Maximum Muscle Bible

Bigger Stronger Leaner Christian Thibaudeau Coaching
1

Hey Coach!
I’m thinking of getting your book Maximum Muscle Bible. Is the book just a collection of all the best intensity teqnuices and methods for building muscle, or is there also programming recommendations as well?

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There are several programs in the book.And it’s not a listing of techniques, it explains why and when to use them

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Okay. Im strictly training for size and don’t care for my strenght, are the programs in the book designed for strictly muscle growth, or is there strenght focus as well?

4

We have both

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Thanks! Jyst got your book of amazon! Can’t wait

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Thank you

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I just read this book, and greatly enjoyed it. Although a lot of it is stuff already said on T-nation over the years, there is a lot of information there. So it’s good and useful to see the basics emphasized and made as simple as possible while still being practical, helpful to any lifter, and accommodating different lifting styles by allowing tremendous customization but also giving many concrete examples and suggestions.

Contains a lot of good ideas and several workouts I will try shortly. Wish I’d read it earlier! Highly recommend this to those at T-nation. Thibaudeau and Carter take sensible opinions on all the controversies argued at length by those who spend more time arguing than lifting. Useful things like CrossFit are shown some respect, and the advice for integrating this with the strength training I prefer is very useful.

Of course, being contrarian, there are some unimportant formatting things and maybe a few more diagrams and flowcharts would have been moderately helpful. Nevertheless, a tour de force and great summary of many of the more helpful and useful things stated on T-Nation over several decades. I’ve learned and used so much on this site that I sometimes forget some of the things I most liked, which makes this book especially useful.

The book makes no pretence of being comprehensive, and cannot be, but between this, Thib’s other books and a book on basic technique, perhaps Starting Strength, you are a lot of the way there. Thanks!

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I moved to work in a small town close to a military base. It had an awesome gym, but I knew nothing about lifting. At a library book sale, I bought a discarded book called “Gold’s Gym Strength Training For Athletes”. For the era, the advice was reasonably good and certainly more practical than the useless popular magazines. People forget how hard it was to come across good advice before the Internet. But I don’t think it even mentioned deadlifting, and I didn’t try that lift until stumbling upon T-Nation in its infancy.

I liked feeling more fit and powerful. I grew strong, but did not grow big until I started eating enough calories. I bought more weightlifting books. “Serious Strength Training” was full of pictures of muscular dudes “who really knew how to train X and eat clean!!!” and in retrospect likely also knew a lot about various pharmaceuticals. And sexy gym bunnies.

The advice in “Maximum Muscle Bible” is much better. But of the 25 or so pictures, all of them are pictures of the authors, looking grim and shirtless. I like to think they are grim due to the unpleasantness of dieting down for a photo shoot. Perhaps these enviable results and sullen gravitas appeal to those who want the knowledge the book offers in spades. Concise info. No filler. Meaningful manuscript, maximum muscle mechanisms, many motivating methods.

But 25 pictures of yourself? I guess it worked for Oprah. I mean, I like the book a lot. Good advice. It lacks the misleading results of Bompa’s well-juiced specimens. Any lifter would find some useful nuggets. But, in fairness, I kind of miss the gym bunnies…

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More seriously, I am surprised I could not find anything on the “Incline Bang Curl” on T-Nation which Carter advocates (though perhaps my Google-fu was weak). Pictures of this, and the VMO anatomy, might arguably have been helpful. But it seems simple enough: use an incline bench and do curls from the centre while pushing the insides of two dumbbells together. Carter says Meadows taught him this and that they really stress the bicep. Further reading on T-Nation shows Meadows doing rows on a T-bar machine, which unfortunately my gym does not have.

So two questions.

  1. Is the “incline bang curl” as good as Carter claims? If so, why not more info on these here? Other curls I found helpful were drag curls and one where you changed the angle of your torso to maximize emphasis (whose name eludes me, might have been mentioned by Ian King, a great contributor who does not seem to get much credit these days…)

  2. Are Meadows rows particularly good for those of us with mediocre backs? And can these be done using other machines?
    (Note, I have been lifting a long time and find I now respond pretty well to novel stimuli.)

  3. I remember other T-Nations articles on smart biomechanical variations. The one I found particularly helpful included doing some extra wrist English at each end of the hammer curl. What eponymous variations might give the best results? Did T-Nation readers find most personally useful?

Thanks.

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John created this movement and a few other unique variations like the one arm barbell row simply because his own back was mediocre and he had to find creative ways to activate it with outside the box movements. Personally, I think it’s a tremendous upper back movement with a huge potential for progressive overload. Same for the one arm barbell row.

I think it’s a great variation and really one that helps you “feel” the biceps. I personally love the move. There’s research to suggest that doing a variety of different curls helps to create a better muscle growth stimulus than just sticking with one. And I think this is a good one that really follows the bicep’s strength curve well.

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I like doing one arm rows. I have a big back, though it is not particularly well defined. I probably don’t row as often as I should, and deadlift more than is necessary.

After many years of lifting, always natural, I thought I had basically maxed out what I could gain. But overhead farmers walks and heavy overhead isometric holds in the Smith machine (10-30 seconds) helped me turn much of my Covid fat into muscle, eventually, and give me some traps.

I’ll have to try the bang curls. Never done it, never seen anyone do it (though these days I work out a commercial gym where even Olympic lifts are relatively rare). I have seen some people, chest to the incline bench, doing dumbbell rows. I find this works really well using the incline bench on the Smith - much easier to reach and you can row quite heavy. But doing curls this way never occurred to me.