- Oct 31, 2012
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Had some time tonight and I wrote a little article on my training history and views. It's pretty long, way longer than I intended it to be so I apologize for that. If you want to skip to the meat and potatoes just skip on down to the numbered section!
OK, so to start off with I’m not a guru (obviously lol), nor am I an expert. Many people on this site will probably disagree with me. I feel, though, like I’ve learned enough through in my time dealing with the iron to help out beginners and other intermediate trainees such as myself. I’ve done poorly in the two competitions I’ve been in so far, so don’t ask me anything about prep, lol. I am however approached by people on a daily basis out in public based on my size and muscularity. I am always the biggest or at least one of the biggest in every local gym I’ve been to, and one of the strongest as well (except for the straight up power lifting crowd).
I started off training when I was about 15. I don’t really remember what got me started specifically, but I had always admired Arnold’s physique as I was a huge fan of all of his movies. So my first workout consisted of nothing but bodyweight exercises and some arms with 10lb DB’s I bought at play it again sports. I would do pushups, chair/bench dips, DB curls, triceps kickbacks and lateral raises. I did that 2-3 times a week for about a year, pretty half-heartedly and paid no attention to my diet. I managed to build a little bit of muscle, mostly some definition in my chest, shoulders and triceps. But I could see a little change and that made me want to take it to the next level.
So sometime around 16 years old I bought Arnolds Bodybuilding Encyclopedia and boy did I think that thing was the mother lode! You have to remember here that I was 16 in 1994… No internet yet. At least not in the sense that it is today. So here I was with this huge tome with all these programs, and exercise explanations with pictures. I joined a real gym at that time, a real badass dungeon of a gym that was literally in a basement of one of the retail buildings downtown. I would either roller blade down there or ride my bike during the summer, and take the bus in the winter. I honestly don’t remember exactly what I was doing but it was some form of Arnold’s beginner routine from the book. LOTS of volume. For some reason I didn’t squat, only leg extension and leg press. At any rate by the time I graduated from high school I’d gotten to about 175 at my final height of 5’11”. So not a big dude by any means but muscular. I had good 15” beach arms, lol.
I joined the Marine Corps after high school and lost all my muscle in boot camp. I graduated at 155 lbs and looked emaciated. I got up into the low 160’s after that but was super small. I wore 28” waist jeans for crying out loud! I was content with that for a while because of all the running and pushups pull-ups I was doing for unit based PT. Eventually when I got situated at a permanent duty station I got the itch again to start bodybuilding and found out we had a pretty kick ass gym on base. I would kind of half ass it though because I would be all hot and heavy into it for a couple months and then stop going and so on and so forth. I managed to get back up into the 170’s though and looked decent. I was doing a TON of volume, way more than necessary looking back. I would go 6 or 7 days a week and had a whole day for each muscle just about. A whole workout for biceps, hahahahaha, oh how stupid I was. I kept getting into that mentality of more must be better when I didn’t see the results I wanted.
Everything changed the beginning of ’99. I went away to a different base for a welding school for six weeks. No friends up there and it was a small town so not much to do. I bought a six week supply of some prohormones from ISS Research who was one of the best companies back then. It was 4-beta diol, and 19-nor-andro. I don’t know what the 4-beta was, but I’m pretty sure the 19-nor was legit oral nandrolone! I got a couple tubs of isopure, and stocked my mini fridge in the barracks with food. You all are going to laugh at this. I went through the frozen section at the grocery store and meticulously went over all of the lean cuisine and what not frozen dinners. I picked out all the ones that had 20+ grams of protein per package and filled my freezer up with them, and my fridge part with chicken breast and turkey breast cold cuts. All I did for those six weeks was go to school, lift, and eat.
I probably had the best results of my LIFE in those six weeks. I recomped my body hardcore and ended up a pretty lean 188 lbs. Shoulders were popping, thick chest, big arms, I thought I was superman. I trained way different than I had in the past. I wanted to be STRONG. So I grouped things together and did 2-3 exercises per muscle and no more than 3 sets working up to a heavy set. I remember I was doing incline DB press with 85’s for like 12 reps and thought that was awesome.
I got back to my regular duty station and everyone was like holy shit. Again though I backed off of training and lost most of what I had built. I went on a ship deployment for six months in ’00 and me and my boy trained our asses off and I got back to about 185, and was much softer than I was before. It hadn’t dawned on my yet the importance of hormones.
