Guaranteed muscle Part 1 the basics
By Richard Baker
Copyright 2012 Richard Baker
Smashwords edition
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Table of contents
Chapter 2 Understanding the adaptive body
Chapter5 Repetitions and muscles in depth
Chapter 7 Routines and sets: How many, why and what order
Chapter9 Rest, avoiding overtraining and injuries
Further information from this author
Dear reader, you more than likely fall into 1 of 3 possible groups. You're possibly reading this and thinking "ok here we go another book pretending to know all the secrets to a perfect muscular body". Or perhaps as a more advanced bodybuilder you want to look for new ideas and methods for packing on the meat. Or (cue the sad music) you're a new starter to body building or you have tried a little bit but don't seem to be getting any results. Well first thing right now I will say what this book is not!
This book is not an endless list of secret ingredients for your diet that will turn you from a stick insect into a hulking mammoth. Like most people interested in resistance training I have fallen for all the silly gimmicks in the popular magazines: "eating chilli raises your metabolism so you get super slim and ripped" and “add blueberries to your after workout shake for enhanced slow release vitamin C" the list goes on. Pick up any popular muscle magazine today and you will find article after article telling you things like "a recent study showed 5mg of coffee in an after workout meal raised testosterone 15% " and "a scientific study recently showed that green tea cleanses all the free radicals out of your muscles". Trust me here, if you took notice of all of these silly studies you would end up eating a veritable ‘witches brew’ of substances and make yourself sick and no further forward in your quest for muscle. Unfortunately this is what most magazines want, shock horror! Did I just say that? Yes, it is actually in their business interests to have you running around in circles getting poor results for as long as possible. If they encouraged people to keep it simple and make slow constant progress then you wouldn't need to keep buying their magazines and they go out of business. I’m being harsh but I believe I’m being truthful (although there are some genuine and useful magazines out there). Remember if you own a business you have to maximise profits and the best way to do that is to get customers to continue to return to you time and time again. This is one of the reasons you get the strange phenomenon of companies telling you dumbbells are now useless and you have to buy kettle bells! Then once everyone has bought kettle bells they then tell you that kettle bells are old fashioned and now you must buy dumbbells again. Then the same companies tell you that if you really want to get big then you must buy special self-adjusting selectable weight dumbbells that for reasons that still elude me cost hundreds of pounds, (that’s not a joke, they really do cost hundreds). I’m sure that if you bought all of these they would then tell you that the reason you are still small is because you now need to buy special shaking weights or some other useless contraption. I hope to give the reader of this book a scientific and logical look at building muscle, whilst entertaining them by showing the abundance of useless devices and techniques and old wives tales that seem to attach themselves to the bodybuilding industry like some horrible leeches.
If there is one bit of advice I can give you right now it would be to try the best you can to stay away from silly magazines which use outrageous claims on the covers. If I see one more magazine promising me a set of six packs in 2 weeks I will scream. It’s absolutely hilarious to see the nonsense claims on the covers month after month. Let me say there are, and always will be good magazines out there, and it’s a matter of looking for ones which are not making silly claims on the cover. Look for magazines which contain solid information and try to avoid ones which have claims like “learn how to add 3 inches to your arms in 1 week”, and “six pack abs by eating bark extract”. If you see a claim and it simply seems too good to be true, then you’re probably right in thinking it’s too good to be true. These claims are designed to make you pick the magazine up, they then enhance this effect by adding a picture of a man with perfect six pack abs on the cover, who has been working out for 10 years and so has never done the secret workout or took bark extract in his life. Also avoid magazines which have a picture of the latest movie star on the front telling you they look the way they do because of a simply 10 minute workout, its simply not likely to be true is it?
