stop feeling the pump, this is, when you are just adding in excess, not to failure.

Basically, he said to try to get as many sets as possible on a bodypart or muscle group in 30 minutes, but to never work a bodypart more than 45 minutes, 60 if you have years of doing it, big size and lift heavy and if you also are on steroids.

I hope this advise helps, i know you probably will tell me to shut up for being new but I have made good gains with that and it has the advantage I don’t even have to think about tempo, sets, rep ranges, or loads, just to feel the weights, I do sets with my eyes closed and let my partner or spotter watch my form, and another guy on the gym who’s already big is also getting gains from it, and fster, as he uses shakes and supplements and maybe steroids.

Ps. Thanks to Mr Pump, hope you can use this method, I just want to say hi on behalf of my wife, she’s thrilled about T-Nation after reading over my shoulder your advise months ago and well, she’s gotten softer with the whip and canes and overall.

182

Well, Hello There, Luthor…hope your Wife is doing you right, for me, if mine went lighter, it would mean she’d be losing interest or that she’s sad or got a problem eating at her insides. But that’s just me, I am glad you did ok, send me a PM for more advise…

Now, your advise is very good, the concept of getting the most out of a set was already posted by Vandal. The problem with your method, this is, if we apply it to my guy, is that it’s a little bit like an HIT workout, and although my guy tires fast, he can train very often if we use HIT, I am sure he’d train more than 3 days a week.

In a way he is like a 100 meters runner pitted against normal gym goers, who would be like the guy who run the 10.000 meters run at a different pace. If I made them run against each other, my guy would be able to run 400 meters in 45 seconds and rest another 15 before the next run, while the other guy would run at a somewhat steady pace for 30 minutes and get to the finish line in one single pull, so I am sure my guy would end up at the finish line at the same time as him if not first by a couple seconds. And he’d be ready to run the next day without needing much more than aspirin.

Now, what I have thought of is to mix concepts here. I will use a program on him that is as follows:

1-) I will make sure the load selected allows him to start feeling the weight making an effect from the second rep and to make him stop lifting at a point where he starts losing the maximal force output speed, this is, when he lifts slower and when he also feels the pump effect is dissipating.

2-) If possible, I will let him do only one more attempt with a reduced load or after a 15-20 seconds pause. That menas if he does dips, with added weight so by rep 2 he starts feeling the effect and he stops at rep 6 or 7 when he starts lifting himself up slower and he feels the pump has either gone away or starting to dissipate, then I’d let him do pushups, which is less resistance even if he keeps the weight vest on, or rest 15-20 seconds to squeeze out more reps of dips.

3-) I will make sure that he is able to lift fast, and to manage reps differently. Instead of lifting fast at the beggining and slow at the end, I will tell him to lift fast at all times so we know when to stop, but I will keep the idea to lower slower in the first reps than in the last ones, to manage fatigue and adapt to it by modifying the effect of the resistance/load used. I plan to see how can we slow down the lifting too, to decrease force output and manage fatigue, but I think that variable can be left out.

4-) He’ll do as many sets as he can with a load, on an exercise, and he’ll stop said exercise then the load gets too heavy and his reps decrease in 25%, meaning if he was getting 10 reps, we wuit when he gets 7 o6 reps. At this point, if his energy is low we will wait until next session, and if it’s not, we change to another exercise.

I will update you all in how he does and I appreciate the help provided.

183

There’s a whole lot of scientific hoodoo in the areas of training and nutrition that can help somebody get real big. But all that is already discussed in relatively great detail in the articles on this site.

I will mention something that seems to often be overlooked - hard work.

There are countless wastes of space at my gym that literally don’t break a sweat while training. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that none of these guys have a physique worth bragging about.

If your shirt isn’t drenched with sweat after training, if you don’t feel like you’re going to vomit from time to time after finishing a set of squats or leg presses then maybe you need to consider that you’re just not working hard enough to get big.