After I got back from overseas I pretty much went back to lifting inconsistently and was much more focused on girls and partying, so I really only maintained at that point.
Met my wife in ’01 and basically stopped lifting cold turkey until 2009. I had let myself get WAY out of shape at this point. I’m 32 years old and FAT. I was like 260, and over 20% body fat. I have a big frame and had kept some muscle so I carried it pretty well, but make no mistake I was out of control. I was slamming 3+ 20oz mountain dews per day AT LEAST. Eating whatever, mostly take out and ice cream every night. So in 2009 I discovered an article about DC training that led me to intense muscle where I fell in love with the concept. I thought, oh hey I’ve got lots of experience, let me jump into this! So I did DC training for about six months, and make no mistake, I did it right, but fuck was I not ready for it. I ended up with more injuries than I knew what to do with and even popped an inguinal hernia. I got stronger, but I still looked like shit because I didn’t do much to my diet. I thought I was still like I was in my 20’s and just a bit of exercise would whip me into shape. Well I got my hernia repaired and ended up out of commission for the rest of that year. I just didn’t feel “right”, so I pushed off training until January of 2010, at which point I felt pretty damn good and was very motivated to lose weight.
I had bought Jim Wendler’s e book on 5/3/1 and started doing that program very diligently. I also may have jumped the gun and started hormones at that point… My thinking was, hey, I’m in my 30’s and this shit isn’t like it used to be, I could use a little help! And truth be told, I’m not sure that the PH’s I did back in the day didn’t fuck up my HPTA. I’ll never know now for sure, but I do wonder. I did 5/3/1 religiously until about August of that year at which point I hired Phil Hernon. I was trying to do a NPC show in Nov. in the novice class and I felt I wasn’t going to make it without help. So from that point on into the early part of 2011 I trained under Phil and really enjoyed his method and learned a lot. I’m retarded though and pigheaded most of the time so I abandoned what I had been doing with Phil and started doing Blood and Guts. I LOVE Dorian’s original blood and guts routine like he does in the video. IF you have all the exact equipment like the nautilus pullover and the HS pull down and upright bench it is awesome. I did that the rest of the year and did some serious size gaining without getting too terribly sloppy.
In Jan. of 2012 I decided almost last minute to compete again. I was 255 and wanted to lean out and see where I was at. So I started prepping for a big state show at about 13 weeks out. My body felt pretty beat up from all the HIT training I’d been doing. I’d been doing a lot of reading on Vince Gironda and Serge Nubret and their styles of training after being pointed in their direction by Buselmo. I decided to give it a try and finished my prep with a routine Buselmo gave me. It was way different than anything I’d done before. Five sets for every exercise, but very short rest and higher reps. I feel like it gave me pretty good results. A lot of people will say to dance with the one that brung ya and I don’t disagree with that, but in the shape my body was in this was a welcome relief. I’m very glad I tried it, I’m not sure I would have under different circumstances so I feel it worked out for the best. I don’t know that I put ON any muscle during the prep, in fact I’m pretty sure I lost some, BUT that was because I was behind(way behind) and did an absolute fuck ton of cardio. I feel like that lighter weight higher volume; quick pace really revs the metabolism up. I feel like if someone were not too far out of shape to start with that you could train like that and do very little cardio and get contest lean with the right diet.
OK so after all of that what is the take home message? What did I learn if anything?
1) Well looking back over all the times that I’ve trained and put much effort into I can say without reservation that training a muscle at least 2 times a week is optimal for growth. The caveat to that is that you must figure out what amount of volume allows YOU as an individual to train frequently like that and recover. I also feel that training 6 days a week will keep you leaner than doing say a 3 day a week HIT split like DC due to the constant ramping of your metabolism.
2) Strength matters. Not necessarily in terms of you must bench 405 or anything like that, but you absolutely must get stronger in the rep ranges that you are working with. If you have been incline benching forever and are stuck at 265 for 8 reps you have to switch something up. Either deload a little bit and try and work back up, or better yet ditch the offending exercise all together for a few weeks and do something different. Bottom line is that over time you have to beat the logbook. If you’ve been benching 225 for the last two years it’s time to step it up.
3) Compound exercises are king. If I had any money at all I’d bet that someone could build a championship level physique without ever doing a single cable x-over, or triceps extension. The name of the game is muscle fiber recruitment and you just don’t get that with isolation exercises.