This book is not a long list of silly little special secret techniques for showing you the perfect arm curl re-discovered from a banned training manual found in the old soviet bloc. Nor is it the book which blows the lid off the secret method for doing side deltoid movements where you tip the dumbbells slightly at the top of the repetition to give secret and huge growth to your muscles. The simple and plain fact of the matter is this; you cannot just pick up a copy of a workout done by some huge guy and automatically expect that if you follow this you will also be huge in no time. I’m really sorry to burst some bubbles here I truly am and I don’t want to start complaining about having an idol but it must be stressed that what suits one guy will not suit the next. There are some constants which will work for all which I will cover in this book at great length but there is no secret workout that will turn you into a monster sized person in a few weeks. The idolised bodybuilders in magazines are of course amazing, and they are also hard working, and they deserve all the fans they get, but get real for a second. Think about it logically, they train intensely day in day out and have done for at least 15 years and they also have fantastic genetics enabling them to get even better results in a shorter time. They represent less than 1% of what the population look like and indeed are capable of ever looking like. They are the absolute elite in bodybuilding, and on top of that pictures can be ‘photo shopped’ very easily further enhancing the look they have. They also have perfect eating plans combined with powerful supplements and massive amounts of rest. Are you starting to get the picture? Instead of looking at them you need to be looking at yourself for once and working out how you can get muscles in a safe a sustainable way to the maximum of your abilities and genetics. And most importantly understand how you can continue this growth over the weeks, months and years ahead.
This book is not a super-secret fast track way to endless gains that would put Hercules to shame in muscle size and mass. I won’t insult your intelligence by simply telling you what to do, in my opinion that is not what a good teacher does. In my opinion a good teacher explains what needs to be done and explains why. A fantastic teacher also demonstrates, in the absence of me being in your room I will have to use words and pictures for exercise demonstration part, but I’m sure you get what I’m saying here. If you follow what I cover in this book you will continue to make great but realistic gains in a logical, scientific, achievable way. Beware idiotic magazine articles about putting 2 and 3 inches on your arms in a week and outrageous workout plans. I’ve seen books telling readers things like ‘One 16 year old kid who tired this method put on 40 pounds in 2 months!’ First things first, when you read silly claims that sound too good to be true, they generally are too good to be true! It is impossible to put on that much weight as pure lean muscle in that amount of time unless your dad was Zeus and your name is Hercules! It has to be fat, water and just maybe some muscle. You need to ask yourself how much of that weight was from fat, how much was from water, how much of that weight gain was from the natural growth a 16 year old would have made naturally regardless of the exercise regimen. Who conducted that study and was it peer reviewed? Was the result repeatable? Who funded the study, was it a supplement company? Without good scientific method and a full detailed explanation you should ignore silly spurious promises, it’s so easy to be sucked in but please try to ignore them. People going all the way back to the Wild West have been suckering people in to buy snake oil and it’s still going on today. The biggest trick ever invented to increase sales is the simple task of leaving information out. If you leave information out you are not telling lies but you are also not fully informing people. Let me give you a simple example. What would you say if I told you I could sell you a device at a reasonable low cost that allowed you to see right through solid walls? Interested? What if I told you that this device can allow you to see right through metal, stone, wood, no matter what the wall is made from you can see through and on top of that you can use it to actually move your hand right through the wall as well. Want one? I know I would, now how much will you pay for this device? It’s easy to get swept up in only the specific facts presented by the seller isn’t it? Want to know the name of the amazing device I just made you want to buy? It’s a window. Yeah it’s funny but it’s exactly what advertisers do when they only give you one side of the story. They tell you all the brilliant things their product is, and never tell you the basic facts and downsides; it’s the opposite of impartiality. This sort of thing goes on all the time, easy examples are things like ZMA supplements and sit up machines. The results of ZMA look brilliant, it’s not until you look at the small print to see why that is the case that you realise you’re not getting the whole picture, I will cover this in more depth in the diet chapters in a following book so read on. Also sit up machines are a huge pile of garbage, they tell you over and over what this machine will do, and that’s all true, but the information they always miss out is “you can do all the abdominal exercises in the world and still not get a six pack unless you lose fat to see them, I will cover this in more depth later in guaranteed muscle books and I will also tell you that sit up machine manufacturers never tell you, that sit-ups are free, just use a floor!