184

Ok, thanks for the advice, but I have new info:

My guy and I went to the gym today, morning…loaded a bar with more than he could press before for his 5-7 rep sets, means that in 1 week, he moved from a 160 pounds bench press to a 180 pounds one, in 9 days. Now, the trick is, he felt the weight heavy and good, got strong, got his pump at rep 2, stopped at rep 7 as he reached maximal lifting speed and started to slow down and lose force production output level and also started to lose the pump and instead getting a cramp-like feeling, just appearing shy.

Now, the workout is great, he can handle that laod for up to 10 sets, and still handle another 20 sets with 90% of it, in any case, not less than 80% of the initial load, and in all the sets, first 10 and even on the other 10 sets, he rested 1 minute between sets. He felt tired, but not smashed, not fully worked, he said “I feel with a half-tank of pump, each set was good, but we only have the glass half-full” but anyways, he was happy as hell.

Now, for the sake of science, 1 hour later, before sparring, i had him warm up lightly, and then use a backpack with a 75-pounds sandbag inside and he was able to do 4-6 reps of dips with 1 minute rests between for 10 sets. I was amazed, and now, as I write this, i am making him do pushups with that same backpack and thos same 75 pounds and he’s squeezing out 10-12 reps per set.

I am gonna kill myself. The guy keeps reps steady, loading more weight decreases the rep range of the sets but only in the alst set, after no less than 8 sets, is that he actually says to me “Ok, I can’t do more” and starts getting two or three reps less than on the other 9 sets. I see that he’s able to work a muscle group for 45 minutes, rest 90 and then work it another 45 minutes with loads 90-95% like the ones he used on the previous session,a nd he’s able, so far, to work a muscle something like 4 times a day and I am thinking even 5, not to mention that tomorrow, he’d be up to do this again, 4-5 times a day and with the same loads, or almost as much, and even if I make him do high-rep sets or so, he’d still be able to give it all.

How the fuck am i supposed to get a freak of nature like this to grow 15 pounds between March and November? I already made him grow , but I bet he lost 1 pound of fat and gained 1 of muscle, for what he looks like. I just feel like I am running out of options and the next thing to do is to shoot him up with testosterone, adrenaline and creatine to load him up heavier on the workouts, make him drink a black coffee/red bull cocktail and make him eat 300 grams of protein a day and use anabolics just to get him to grow 10 pounds from here to the Halloween at the very least.

I have seen some guys train in the gym the same way, very odd ducks, Colombian and such, and I am starting to think i should ask them about how to do this shit, because the way they train is exactly like the Quattro Dynamo and nowadays, the article by Joel Marion “Stripped Down Hypertrophy” from Feb 5 and the HFT idea by Waterbury work, so maybe I have something to learn from these guys, however, I am still asking for help here about frequent training with heavy loads and rep ranges between 6 and 12 reps, particularly for heavy loads, fast eccentrics and concentrics and high volume.

185

Just because he can do it,does not mean that he will grow with this.

Why dont you put him with 1.5 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight or more, without the anabolics idea,just so you know that he is responding to the food, and have him work to failure instead of this Waterbury-esque stuff of “terminating set as soon as your rep speed decreases” ?

186

I think that there’s a solution that will work for your guy: simply take him out of the comfort zone.

Your boy’s like a cannon: it can shoot big loads (in this case, do heavy sets well) and he can do it for as long as he gets ammon (food, carbs, glycogen energy) and a slong as he can cool down (means, rest between workouts, not just between sets) and with that in mind, please rememebr that he’ll be able to drive you nuts if you let him, so take him out of the comfort zone.

You said rest-pausing and drop-setting tired his ass a lot, too much…I think that the solution might lay somewhere in the middle of the distance between his performance with that workout that lets him recover that fast and the idea of the drop sets and rest-pause that tire him out fast.

I would advise you to do the following, assuming you are sticking to dips, pushups, chins and pull ups, and such exercises with that backpack of added weight you said he uses, it’ll work wonders for him:

1 - Take a simple approach: without letting him do the reps as fast as possible (that would make him use shitty form), give him a load and tell him to do as many reps as possible with that load before he has to stop as his force fades and it gets harder. use a load that he can feel working after 2 or 3 reps and make sure he gets 6-8 reps as a minimum, 10-12 being the top end.