4) Forget the whole “mind muscle connection” bullshit. It’s just that, bullshit. I don’t care if you can trick yourself into thinking that 135 is heavy with your monk like concentration. If you’re not upping the weight consistently you will not get optimum growth, unless you are a mutant. Now, I’m not saying don’t pay attention to form or anything like that. I’m saying move the weight in a controlled fashion without any kinks or hesitation.
5) Along with #4, don’t get paralyzed by doing only full ROM exercises. Unless you are a power lifter it’s pointless. You will get much better stimulation and fiber recruitment with a partial ROM. I like 75-80%, but you can experiment and find out what works best for you. For example, on chins I lower myself so that I feel my lats stretch but I don’t allow the biceps to become fully extended. On any benching exercise I lower the bar to a few inches off the chest, and then press till just short of lockout.
6) High(ish) volume has a place as long as it’s not done merely for the sake of adding volume. Higher volume is great when working around injuries or when taking a break from lifting as heavy as you can. That’s why the volume goes up, because you are not moving as much weight. One thing you can do that increases intensity is rest less. Much less. Think 30 seconds or less between sets. Something you can do for a lagging body part is an 8x8. Using around 60-70% or your normal 8 rep max you are going to do 8 sets of 8 reps (thanks Vince, RIP). Don’t even let the bar go in between sets. Take big breaths and rest no more than 30 seconds and crank out 8 reps each set. If you can’t get 8 the last few sets that’s fine, but don’t increase the weight until you can.
7) Instead of doing your sets light to heavy, try heavy to light. Do some warm-ups that get you lubed up and are not too taxing, then do your heavy set and start dropping weight down. Your heavy set will be heavier than it would be if you did it last. And if you went to failure at 225, why increase and go to failure? Fail at 315, 275, and 225. I feel like that makes your body adapt much better.
Finally I would like to reiterate that this is just my opinion and most of it if not all is up for debate. And I would like to thank all the people that have helped me in some way along the way either directly or indirectly (in NO particular order): Phil Hernon, Dante Trudel, Big A, Mike Mentzer, Vince Gironda, Serge Nubret, Arnold, Arthur Jones, Brad Davis, Buselmo, Queefer, and Magnum.
Thanks for reading!
OK, so to start off with I’m not a guru (obviously lol), nor am I an expert. Many people on this site will probably disagree with me. I feel, though, like I’ve learned enough through in my time dealing with the iron to help out beginners and other intermediate trainees such as myself. I’ve done poorly in the two competitions I’ve been in so far, so don’t ask me anything about prep, lol. I am however approached by people on a daily basis out in public based on my size and muscularity. I am always the biggest or at least one of the biggest in every local gym I’ve been to, and one of the strongest as well (except for the straight up power lifting crowd).
I started off training when I was about 15. I don’t really remember what got me started specifically, but I had always admired Arnold’s physique as I was a huge fan of all of his movies. So my first workout consisted of nothing but bodyweight exercises and some arms with 10lb DB’s I bought at play it again sports. I would do pushups, chair/bench dips, DB curls, triceps kickbacks and lateral raises. I did that 2-3 times a week for about a year, pretty half-heartedly and paid no attention to my diet. I managed to build a little bit of muscle, mostly some definition in my chest, shoulders and triceps. But I could see a little change and that made me want to take it to the next level.
So sometime around 16 years old I bought Arnolds Bodybuilding Encyclopedia and boy did I think that thing was the mother lode! You have to remember here that I was 16 in 1994… No internet yet. At least not in the sense that it is today. So here I was with this huge tome with all these programs, and exercise explanations with pictures. I joined a real gym at that time, a real badass dungeon of a gym that was literally in a basement of one of the retail buildings downtown. I would either roller blade down there or ride my bike during the summer, and take the bus in the winter. I honestly don’t remember exactly what I was doing but it was some form of Arnold’s beginner routine from the book. LOTS of volume. For some reason I didn’t squat, only leg extension and leg press. At any rate by the time I graduated from high school I’d gotten to about 175 at my final height of 5’11”. So not a big dude by any means but muscular. I had good 15” beach arms, lol.
