Bodybuilding: The Power Of Heavy Poundage

THE POWER OF HEAVY POUNDAGE
by Dane Fletcher

21st Century bodybuilding has become a complicated business. It seems that to
get anywhere in this game nowadays, you’ve got to have PHD level knowledge on
everything from nutrition to kinesiology, from chemistry to, dare I say it, psychology.
We’re constantly being bombarded with state of the art research about everything
from metabolic typing to visualization, from chemical sub-structures to ECG graph
print-outs. It’s enough to make an old school iron pumper growl in disgust.
Fortunately for the several million of us who would like to keep things simple,
however, there is one muscle building truism that will never change, no matter how
far our sport meanders into technical triviality: to build huge and freaky muscle
mass you’ve got to haul heavy poundage.

Go Heavy or Go Home

The principle of progressive resistance is the cornerstone of the sport of
bodybuilding, and for good reason. Without it we simply will not progress. That’s
because our bodies have an amazing adaptive ability. If you’re pumping 100
pounds on the tricep push-down for 10 reps, it won’t take your body long to get
used to that level of stress. When it does, it won’t have any reason to respond and
the process that, if supported by proper rest and feeding, leads to bigger muscles
will never get started. That is why you need to be lifting heavier and heavier
weights progressively to keep packing muscle onto your frame. To put it bluntly, if
you’re not pushing the poundage to the edge of your ability, you’re pretty much
wasting your time. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve got to increase
the weight on the bar each set. That is only one way to make the weight feel
heavier. There are a whole host of intensity techniques that will also do the trick,
such as reducing rest between sets or doing drop sets. Yet, increasing the weight
progressively is an essential ingredient that must not be side-stepped.

The Great Rep Debate

Go heavy for 6-10 reps to build mass, and go light for 15 to 20 reps to get
cut.

That apparently sage piece of bodybuilding advice has been doing the rounds for
longer than most of us have been on the planet. Unfortunately for the
unsuspecting, it’s a load of baloney. It has led a lot of mass hungry gym neophytes
to while away their gym time with light weights and high reps, get absolutely
nowhere and give up in despair, convinced that they just aren’t genetically
disposed to building muscle. One the other side of the ledger there are those
hardcore individuals who are convinced that the only way to get big is to max out
on every set, keeping the reps way down in the one to three range. After all, they
argue, a stronger muscle is a bigger muscle, so lets get as strong as we possibly
can. It’s hardly surprising, then, that there’s a lot of confusion around the trenches
regarding the ideal rep range. So, what’s the truth about this rep thing?

To build muscle we must firstly place maximal stress on that muscle. Performing
one repetition of a movement with a maximum poundage will not recruit all of the
fibers within the muscle cell. In fact, it will only stimulate somewhere between 65
and 80 % of them. The more reps you do, the higher the number of fibers
recruited. Of course, there has to be a trade off to this – after all you can only do
one rep with your one rep max. So the weight needs to come down to enable you to
do more reps and, as a result, recruit more muscle fiber. As the reps increase, the
initial 65-80 % of fibers recruited fatigue and more fibers are called into action.
After a certain number of reps there will be no more fibers left to recruit and the set
will come to the point of positive (concentric) failure. To complicate matters further,
there are more than one type of fiber within the muscle cell. There are, in fact, two
types of human muscle fiber. Type 1 (or slow twitch) fibers have a slow contraction
time and are highly resistant to fatigue. These fibers are predominant in
cardiovascular exercise. Most of our everyday activities also involve slow twitch
fibers. Type 2 (or fast twitch) fibers are just the opposite – they have a fast
contraction time and a low resistance to fatigue. These Type 2 fibers are the ones
responsible for muscle growth. They are stimulated by heavy resistance. The
lighter the resistance the more the Type 1 fibers come into play. Clearly, then,
there must be a cut off point where the resistance switches from maximally
activating Type 2 fiber to stimulating Type 1 fiber. Not surprisingly, dozens of
studies have been performed over the years to determine what that cut off number
is. The result? The ideal range to maximally stimulate Type 1 muscle fiber is
between 6 and 8 reps. Any less than that and you won’t be recruiting 100 % of
those fibers and much more than that will switch the emphasis over to Type 1 fibers.