±>He’ll try to get as many reps before his strenght fades, but that’s where you have to watch out and make sure that even if he is using short eccentrics as he is on a race against time, you tell him to keep the eccentric at the shortest time lenght possible in which he still gets the muscle’s tension level to be high, not less than half the tension of the lifting phase. However, if you do go heavy enough for him to feel the load at the 3rd rep, get the pump from there, odds are he’ll do this without being told and his muscle’s tension level will be constant, and high.

2 - He won’t stop when he can’t get more than 1 or 2 reps before failure, he’ll stop when he can’t do the reps fast enough to put on them his best. Then he’ll step down, rest 10-15 seconds and do it again with a 50% weight reduction. If he still has energy left after the second attemp, let him rest 15-20 seconds and then let him try again with another 50% reduction (he’d have 25% of the original load). Then let him rest for another set, go back to the original load and proceed again. If you ened to reduce the original laod, which you will, never do it below 75% of the one from the first set.

3 - Make the rest between sets enough but not plenty, barely enough is the concept: he can start resting 30-45 seconds between sets and he’ll end up resting 2 minutes. If he needs to rest more than that, forget it, go home and let him rest for the day, even if he says he can do another workout 6-12 hours later. if he can, have him do 100 reps of a softer exercise (instead of dips, pushups) and tell him to do them with pauses, that if he can do 10 reps on a set, do only 5, and rest 1 minute. Then if he can, go back the next day to the gym (I’d be surprised if he can go before 72 hours)and change the rules: use a load that is half the one you used on the first set of the previous session, only do 1 weight reduction and have him do high reps, somewhere between 15-20 at first (not more than 30) and then drop 50% of the laod and have him do more. keep the rest between sets short, and when he needs to rest more than 1 minute, switch to isolation work.

4 - Work 4 days a week, leaving wednesdays, saturdays and sundays off. if he gets good, work 5 days a week, leaving wednesdays and sundays off, and use saturday for legs, while taking it easy on the upper body exercises, and make him train at different times: before and after lunch, after breakfast, before or after dinner. Don’t elt his body get used to a routine and make sure that he doesn’t eat the same stuff eachd ay, make him flip and change his meal schemes and his routine for everyday life.

If this doesn’t work while giving him 1 gram of protein per lean pound of bodyweight, he won’t every grow and the most he can settle for is a physique like Keanu Reeves. That would also make him like the 0,00000001% of the male population of the planet, so trust me, although 15 pounds in 10 months is unrealistic to me, he’d get at least 6 pounds of solid muscle slabs even if the scale actually says he lost weight because he’ll burn fat and look so good that he’ll stick to this for life, not to mention he’ll get strong.

Also ask those dudes from Colombia about how they train and maybe you can tinker with my program idea, but try it like it is for 1 week before tweaking it.

187

I must say that I tried your advise just as you put it up, even if I did feel it was just another dose of the same workout from your friend on the beach and all but it worked for some reason. So far, it’s been 36 hours and he’s barely able to say that by tonight, 48 exact hours after the workout, he will repeat the dose, and I’d venture and say that most likely he’d need another 24 hours. I would make him do the high-rep one and see how he fares, but thanks for the advise, he and i both appreciate it.

On a different note, he and I tried to get some help from the Colombians and basically, 90% of wat they said is what you are saying. Basically, they follow the program you outlined, also combine the timed sets, russian bear and they are big fans of EDT as well as the Gironda concept of resting between sets as little as possible. But there’s a problem.

I don’t know why, but they are split between 2 groups, one smaller than the other, and bigger, stronger,t he shit…but they get segregated, it sounds racial for they call them “middles” or something and hate their guts, so I guess I can get good advise by playing nice, huh?.

I notice you are Brazilian, what is the deal with those guys? They take things seriously, both groups of Colombians, they train like their life depended on it and the ones whos tudy do it like they were going to NASA. ¿ What’s up?