The bedrock of success in the gym is the triumvirate of progression, performance and persistence.
Simple progression is so much the essence of successful bodybuilding that its importance shouldn’t need stressing. Today’s world of distracting hype has placed simple progression on the sideline of training considerations. It’s usually added onto a training article as an appendage, as an afterthought. Other factors tend to dominate the written and spoken word of bodybuilding.
The need for simple progression should be embossed upon the gym clothing of every bodybuilder, especially neophytes, and emblazoned in every training facility and upon every training-related product.
Simple progression is about marching into new ground, going into areas you’ve not been in before, pushing yourself harder than you’ve been pushed before, demanding more of yourself than ever before.
At its simplest it’s the “one more rep,” and the “one more pound” principles. Work on adding “one more rep” to a work set, and then add a little iron once the rep goal has been achieved; or keep a fixed rep count and add a pound (or a fraction of a pound) every workout or few.
How often do you see the achievement of “one more rep” be the all-dominating force behind a workout? How often do you see someone push his body beyond what was thought to be the last rep, to grind out yet one more rep, and then perhaps another?
That you don’t see much of this sort of application of simple progression is testimony to the paltry results that so many bodybuilders get. No other consideration matters—be it a coach, equipment smart clothing, food, supplement, mental aid, literature or whatever else—until you’ve absorbed, into your being, the absolute importance of simple progression.
The “one more rep” simplicity of simple progression, and the adding of some iron (as little as half a pound made up by a few large washers) to each exercise every week or two or three, isn’t the only way to increase progressively the load upon your muscles. But for the hard gainer it’s by far the most important means of progression. Grasp with life-long, irrevocable understanding that simple progression is the name of the game, and that simple progression is about effort—unadulterated and belligerently determined effort.
It’s neither possible nor desirable to drive yourself to a new limit every workout on a permanent basis. The body of a drug-free, genetically typical bodybuilder can’t take such a battering. (More on the need to cycle intensity of effort is given later on.)
In the initial stages of bodybuilding, the neophyte usually gets to grips with simple progression because, at that stage, progression is easy. There’s no need to push yourself to failure to keep the progression coming along. This is the easy stage of training. But this assumes the use of a sensible routine that’s neither too long nor too frequently done.
Things start to go wrong when the easy poundage progression of the initial months of training grinds to a halt. Now you have to earn the progression by putting in extremely determined effort. But it’s now that training routines are too readily expanded, split routines adopted, and the attractions of the distractions ruin progress. Effort gets spread thinly, recovery time is decreased, volume of work increased, and marginal concerns of bodybuilding are treated as major concerns.
When maintaining poundage progression, avoid the mistake of making the increments too big. When you’re in the stage of a cycle that has you training nearly flat-out, and then flat-out, keep the poundage increments very small. Search out for the smallest plates you can get—get a pair of quarter-kilogram plates. Hunt around for a specialist supplier of Olympic weightlifting gear. Using these you can add a mere 1.1 pounds to your barbell. When the sets are hard to eke out, progressing 1.1 pounds is realistic, and the bar doesn’t feel any different. If five pounds is the minimum you can add to your barbell, that can make the bar feel a lot heavier when you’re getting towards the end of a cycle. This will kill the gaining momentum. Haste makes waste. Keep the momentum going for as long as you can.
Tiny discs can lengthen a cycle a surprising amount. Your body can adapt to 1.1 pound increases every week or two. Strength can easily be built at that rate. (Perhaps you can get half-pound discs rather than quarter-kilogram discs.) You can add these discs to your bar time after time after time without the bar feeling any heavier, even once you’ve hit the full-bore stage of a cycle. If you can’t get hold of quarter-kilogram or one-pound discs, find any way of tying (or taping) a half-pound load to each side of the barbell. A metal-worker should be able to rig up something for you. Get the discs (or substitutes), and use them!
When doing 20-rep squats, for example, suppose you just eked out the full 20 in Monday’s workout, and it demanded more than you’ve given to an exercise before. Don’t put another 10 pounds on the bar for your next workout. Don’t even put five pounds on the bar. Put just one or two pounds on or, perhaps better still, repeat the poundage and put on the additional pound or two at the following workout. Once the workouts are very hard, keep increments small but maintain them for as long as you can. The quickest way to kill a training cycle is to pile poundage on too rapidly. Don’t be impatient and ruin your progress.
