Ok, it might be dumb title since we’ve been working on this project for 10 months, but it is true.
When it comes out (it will!, honest) most people will miss the boat completely with this I, BODYBUILDER thing. Most readers will simply jump into it like they would a regular program. It’s not meant to be that way.
I, BODYBUILDER is NOT the finish line, it’s only the front door to the castle. Basically it is the application we designed to teach you the foundations of HIGH THRESHOLD HYPERTROPHY. And HTH is not a program set in stone, heck, it isn’t even a system in the traditional sense. If you learn the basic principles, you can pretty much apply them to any kind of training and make it work.
Basically we want to teach people how to train to get results, not how to follow a program. Ironically we had to design a program to teach people how NOT to follow a program!
Let me tell you this: if you do not master the art of the perfect rep, do not grasp how to get into that activated state and don’t know how to autoregulate, then IBB will simply be just another internet program… no better or worse than the tens of thousand already available, and that would truly sadden me.
Let’s start with the PERFECT REP. The perfect rep is a set in itself, an athletic event. Every single rep should be performed so that you juice everything you can get growth-wise out of it, regardless of the actual weight you are lifting.
Yeah yeah yeah, I know how stupid it sounds… we all know how to do that, right? We all control, but don’t go slow on purpose on the eccentric and try to be explosive on the concentric, right? Let me tell you this, most of you who think that they are doing it, aren’t.
Heck we have been working with Mighty_Stu, ACTrain, Nate Green, his partner Kyle and a special ops officer friend of mine who has tons of lifting experience.
Well, NONE of them were performing reps that would fit the bill…
Not Stu who has been lifting for years, competed in a strongman and bodybuilding contest and is very smart about training.
Not ACTrain who has also been training for a long while and who is one of the most insightful and helpful forum member.
Not Nate Green who is a great all-around athlete, has good natural explosiveness and has interviewed or trained with many of the world’s top coaches.
Not Kyle who is a training freak, loves everything related to training and is very strong (actually he was the one who got the perfect concept the fastest).
Not Jer who played college football (fullback) has been training for years and does MMA to get his adrenalin flowing.
It took all of 4 days to really get, and were able to perform consistently perfect reps. And once they got it, despite doing minimal actual training they all felt super sore but motivated to train.
It honestly shocked me how far away these guys were from that perfect rep, despite thinking themselves that they were doing it. And I consider these guys advanced and very knowledgeable about training. So I can only imagine how the average gym rat is!
And the thing is that it all starts with that perfect rep. If you can’t do perfect reps every single time, then I BB will not work like it should. If you can’t do those perfect reps, there is no logic in you using advanced methods.
While I will not go into all the details about that perfect rep… Nate will probably write an article about it in the future and I guess Stu and AC might share some of their experience, know one thing:
The KEY to producing growth, to getting that perfect rep, is finding a way to maximize the amount of force produced at the turnaround point (when you switch from the eccentric to the concentric). The FIRST 4 inches in the range of motion are totally the key! The turnaround should not only be rapid, it must be snappy. The faster and more powerful the turnaround is, the more force the muscle will produce and the more muscle damage you will inflict.
A lot of people ‘get’ the need to try to accelerate during that concentric phase. But most of them are still slow at that turnaround point. The gradually build up speed during the whole rep, good, but not perfect if you are not able to produce optimal force in the stretch position.
Every single method we have is based on putting a maximum stress on the muscle in that stretch position. Our regular reps are all bout that powerful turnaround… if you don’t get it, you will not benefit from any of the things we are doing.
Twitch reps are actually a learning tool: they are used to work on that snappy turnaround skill. We just happen to found out that they were also very good at activating the nervous system.
Reps from a deadstart and blast isos put a lot of stress on the stretch position for another reason: they take out the reflex action out of the stretch position, so the muscles themselves have to contract extra hard to produce the necessary force to lift the weight. The blast isos also have the advantage of putting you in that aggressive/attacking mode which favors that explosive rep.
Even the way I NOW recommend doing negatives/eccentric training is based on putting stress on that stretch position (more on that one in the future).
Master the perfect rep… learn to be a ‘turnaround genius’ and you will be able to stimulate growth with every single repetition, not only that last grueling rep of a set. If you don’t learn that perfect rep… than none of what we will put on the net during this project will wok any better than the average program.