The fact of the matter here is I am essentially shooting myself in the foot writing this book. Why? Simple, rather than tell you a whole load of lies and pseudo-science rubbish which would make me money as you would fail and have to buy yet another book. I am attempting to inform you the best ways to eat train and rest which will in my opinion guarantee you will make gains, regardless of your genetic background. I will also fully explain why I am telling you the things I am, and I will try to explain scientifically why they work. And when I refer to people’s genetic background I refer to the well know somatotypes. (That’s posh for body type, for example: tall and slim, short and stocky or falling between these two). Without going too far into Somatotype classifications, when you look at the population you will notice that you see 3 main body types:
Ectomorph: These people show easily the visible signs of being slim with very low fat storage and small thin muscles. You might hear these people being refer to as skinny. A good example of these people are long distance runners and everyone knows a person who seems to be able to eat all day and never put on any weight that's an Ectomorph due to their metabolism.
Endomorph: These people tend to show signs of being large framed and by that I mean they appear to have much more fat stored with a large bone structure and a wide waist, don't mistake my description here for obese people (that’s an extreme level of fat storage above and beyond a simple body type). But they will show visible fat storage, they will also be the people who you know that seem to be able to put on weight by just eating a lettuce leaf! This again is predominantly due to metabolism. This body type is not best suited for endurance sports.
Mesomorph: This body type is the one that most men strive for as it is associated with having low fat levels with a slim waist but the appearance of a wide shoulder frame and a good amount of muscle, these people tend to find it easier to put on and keep muscle and for that reason it is the most apt body type of top body builders as this gives them a natural advantage for obvious reasons.
I will touch on the subject of body types and genetics later in the book but the above quick guide to body types should give you a basic awareness of the body types out there and what they tend to be good or bad at. While on the subject of body types I would like to say straight away I was born and lived most of my life as an Ectomorph (skinny guy). In fact as a way to prove the point I will tell you that every morning I used to buy at least 5 bars of chocolate and then spend the morning eating them at work I would then have a huge ‘fast food’ dinner followed by more chocolate in the afternoon then I would have a large evening meal followed by another meal before bed and I found it impossible to put on weight. It infuriated my work colleagues who were on diets but I was able to do that. Although I was not adding any muscle at all despite doing a billion biceps curls a week. Of course I no longer sit around eating masses of chocolate which is nutritionally poor for anything other than raw calorific content. Now I eat healthy, but still in large amounts which is one of the hallmarks of the Ectomorph. Despite not being able to grow any bigger by eating alone after using my methods I have so far done the impossible. I am now a muscular guy even though I should ideally be a runner or involved in sports that require a slim light frame like running. I have done it, and if I can then I believe that anyone can! Your genetics are not an impregnable wall to stop you getting the body you want, you just need to know how to train and use your genetic advantages when you can. I will explain the method of using your genetics to your advantage later in the book. So before any skinny guys put the book down let me tell you, you are going to find it so easy to get a six pack using the books in the guaranteed muscle guide. And on top of that you will love the fact you can eat tons of (nutritious) food.