To be able to sustain the principle of simple progression, there are three factors you must get in sound order:
The more work you do, the more work over which you have to spread your effort and energy. The briefer your workouts, the more concentrated is your effort. Think it through. The more multiple-set work you do, and the more exercises you use, the more you conserve on your effort levels to make it through the whole schedule. No one can train flat-out for long workouts. No amount of grimacing and noise making can convince to the contrary.
There’s no single combination of numbers of exercises, sets and workout frequency that’s universally appropriate for all hard gainers. More on this point later. The general rule is to do fewer exercises rather than more, do fewer sets rather than more, and do less frequent workouts rather than more frequent ones.
As effort can only be applied at full force in small quantities, and as the recovery capacities of hard gainers are very limited, the volume of work must also be very limited. It’s necessary to concentrate effort on the most basic and most demanding exercises. This causes the most growth stimulation from as few exercises as possible. This means the priority selection of the major basic exercises, or variations of them. But there’s no need to get locked into the same set of exercises all the time.
This means squats, not leg extensions; bench presses or dips, not flyes or crossovers; deadlifts, not hyperextensions; overhead presses, not lateral raises, etc. The most productive exercises are the ones that “hurt” the most when done in good form. The more an exercise wipes you out, the more growth it can stimulate. The comfortable exercises are the most unproductive ones. I must qualify this to say that isolation exercises done with real effort wipe you out too, and certainly aren’t comfortable. But the discomfort from the latter is mostly local rather than local and throughout the body as with the big multi-joint exercises such as squats, deadlifts, bench presses, dips, etc.
Hard gainers have much more limited recovery capabilities than do genetically superior easy gainers, especially if the latter are using drugs. This exaggerates the stress we need to place upon the use of the major basic exercises. We need to get the absolute most out of as little exercise as possible. The extreme interpretation of this produces routines of only one to three exercises. Absolute heresy it is, absolute growth stimulation it can be. Never short-change abbreviated routines.
Look at what some powerlifters do to their bodies. Some powerlifters don’t do much, if anything, in the way of assistance exercises. They just pour themselves into the three powerlifts, sometimes only training each lift hard once a week, but they grow all over. The overall physique balance isn’t perfect, and the pure aesthetics are lacking (by advanced bodybuilding standards), but they have little or no interest in all of that. All they want to do is to get stronger.
You can adopt similar principles and, once plenty of mass has been built, then the balance and finish can be worked on. While the heavy lifters aren’t renowned for their definition, the under-200-pound lifters are usually hard and defined, although lacking the chiselled look of an advanced bodybuilder. Don’t worry about the details of the finished look until you’re so big that the details become significant.
This brings us to one of the most striking differences between typical hard gainers, and genetically gifted and/or drug-using bodybuilders. The latter can build mass and simultaneously work on detail. The former can only build mass if they focus on that for several years. Once they have enough mass, then they may benefit from a scaled-down interpretation of the latter’s detail work.
Drug-free and genetically typical bodybuilders don’t have enough training energy and recovery ability to be able to recover and respond to what the easy gainers can. It’s a different world. While the easy gainers can get to the targets in Chapter 3 very easily, the typical bodybuilder can’t. Just to get to those goals is a major task, involving almost total focus upon those single goals.
Easy gainers have far fewer problems getting big than they have with getting all the detail, chiselling and fullness of development necessary to win competitions. They have the luxury of being able to concern themselves with something the majority of us never can.
For hard gainers, getting even moderately big is such a mighty task that detail work is not only a distraction, but it’s an irrelevance. Even once at the Chapter 3 targets—after having climbed the “Everest”—many typical bodybuilders still won’t have the ability to grow and work on the details. Just what you can productively use, you’ll have to discover yourself once you’re already at the goals of Chapter 3.
The top bodybuilders, and even those not right at the top, couldn’t have developed their full, balanced and detailed physiques without a variety of exercises, both multi-joint and single-joint. A single basic exercise cannot fully develop size and detail in a single muscle.
This doesn’t mean that you should rush out and start using a multitude of exercises to get the full and detailed development you want. What it does mean is that you should set about getting the development in a way appropriate to a drug-free and genetically typical bodybuilder. Size and overall strength first, even if it comes with physique imbalances and lack of detail.
You may be able to alter, at least in a small way and at the appropriate time, the apparent shape of a bodypart by focusing on a single aspect of it. This doesn’t mean you can do anything about genetic shape limitations. You can only make the best of what you’ve got. Of course, that “best” is always terrific relative to where you started from, and fantastic relative to the untrained person.