Temper the Flame

Having established the technical validity of training hard and heavy for 6-8 reps,
lets add a qualifier or two in order to create a sensible, productive routine. You
cannot and should not go heavier every time you work out. Your body operates in
cycles and rhythms that make it impossible to be constantly lifting a heavier weight
every time you work a muscle group. As we all know the body also arrives at its own
plateaus. If it didn’t, we’d see guys who have been training since the Sixties
pushing 800-pound bench presses by now. So, if you set your mind on pushing a
heavier weight every single work-out, there will be only one inevitable result: you
will start to cheat on your form in order to get more weight up. In so doing, you’ll be
leaving yourself wide open for a serious injury. So, rather than setting your mind on
upping the weight every session, view the adding of weight as just one – albeit the
most important – way to enhance training intensity. When a weight that you used to
be able to barely manage 6 reps on now allows you to squeeze out 8 reps, than it’s
time to add a pound or two – not before.

You should also cycle your training so that every six weeks you get a complete
break from working out for a week or so. This allows the body time for both mental
and physical recuperation. Do not fall into the trap of working your body to
exhaustion. It demands time to refresh and refocus. If you ignore this demand, your
body will literally eat away at your muscle stores – the mere thought of which is
enough to send most bodybuilders into a catatonic state.

A Heavy Routine

When it comes to hard and heavy training, what role models come to mind? The
Nineties gave us Dorian Yates. The Eighties saw the emergence of the golden
eagle, Tom Platz. The Seventies belonged to Arnold. The Sixties were ruled by
such luminaries as Bill Pearl and Larry Scott. And the Fifties? Anyone remember
Marvin Eder? If you’re going “Marvin who?” then you’re in need of a quick iron
history lesson. Marvellous Marvin is perhaps the strongest bodybuilder who ever
lived. Check out a few stats: 510 lb bench press; 365 lb standing press; a dozen
one arm chin ups. At 198 lbs and with 19 inch arms this guy was impressive. Marvin
put his incredible strength and mass gains down to his no frills style of hard and
heavy training. What follows is the basic routine that Marvin used to pack mass
onto his frame and build strength levels that still astound us a half century down
the track:

(1) Squat
(2) Bench Press
(3) Close Grip Bench Press
(4) Bent-Over Barbell Row
(5) Standing Barbell curl
(6) Lat Pull-down
(7) Leg Raises

That’s it – seven exercises to cover the entire body. The program works because
when you work your major muscle groups with a systematic, heavy program, the
synergistic muscles that surround them are also recruited and maximally stressed.
So you are getting a total body work-out for less time in the gym. This is a great
routine to pack on dense, thick muscularity that will make you look as strong as an
ox. Do the program twice a week. Perform three sets per exercise, aiming for 8,7,
and 6 reps respectively per set – except, that is, for the leg raises. Marvin used to
do 100 of them – and he had great abs.

What About Periodic Power Training?

So, is there any value in bodybuilders periodically doing reps in the one to three
range to add density and thickness? Definitely. After all, two of the greatest
physiques of all time – Schwarzenegger and Columbu – were grounded as power-
lifters before they rose in the ranks of muscledom. There are, in fact, two good
reasons why you, as a bodybuilder, should do power training every few weeks:

(1) It will increase your absolute strength, which will, in turn increase your relative
strength. To put that another way, lets assume that your one rep max on the bench
is 275 lbs and your 6 rep max is 200 lbs. Then, through doing heavy singles,
doubles and triples, you get your one rep max up to 290 lbs, it should follow that
your 6 rep max will increase to about 212 lbs. So, when you revert back to your
bodybuilding routine, you will be lifting heavier weights.
(2) There is a certain type of density and thickness that only comes from extremely
heavy training. It’s hard to describe but instantly recognizable. The competitive
bodybuilder who has developed this look will be at a definite advantage when
competing. And for those of us who will never set foot on a bodybuilding stage, it
will help us to develop that rugged, manly look that was probably the reason we
picked up a weight in the first place.