This book will not give you the so called "perfect routine" that if followed will keep on giving you massive muscle growth for years, and you will never need to use any other routine ever again. Trust me there is no secret routine that will work the best and forever, anyone who tells you otherwise is misinformed and although they may think they are helping they are not. I find the best way to tell when advice given in a gym is good or bad is as simple as asking one question. “Why?” If they cannot give you a scientific and/or reasonable answer then it's probably just an old wives tale or they are repeating something they have heard or assumed to be right. This is tantamount to passing on folklore, it might sound good, hell it may even sound plausible at times but without a sensible scientific reason to it its usually a load of old garbage. Let's face facts here, if you went to see a doctor and they advised you to take a certain drug but when asked why he said "I don't know" or "well it just works, my friend told me once", alarm bells would be going off in your head! Now I’m not asking people to be super critical of everything but please remember when someone tells you a weight lifting tip you need to think a little and look at the facts, does this person know what he is talking about for a start? Even if they are well wishing, people tend to be repeating a myth or a long held belief that has no scientific basis. You need to be critical of the facts when it comes to weight training. Ask yourself why can’t he or she tell me why a particular thing is good or bad? It sounds like common sense but you would be so surprised how many people fall into the trap of believing anything they are told. A classic example for the advanced body builder would be people in the gym telling you to do a circular shrugging motion when working on your trapezius muscles. It’s quite simply a complete nonsense movement which does absolutely nothing extra what so ever for the muscle in question as opposed to correct form. A simple up and down is sufficient to work the trapezius (the muscles of the upper back/base of the neck). So then why is it still passed around like a dark secret from body builder to body builder to this day? Quite simple, they don't know any better and they have not stopped for one second to ask where this information is coming from or why doing it that way should be better. For those that are not advanced what I am referring to here is an out dated method for training the trapezius muscles where people still to this day grab some weights and then proceed to rotate their shoulders backward and forward making themselves look like some gyrating 1980s disco dancer. Why do they do it? When you talk to people about it you find out that they are either copying someone else because they saw them do it or even worse they were given this method from a well-meaning person. For the record, up and down is right and if you need to change around the form to prevent stagnation in progress then there are ways to do that, which I will cover in the back exercises section of the guaranteed muscle guide books, I will give you plenty of options.
Another thing that is always overlooked with resistance training is the proper use of periodization training methodology. I have heard it a hundred times when I tell people to change their routines around “why would I want to do that!” as if I am asking them to go do something really silly. Trust me without periodization training (making necessary changes over time) you are missing an important way to keep muscular gains coming. When I say periodization what I am talking about is based on what Russian sports scientist Leo Matveyev would recommend, although not completely the same. What Matveyev said basically was that when beginning to train the body you need to train with low intensity but do a high amount of training which I happen to totally agree with, especially for beginners to resistance training. When you first start training it is an incredible stress to the body and not just the muscles you are training. It will hammer your ligaments and connective tissues as well as your bones and heart. Over time you will eventually build muscle memory and not over stress the ligaments and bones. A good way to think of this is like putting a new engine in the car without upgrading the nuts and bolts which will still be weak and not up rated to cope with the new stresses. This in my opinion is why beginner body builders should never try and copy split routines or hard technical severe isolation exercises which they might see in magazines. Copying these routines too early without understanding them is a recipe for disaster. When you first start you need to avoid specialisation of body parts each day as your body needs to work up to this kind of intense training. I cannot stress this enough so please beware as a beginner. Let's face it if you wanted to start running you wouldn’t grab a copy of a top marathon runners training manual and copy it exactly, you would end up in hospital or drop dead of a heart attack! After doing the ground work Matveyev then advised that you move onto reducing overall volume of work but increase the intensity. So for the budding body building that would translate as: start doing a few months of long duration but light weights sessions. Avoid concentrating on specific body parts, stick to the basics like squats dead lifts and presses, all exercises that use multiple muscle groups. Then as you get used to this and your bones and connective tissue adapt to be stronger and more resilient, you can then move onto specialising on muscles each day. All of which I will cover in the chapter 'designing your own routines' which will be part of proceeding parts to the guaranteed muscle guide. Now this all sounds like a one off thing right? As soon as you graduate from being a beginner you just stick to doing split routines where you do a different body part all the time, well within this framework you can still make changes and that will be covered in the chapter ‘Change is good’. The important message on that chapter will be to instil in you the importance of keeping things changing and different. Periodization as far as I am concerned is not just about differing levels of work or intensity but the need for a constant change to stop your body getting stuck in some horrible non-productive rut. In fact one of the most important basic methods of continual periodization is the incremental increase of resistance though adding weight to the bar slowly over time. I will cover all of these issues in full detail in later chapters so don’t worry about all of these issues now. I have also included information on diet in the diet book, don’t worry I am not using the word diet to instil fear and loathing in the reader, there will be no advice of eating 1 lettuce leaf a day with a boring boiled fish finger. In fact the opposite will be true! I will show you why and how as a body builder you will be eating probably more than you do now! And furthermore not only will you be eating more than you do now and not feeling hungry; you will over time lose fat and if you choose to go onto lose even more at any rate you see fit. These sound like stupid claims but I assure you they are not, once you understand all the components of the foods you put in your mouth you can start to eat for purpose rather than just sitting eating chips all and gaining no muscle. Lastly I will use the guaranteed muscle books to try and bust myths when I can, such as “all fats are bad for you” which is a lie plain and simple, I also want to try and answer the long running question of how much protein do you actually need a day? I hope you enjoy this first book on the basics as I have enjoyed pouring my years of knowledge into it to try and help others to get the muscular bodies they deserve.
