Re Brian Johnston/Jreps/Zonetraining:
Heard a podcast with him featured, where he shared some insight in “freeform”, which almost made me understand his latest principle. He also had some interesting comments on Mike Mentzer (which were not only positive). Not to mention his opinions on diet…
Searched the net for more info, as well as his books, with poor result. I found a non working link to the e-version of his HDT-book (his latest?).
Can someone please tell me how Brian Johnston recommends how to train, for example leg press? In the podcast he talks very loose about combining full reps with partial reps, maybe until fatique or what? He didn’t advocate the use of greater weights or even TUT as a principle. Made me confused, of course.
== Scott==
I could be wrong but it seems like this time under tension stuff is a recent obsession with bodybuilders. I don’t recall that coming up much in the past? The idea of timing your sets or reps with a clock seems silly. Can’t you just see Mike Mentzer or Arnold watching the clock and screaming, damn! I’m over 5 seconds!! Not!!!
Hi pettersson
I have been training primarily in zones for over 10 years now and find it to be the most effective method of loading the musculature and delivering the best lasting muscular pumps and fullness. A couple of Johnston’s methods I like best for a compound pushing exercise like leg press are 1) JRep halves, where you press the weight from the bottom position halfway up the range of motion at a 2-3 second tempo, pausing at both ends, for 12 reps, then doing the same over the second half of the ROM. The other is expanding zones, where you press from the bottom up a quarter second (count “one”), lower back down a quarter second, press up a half second (count “one,two”), lower back down a half second. Continue expanding the zones, until you have completed 20 quarter second reps (20 - 1/4 second reps at a 5 second FROM tempo).
Both of these methods will provide muscular loading, pump and lasting fullness superior to full range reps at any tempo for any number of reps.
My impression is that his training approach just isn’t that easy to characterize or describe, because it isn’t narrowly prescribed. He has a set of principles, and applies those in a variety of ways, which winds up producing a constantly evolving routine.
That is because he is a big believer in the need to regularly change your program and do something different, lest your body adapt to a particular stimulus and then progress stalls.
If I recall correctly, he tended to use split routines, hitting one or two body parts per session and keeping those workouts short, with a fair amount of volume done in a short time span.
His last book promoted High Density Training, which basically meant doing as many reps as you can in a fixed amount of time. He doesn’t seem to care much about tempo, and since faster tempos let you do more reps in a given space of time, I think he tends to move pretty fast relative to what some HIT people prefer.
One rep scheme he advocated was basically a pyramid: start with a lighter weight, do 30 reps; increase weight, do 15 more reps; increase weight again, try to get 8 more reps (30-15-8 scheme). I don’t think he claims credit for inventing that, but it was one technique that he talked about at one point.
Zone reps are another kind of variation he promoted for awhile. It was a way to deal with non ideal resistance curves that you find in many free weight exercises. Do a lot of mini reps in the range that is hardest for you; then as you approach failure, move to the range of movement that is a little easier, then finish with more mini reps in the easiest place.
As for legs: I recall that he was a big fan of the Zane Leg Blaster. Presumably done with a lot of reps.
One of the problems I’ve had through out the years is consistency. There’s many reasons for this like life’s chores and family things getting in the way or something else just comes along you’d rather be doing but one thing I know for sure that causes training problems is seeing some other cool routine that I want to try so I veer off of whatever routine I’m doing at the moment and try that and soon I’m lost the momentum and feel and progress I might have had with the routine I was doing and so I quit for a while. Right now I’ve been doing this 30 10 30 routine for around 4 months and it’s the longest I’ve stuck with a routine in years. I’m actually making progress and happy with the results but then I see these cool possible routines Brian Johnston taught or some other idea on here and suddenly I’m thinking I want to try that! I wonder if there’s a way to try new stuff once in a while for a short period and then go back to the basic routine you were doing without screwing up the progress you were making on the program you stepped away from ? A certain period of time you could change up your routine before it messes up the progress you had made before. Maybe every so often it’s a good thing to do that? Am I making sense here?
Scott
You make a very interesting point here. Yes, I’m also into 30-10-30 with specialization routines. In order not getting overtrained I established an A and B routine with different emphasis in 4 week intervals - which I plan to stick with over time.