I joined the Marine Corps after high school and lost all my muscle in boot camp. I graduated at 155 lbs and looked emaciated. I got up into the low 160’s after that but was super small. I wore 28” waist jeans for crying out loud! I was content with that for a while because of all the running and pushups pull-ups I was doing for unit based PT. Eventually when I got situated at a permanent duty station I got the itch again to start bodybuilding and found out we had a pretty kick ass gym on base. I would kind of half ass it though because I would be all hot and heavy into it for a couple months and then stop going and so on and so forth. I managed to get back up into the 170’s though and looked decent. I was doing a TON of volume, way more than necessary looking back. I would go 6 or 7 days a week and had a whole day for each muscle just about. A whole workout for biceps, hahahahaha, oh how stupid I was. I kept getting into that mentality of more must be better when I didn’t see the results I wanted.
Everything changed the beginning of ’99. I went away to a different base for a welding school for six weeks. No friends up there and it was a small town so not much to do. I bought a six week supply of some prohormones from ISS Research who was one of the best companies back then. It was 4-beta diol, and 19-nor-andro. I don’t know what the 4-beta was, but I’m pretty sure the 19-nor was legit oral nandrolone! I got a couple tubs of isopure, and stocked my mini fridge in the barracks with food. You all are going to laugh at this. I went through the frozen section at the grocery store and meticulously went over all of the lean cuisine and what not frozen dinners. I picked out all the ones that had 20+ grams of protein per package and filled my freezer up with them, and my fridge part with chicken breast and turkey breast cold cuts. All I did for those six weeks was go to school, lift, and eat.
I probably had the best results of my LIFE in those six weeks. I recomped my body hardcore and ended up a pretty lean 188 lbs. Shoulders were popping, thick chest, big arms, I thought I was superman. I trained way different than I had in the past. I wanted to be STRONG. So I grouped things together and did 2-3 exercises per muscle and no more than 3 sets working up to a heavy set. I remember I was doing incline DB press with 85’s for like 12 reps and thought that was awesome.
I got back to my regular duty station and everyone was like holy shit. Again though I backed off of training and lost most of what I had built. I went on a ship deployment for six months in ’00 and me and my boy trained our asses off and I got back to about 185, and was much softer than I was before. It hadn’t dawned on my yet the importance of hormones.
After I got back from overseas I pretty much went back to lifting inconsistently and was much more focused on girls and partying, so I really only maintained at that point.
Met my wife in ’01 and basically stopped lifting cold turkey until 2009. I had let myself get WAY out of shape at this point. I’m 32 years old and FAT. I was like 260, and over 20% body fat. I have a big frame and had kept some muscle so I carried it pretty well, but make no mistake I was out of control. I was slamming 3+ 20oz mountain dews per day AT LEAST. Eating whatever, mostly take out and ice cream every night. So in 2009 I discovered an article about DC training that led me to intense muscle where I fell in love with the concept. I thought, oh hey I’ve got lots of experience, let me jump into this! So I did DC training for about six months, and make no mistake, I did it right, but fuck was I not ready for it. I ended up with more injuries than I knew what to do with and even popped an inguinal hernia. I got stronger, but I still looked like shit because I didn’t do much to my diet. I thought I was still like I was in my 20’s and just a bit of exercise would whip me into shape. Well I got my hernia repaired and ended up out of commission for the rest of that year. I just didn’t feel “right”, so I pushed off training until January of 2010, at which point I felt pretty damn good and was very motivated to lose weight.
I had bought Jim Wendler’s e book on 5/3/1 and started doing that program very diligently. I also may have jumped the gun and started hormones at that point… My thinking was, hey, I’m in my 30’s and this shit isn’t like it used to be, I could use a little help! And truth be told, I’m not sure that the PH’s I did back in the day didn’t fuck up my HPTA. I’ll never know now for sure, but I do wonder. I did 5/3/1 religiously until about August of that year at which point I hired Phil Hernon. I was trying to do a NPC show in Nov. in the novice class and I felt I wasn’t going to make it without help. So from that point on into the early part of 2011 I trained under Phil and really enjoyed his method and learned a lot. I’m retarded though and pigheaded most of the time so I abandoned what I had been doing with Phil and started doing Blood and Guts. I LOVE Dorian’s original blood and guts routine like he does in the video. IF you have all the exact equipment like the nautilus pullover and the HS pull down and upright bench it is awesome. I did that the rest of the year and did some serious size gaining without getting too terribly sloppy.