The most striking need, visible in all typical gyms, is the absence of enough muscular mass. The best way to get better shape is simply to get bigger muscles. (More size with the same amount of body fat makes you appear more defined, too.) Focus on size and strength first. Build the foundation. Work up to being advanced—by drug-free and genetically typical standards—and then pay attention to the detail, supposing you think you have enough mass to do that. It may be that you still feel that your focus should be on mass for another year or few.
Even on an abbreviated routine, so long as your calves and neck get direct work, and you don’t pile on mass too quickly—mistaking fat for muscle—everything else has to come along in size while maintaining satisfactory hardness. If you pour yourself into a short set of basic exercises such as squats, stiff-legged deadlifts, a row, an overhead press, and dips or bench presses, together with calf and neck work, (not all done at every workout) what major structure of the body isn’t going to respond? Apply yourself for a few years to these exercises, or variations, building up to big poundages, and you’ll see what so little exercise can do.
Forget once and for all the myth that lots of exercises and lots of sets are needed to build size. A variety of exercises is important, but a variety of the major exercises over time, not a variety of anything and everything at the same time.
For example, do barbell bench presses on a horizontal bench for a cycle. Next cycle, do bench presses on a low incline. Later, following another cycle of regular bench presses, you could do dumbbell bench presses, or dips.
Variation is not only good for your body, to prevent it getting in a rut, it’s good for your mind too. It helps to keep motivation and interest high. Just make sure that the variations are variations on the basic movements. For other ways of introducing variety while maintaining the focus on the big, basic lifts, see Chapter 13.
This isn’t to say that all isolation exercises should be shoved aside, and that some interpretation of a split routine can’t be used effectively. It is to say that isolation exercises should play, at most, a minor role for hard gainers struggling to reach their size potentials. It is possible to get big and strong without ever using a small isolation exercise. For some hard gainers, it’s the only way to get big and strong.
If all isolation exercises were to disappear from the face of the earth, all bodybuilders other than competitive ones in the advanced finishing stage would benefit. There would be more stress on the building exercises, and the great mass of bodybuilders would have a much greater chance of getting what they need the most—substantially increased muscular mass and strength.
The traditional split routines are a waste of time for the vast majority of hard gainers. There are, however, interpretations of split routines—nothing like what you usually read about, though—that can be very helpful.
Linear progression can’t be sustained for year after year. Linear progression can be maintained for individual cycles. Don’t even try to increase your absolute best rep and poundage achievements every workout. It can’t be done.
You must structure your cycles so that most workouts, or even every workout in each cycle, show progress relative to the previous workout, but only the workouts in the final weeks of the cycle will show absolute progress—new personal bests of rep and poundage achievements. Detail on cycling is given in Chapter 7.
The emphasis upon progression doesn’t mean a disregard for proper style of performance for each exercise. Every rep and poundage increase has to be earned through effort and real strength and muscle increases. No mere loosening up of style to get out the extra reps—that’s dishonest training that greatly increases the risk of injury.
You may be able to keep 10-pound a week increases going for a long time in the squat so long as you keep cutting the depth of the squat. Eventually you’ll be doing next to no squatting, but there will be a heck of a lot of iron on the bar. Your actual strength and muscle mass won’t have changed much though.
Proper style of performance matters a lot. What is correct style of performance? Controlled and smooth rep speed, no explosiveness, and use of safe, correct bar pathways are the combination for long-term, injury-free training. I don’t recommend counting seconds during reps. Counting seconds will distract you from what should be your focus—getting out as many reps as possible (on your work sets, that is). But every rep you do must be performed strictly, without cheating. Reps can be counted without the counting becoming a distraction. Once you’re experienced in training you can almost subconsciously count reps. Counting reps is a powerful aid for producing hard, productive training, so long as you have a target to beat.
The first few reps of a set are easy to do—very low-rep work excluded—so you don’t give forth of full effort at this stage. If you do, you’ll be throwing the bar, setting yourself up for injury. Once the reps become hard, use as much force as you can, without cheating, to get the bar up. The bar is always lowered deliberately, with no dropping. Following the early reps of a set, you’ll try to move the bar rapidly but, in practice, the bar will move slowly.