Chapter 2 Understanding the adaptive body
I think that this is possibly the most important part of the book theory wise, the meat and potatoes so to speak of the body building world. If you want to add muscle then there is simply no substitute for good quality resistance training, weather that means doing the good old fashioned push up, using a resistance band or pumping huge pieces of cold steel overhead in some dusty workout room. The simple and undeniable fact of the matter is that without resistance training you will not under any circumstances put on muscle, despite what you may read on the back of a supplement bottle!
The human body is a miracle of nature, so complex that we still don't understand its every detail; we still don't even know categorically what the human appendix is for! However, it can be said with great certainly that without the breakdown of muscle tissue that occurs with resistance training the body will never grow new stronger and bigger muscles. Growing muscles through adaptation to external resistance is given the scientific name of Hypertrophy (it just means grow bigger). That in a nutshell is what being a bodybuilder is, breaking down your muscles so the body grows them back bigger, you repeat this over and over in a safe controlled manner and day after day, week after week, year after year, you grow bigger and bigger. This one simple scientific fact is the entire core of bodybuilding and without this mechanism you would never grow the skeletal muscles. Of course they never tell you this on the back of a supplement bottle or in a horrifically bad advertisement for a sit up gizmo.
I am going to try and explain the simple concept of the adaptive human muscle system in an analogy. Let's say you have 10 men and a rope, these men represent the muscles in the human body. Ok so let's also say that this rope is attached to a large boulder and they want to move it. The men take the rope and take up the strain and if they are strong enough the boulder will move. Right here comes the adaptive part. Let's say the men cannot move the boulder far because it is really heavy, what the human body does in this analogy is it adds an extra man to the group, thus giving more power. This only comes about after the body realises it’s being asked to do a far greater load than it is actually capable of. The human body will adapt over time to the task being asked of it by adding more strength, growing the muscles larger to put it simply, hypertrophy. Here comes the other part of the adaptive body system that must be born in mind as somewhat of a limitation to this automatic process. In order to get this adaptation you need to train in a specific way for an ideal amount of time and then give your body a certain bunch of nutrients and rest for an ideal amount of time. This all sounds simple and in essence it is! Remember if you use your hands too much to work in the garden you will get calluses, the body is adapting and adding the calluses to protect your skin. The same is true for your muscular system, if it finds a task difficult then the body tends to increase your ability to make sure the next time it is asked to do the same task it is better suited to that task. This type of training is referred to as resistance training in that you are moving your limbs around while they are being resisted by a weight. Resistance training when done correctly results in increases in muscle size and capillary density(1). That's what sets us humans apart from machines, a machine can only do what it was designed to do and never improve itself. Humans on the other hand given enough time can continually improve and adapt to meet a challenge. The term that comes to mind to sum all this up is ‘adapt and survive’.