In Jan. of 2012 I decided almost last minute to compete again. I was 255 and wanted to lean out and see where I was at. So I started prepping for a big state show at about 13 weeks out. My body felt pretty beat up from all the HIT training I’d been doing. I’d been doing a lot of reading on Vince Gironda and Serge Nubret and their styles of training after being pointed in their direction by Buselmo. I decided to give it a try and finished my prep with a routine Buselmo gave me. It was way different than anything I’d done before. Five sets for every exercise, but very short rest and higher reps. I feel like it gave me pretty good results. A lot of people will say to dance with the one that brung ya and I don’t disagree with that, but in the shape my body was in this was a welcome relief. I’m very glad I tried it, I’m not sure I would have under different circumstances so I feel it worked out for the best. I don’t know that I put ON any muscle during the prep, in fact I’m pretty sure I lost some, BUT that was because I was behind(way behind) and did an absolute fuck ton of cardio. I feel like that lighter weight higher volume; quick pace really revs the metabolism up. I feel like if someone were not too far out of shape to start with that you could train like that and do very little cardio and get contest lean with the right diet.
OK so after all of that what is the take home message? What did I learn if anything?
1) Well looking back over all the times that I’ve trained and put much effort into I can say without reservation that training a muscle at least 2 times a week is optimal for growth. The caveat to that is that you must figure out what amount of volume allows YOU as an individual to train frequently like that and recover. I also feel that training 6 days a week will keep you leaner than doing say a 3 day a week HIT split like DC due to the constant ramping of your metabolism.
2) Strength matters. Not necessarily in terms of you must bench 405 or anything like that, but you absolutely must get stronger in the rep ranges that you are working with. If you have been incline benching forever and are stuck at 265 for 8 reps you have to switch something up. Either deload a little bit and try and work back up, or better yet ditch the offending exercise all together for a few weeks and do something different. Bottom line is that over time you have to beat the logbook. If you’ve been benching 225 for the last two years it’s time to step it up.
3) Compound exercises are king. If I had any money at all I’d bet that someone could build a championship level physique without ever doing a single cable x-over, or triceps extension. The name of the game is muscle fiber recruitment and you just don’t get that with isolation exercises.
4) Forget the whole “mind muscle connection” bullshit. It’s just that, bullshit. I don’t care if you can trick yourself into thinking that 135 is heavy with your monk like concentration. If you’re not upping the weight consistently you will not get optimum growth, unless you are a mutant. Now, I’m not saying don’t pay attention to form or anything like that. I’m saying move the weight in a controlled fashion without any kinks or hesitation.
5) Along with #4, don’t get paralyzed by doing only full ROM exercises. Unless you are a power lifter it’s pointless. You will get much better stimulation and fiber recruitment with a partial ROM. I like 75-80%, but you can experiment and find out what works best for you. For example, on chins I lower myself so that I feel my lats stretch but I don’t allow the biceps to become fully extended. On any benching exercise I lower the bar to a few inches off the chest, and then press till just short of lockout.
6) High(ish) volume has a place as long as it’s not done merely for the sake of adding volume. Higher volume is great when working around injuries or when taking a break from lifting as heavy as you can. That’s why the volume goes up, because you are not moving as much weight. One thing you can do that increases intensity is rest less. Much less. Think 30 seconds or less between sets. Something you can do for a lagging body part is an 8x8. Using around 60-70% or your normal 8 rep max you are going to do 8 sets of 8 reps (thanks Vince, RIP). Don’t even let the bar go in between sets. Take big breaths and rest no more than 30 seconds and crank out 8 reps each set. If you can’t get 8 the last few sets that’s fine, but don’t increase the weight until you can.
7) Instead of doing your sets light to heavy, try heavy to light. Do some warm-ups that get you lubed up and are not too taxing, then do your heavy set and start dropping weight down. Your heavy set will be heavier than it would be if you did it last. And if you went to failure at 225, why increase and go to failure? Fail at 315, 275, and 225. I feel like that makes your body adapt much better.
Finally I would like to reiterate that this is just my opinion and most of it if not all is up for debate. And I would like to thank all the people that have helped me in some way along the way either directly or indirectly (in NO particular order): Phil Hernon, Dante Trudel, Big A, Mike Mentzer, Vince Gironda, Serge Nubret, Arnold, Arthur Jones, Brad Davis, Buselmo, Queefer, and Magnum.
Thanks for reading!