Every few weeks why not pick a body part and train it power-lifting style? Take the
chest for example. After warming up thoroughly on the bench, do a pyramid work-
out where you drop from 3 to 2 to 1 rep per set. Then go back the other way for a
total of 5 intense sets. You can do the same thing with squats for the legs, dead-
lifts for the back, military presses for the shoulders and curls for the biceps.
Obviously, though, you wouldn’t want to try this sort of thing on isolation
movements like the leg extension. This sort of work-out is extremely taxing on the
muscle so give the body-part a full week recuperation before working it again.

Go Heavy, Go Safe

The heavier the weight you lift, the more the likelihood that you might lose control
of it. For that reason it is imperative that you have at least one good spotter when
training heavy. You also need to thoroughly warm up before attempting to handle
heavy weight. You should do specific stretches for the working muscle group as
well as one or two warm up sets with a lighter weight. Also be very careful about
how you go about the process of getting the weight into position. A surprisingly
large number of training injuries occurred before the first rep even begun during
the initial positioning phase. This is especially true of such movements as the
dumbbell bench press. Often the lower back is injured when people twist
unnaturally to get the weight into position. Avoid this by putting your spotter to work
to pass the dumbbells up to you.

The Siege Mentality

Do you remember the last time someone really made you mad? I’m not talking
angry, I mean fuming under the collar, screaming blue murder furious. If that chump
turned up in your face while you were feeling that way, you’d probably end up with
a one way ticket to death row. Well, when was the last time you felt that way in the
gym. I’m not talking about being angry at another person but being angry with the
weights. You see, those damned hunks of iron are sitting there taunting you. There
saying, “You haven’t got the strength or the guts to push me around. You’re a loser
and you’re going to fail at this work-out.” And what do you do about it? Well, most
guys turn up already defeated. Life has knocked them around, they’re already
feeling exhausted and they want to get this blasted work-out over to get home for
The Simpsons. They feel intimidated by those heavy weights and have already
programmed a negative result into their brain. So is it any wonder that these guys
are not getting the results they want?

Contrast that with the guy who enters the gym totally psyched and ready to engage
those weights in mortal combat. Don’t get me wrong, the guy doesn’t have to be all
loud and demonstrative about it – a quiet determination is far more telling. He
knows exactly what he’s going to achieve, he’s visualized himself successfully
pushing the weights in perfect form and he’s primed himself nutritionally for
maximum work-out energy. This guy has what the late great Mike Mentzer referred
to as the siege mentality. Here’s what Mentzer himself once said about his own
mindset in the gym, “Upon contact with my ‘enemy’, the weights, my nervous
tension would explode in a burst of energy so intense that often the other
bodybuilders around us would stop training and watch. There were instances in
which, while waiting to do my next set, I’d be shaking with rage.” Can you take a
leave out of his book and develop a more aggressive attitude when stepping up to
face the heavy weights at your gym?

BONUS - Heave More with Rest-Pause

When it comes to lifting heavy weight, one of the most brutal training methods you
can employ is the rest-pause technique. Rest-pause allows you to take a set
beyond the point of muscular failure to recruit more of those elusive, hard to get at
muscle fibers that are guaranteed to trigger new growth. It simply involves resting
for 10-15 seconds at the end of a set taken to failure and then banging out two or
three more reps with that same weight. That short rest will allow your body to re-
energize. Oxygen will re-enter the muscle tissue, metabolic by-products will be
removed and ATP will be re-synthesized. A variation on this technique is to choose
a weight that is equivalent to your 3 rep max and perform a single rep. Then pause
for 10-15 seconds and perform another. After another 15 second pause perform a
third rep and so on until you have completed 10 reps. Perform basic mass building
exercises with this technique and do them inside a power rack, with the lower pins
acting as a safety rack. Give rest-pause a try and you’ll soon be experiencing more
pleasure from your heavy poundage pain.

About the Author: Dane Fletcher is THE Training Authority and writes exclusively
for GetAnabolics.com, a leading provider of Fat Loss Supplements and safe,
legal Testosterone Boosters. For more information, please visit http://www.
getanabolics.com