The A/B solution gives room for experimentation. Alike my introduction of 30-10-30, starting out with just 1-2 excercises - I thought of doing the same with Brian Johnston’s ideas - namely, introducing his partial, high rep regimen on leg press only, in my B routine.
Thanks mikael and al for further insight on BJ:s regimen. I have finally got my hands on the HDT e-book - it will be an interesting read.
I’m purposely bumping this to keep this excellent thread alive!
As an update to my own routine, I have now tweaked my own Mentzer-style routine after a solid 3 months on a programme akin to Heavy Duty II. This involved training twice a week. I am now going against the grain somewhat and have moved closer to Heavy Duty I. However, unlike the original system where you trained 4 times a week, I am sticking with 3 times a week, i.e. A - B - A one week; B - A - B following week, etc.
Split:
A - Legs, chest, triceps
B - Back, shoulders, biceps
Features:
All sets to failure; use pre-exhaust; accentuate negatives (e.g. on leg extension - 2 legs up, 1 leg down); use negative only sparingly. I have begun with one superset but may extend to two as I progress.
By way of example, Legs:
A1) Leg extension
A2) Belt squat
x1 cycle
On the belt squat, I use the rack as supports for my arms to help with a few assisted reps at the end.
B) DB Bulgarian split squat - straight set to failure
C) Calf work
Chest
A1) Band crossover - bands are great. You can extend the set past failure by stepping back slightly easing the tension, a bit like a drop set without the need to stop and change the weight. You can also step back for the positive and then step forward to increase load on the negative.
A2) Incline press - as I train alone, I can do rest pause in the rack to extend the set; also end with a slow negative, etc.
As an aside, given some excellent feedback on this forum on 30-10-30, I am using Dr D’s shoulder specialisation routine for delts instead of Heavy Duty for this body part. I have been trying this out for 2 weeks so far so will give it a bit more time.
Some folks have commented that putting legs and chest on the same day wasn’t one of Mike’s better ideas. I can see where they are coming from. However, you do legs first, when you’re freshest. And who cannot get up for chest? That only leaves triceps at the end, by which time you know you’ve done the ‘big stuff’.
As Mike had two separate routines for each body part workout, you are repeating the same session every 14 days or so. This is a bit novel for me as I was simply rotating two workouts (A and B style) every 3-4 days.
One tweak I have made here regards legs. The first session is quad-focused (as I posted earlier); the 2nd is glute/ham based with one set of belt squats thrown in. Mike went against the grain when it came to hamstrings and he spoke about them getting the necessary stimulus with quad work. To be fair, he also had deadlifts in his programme so that is probably fair comment.
Yeah BJ is very much about freestyle bodybuilding.
I have a couple of good books written by Ronald Laura called The Matrix Principle and Matrix for Muscle Gain. Awsome read and quite an effective way to train.
I have no problem following Legs with any of my body parts. I’m usually starting my routine a few diiferent ways: 1. Squats or Leg Press with or w/o Leg Ext OR 2. Deadlifts and maybe Calves OR 3. LCs, Hip Add, Glutes. I never kill myself with Legs anymore and have no problem going on to the rest of the workout after that.
Even after a Leg Ext/Leg Press superset that made me puke, I still had enough for Chest or Back.
Since finding Dr. D’s HIT about 16 yrs ago, I have never went away from the toe-to-head concept. I don’t do “Whole Body” workouts often, BUT I always have Legs in any workout to some degree.
I see no problem with starting a workout with legs. If I’m not doing full body, than I prefer just splitting it into push/pull with quads on push and hams on pull. I don’t like going beyond a 2 way split because like @simon_hecubus said, it cuts body part frequency down too much.
As far as a split routine goes, I think of that as ideal, that way body parts get trained every other session, and you’re never left too long without hitting it again. Your volume can also be quite low, just about 4 or 5 exercises built around 2 big compounds and 2 or 3 isolation movements; ie, squats and bench +lateral raises and overhead triceps extension-then stiff-legged deadlifts and pulldowns + face pulls and curls. You can change the exercises every time to have a different focus, but it gives you a lot of room for customization.
Nice ideas on splits. I still do a three way split and for me at least , hitting each muscle group once a week is plenty.
I’m right on schedule for this time of year as far as my conditioning / intensity and volume . Yesterday I had a great workout of shoulders , chest and triceps completing 17 sets in 24 minutes.