Between reps there’s a deliberate pause. It’s very short early in a set—perhaps one-second pauses. It will lengthen as the set progresses, to the point of taking a breath or few between reps to set yourself up for the next rep. Rest-pause training exaggerates the rest between reps, but that’s only for certain exercises at certain times.
At the end of a set of perfectly performed, strict, smooth reps, don’t loosen your form in order to get out an extra rep or two. The conservative “absolutely no cheating” approach is the best way to go because it’s a much safer way to train. You must avoid injury!
To extend a set beyond the point where you have completed the maximum possible number of perfect reps, perform forced reps using one or (for the big exercises) two assistants. But as noted elsewhere in this book, forced reps must be used with caution if at all. Harder work is not always better; and often, increased intensity beyond what is already genuinely hard, is overkill, and will produce overtraining. Overtraining doesn’t build bigger muscles. In fact, overtraining will wear you down, weaken you, and set you up for injury and/or sickness.
Rep speed variation can help keep variety in your training. Don’t get locked in one fixed pattern. At the same time, don’t go chopping and changing so much that you never milk any single interpretation dry. Stick to one (rational) interpretation of exercises, rep speed, and set and rep scheme for a whole cycle before passing judgement.
Productive bodybuilding is about a number of unified factors. Take one factor out of the whole, and the productivity of training will evaporate. Stressing simple progression is an absolute must, but only in combination with sound exercise form and satisfaction of all the other factors of bodybuilding.
When starting a new training cycle, the training intensity has been slackened off. Apply yourself to perfect exercise performance (see Chapter 11). Do the exercises properly, and keep doing them properly as the intensity picks up over the course of the cycle. Always slow down the poundage increments and lengthen the cycle. If you hurry the poundage increments you’ll slacken your exercise style, incur the chance of injury, and reduce the effectiveness of the cycle.
Putting the requirements of successful bodybuilding onto paper is straightforward. It’s the putting into practice that’s the difficult bit. Hard gainers always need to adapt given routines to fit their own uniqueness. Some of us need to adapt things more than do others. Experimentation, and trial and error, takes time. Some people find what works for them early on. Some take a long time to find what delivers the goods, even though they’ve been moving within the range of sound, sensible and basic training. There are many interpretations.
Some bodybuilders get so distracted by the ineffective alternatives that dominate popular bodybuilding that they can take years before coming around to finding what actually works. Some take so long that they never find what delivers substantial size and strength.
Even when training is going well, gains don’t flood in on a long-term basis. You’ll probably experience short periods of quick gains, but you’ll also have long periods of little or no gains. Keep at it. Never give up. Every mistake is a lesson learned. So long as you don’t keep repeating mistakes, mistakes are fine to make.
Keep a training diary, and record all your workouts. You need a written record of what you’ve done previously in order to determine what you need to do later on. Be diligent and serious about your training. Huge success in the long-term is about little bits of success in the short-term. Chart the success, and record the little bits of success by using a training diary.
A bite at a time, a step at a time, piece by piece. Think of some huge man-made structures. They were built by one little bit being placed on top of another little bit. This is how it is in bodybuilding. Just work at adding the next pound to your barbell, then the next, then the next and on and on. Just work at adding the next eighth of an inch to your arms, calves and everything else. Add up all the eighths of an inch, and add up all the bits of iron; then you get many inches over your body and hundreds of pounds on the bar. Persist!
Frustrations, setbacks, disappointments, injuries (not necessarily caused by training) and unsuccessful experiments are all part of life. Come they will. When they do, then you’ll be tested.
There will be times when you’ll have to content yourself with keeping regression to the minimum; progression is then but a dream. There will be wonderful times when everything clicks for the good, and you can really forge ahead.
No matter how hard the going gets, keep at it. Life is no picnic, and neither is bodybuilding. Persist!
Life is a continuous challenge. Rise to it. See every setback as a challenge. Let nothing get you down. Ignore negative influences. Stay true to what you know is the way to go. Persist!
“Stickability” is one of the biggest factors in bodybuilding. Successful hard gainers aren’t built overnight. They need time, sometimes lots of time. Pound by pound on the bar, eighth of an inch by eighth of an inch on your muscles. Persist!
Workout after workout, week after week, month after month, year after year . . . persist!
Not only should you never give up, you should never even think of giving up, not ever. Relish the satisfaction of persistence and achievement. The only people who don’t have the satisfaction of rising to challenges and overcoming setbacks are the ones in the coffins. Persist, persist and persist some more!