Now here is the tricky part, how much weight do you need to use to get an adaptive response and muscle building action in the human body? Well luckily this has all been worked out to some degree by scientists. It turns out that you cannot simply spend all day trying to move a 500 ton mountain until your body builds up for the task! No, sorry but that won't work although it would be nice wouldn’t it. What you need to do is give your body enough of a shock without breaking your bones! This is where repetitions come into play. Instead of say lifting a weight once then putting it down and walking off waiting for the human body to start growing muscles what the modern body builder is after is a sufficient strain on the muscles but over and over again. This means not having one all mighty super dangerous bone breaking effort, but instead smaller easier ones over the time it takes to do some repetitions of the movement in question. In fact you need to remember that when doing a maximum effort 1 repetition lift you are the most likely to do yourself an injury. However carry out too many reps and the exercise becomes an endurance task. This causes the body to tend to strip away muscle or improve the circulation or efficiency of the muscles to be more vascular and efficient at endurance exercises. Use too much weight and you will either hurt yourself with the strain or you will end up doing the repetition with such poor form that you simply cheat and swing the weight about using momentum and anything else to get the weight moved. Swinging weights around and using too much weight is no use for a body builder. While on the subject of body builders I refer to the user of this book as a body builder and not a weight lifter. Why is this? Well for one thing you are only interested in growing muscle, for you as a body builder the concept you strive for is to strain the muscle. You are not interested in the amount of weight but the contained and safe strain on the muscles you are working out. A weight lifter will do as his name implies he will use his muscles, momentum, mechanical advantage and inertia (a body will stay in motion once given a push) to lift a weight. A body builder in essence wants to do the opposite to that. You need to lift the weight with the most inefficient method until your muscle actually fails. I know it sounds silly to ask you to lift something in an inefficient manner but you need to do that to reach a point of muscular failure in the muscle you are trying to grow. Failure is the main key to the continued growth of your muscles, without muscular failure you are less likely to add more muscle as the human body won’t notice much. In the next chapter I will discuss why as a bodybuilder you need to embrace and strive to achieve failure. Sounds crazy I know, in most sports and physical pastimes you look to do it as efficiently as possible (winning runners and swimmers for example can be said to be very efficient). When it comes to bodybuilding though failure if your friend, it is the one goal you need to find each time you train and by doing so you will force the body to grow bigger and stronger. Remember your body will adapt over time and the adaptation you look for is increase in muscle mass. The only slight problem when it comes to the adaptive response of the human body is that you will start at some point to see fewer gains. Eventually you may even hit a wall and stop gaining muscle from whatever exercise it is you are doing. For example you cannot simply to 100 push ups a day for 40 years until you eventually have the biggest chest in the world. The well known and most used method of keeping the body adapting without stopping is to increase the resistance you place on it. For example in the gym, you can over time continually and gradually choose progressively heavier weights. This will keep asking the body to do more which it cannot achieve, it then adapts to cope with the load and so you again choose a slightly heavier weight. There are of course many more ways to keep the body guessing and I will cover these in the chapter ‘change is good’ but for now just remember you must ask your body to do things which it struggles to do. Body building and being good at it is not going to be some walk in the park, where to go to the gym and then rattle off a few repetitions on a comfortable machine, doing an over complex routine you saw in a magazine and keep doing that for years until you get super huge. Sorry but it’s not that easy, if it was then the world would be overrun with people who look like pro wrestlers! Another important point I want to make before I end this chapter is the fact that not only does the body adapt to increase your muscle size and therefore strength over time you will gain so much more. When you ask your body to do a task regularly enough your body adapts by upgrading the neural pathways that control the muscles you are using. You will hear some well written articles in magazines sometimes refer to CNS (central nervous system). This is just a way of quickly referring to the pathways that send and receive tiny electrical impulses to control the body. This sounds complex but think of it this way, if your arm was like a construction site crane then by training it correctly over time you would in effect be upgrading that crane. The bones of your body would be like the iron structure of the crane, over time this would thicken and harden like your bones do when used in resistance training over time. Similarly like the long thin tensile cables that connect the cranes working parts you would be thickening and strengthening these in your body which would be your tendons and ligaments. As time passes your muscles get bigger and stronger this is like taking the crane and sticking in a progressively stronger motor with more power. Now back to the initial point of the neural pathways that control the muscles, by training your muscles over time you upgrade the pathways that control the muscles, this would be like taking the crane driver cab and putting in a better computer and a more complex and finely tuned set of controls. These fine tuning adaptations cannot be seen by looking in the mirror they are ingrained in your inner workings and this is why if I was to try and copy a guy who is great at sleight of hand tricks I would fail, I simply have not built up the fine tuning necessary to do those things which he has over years of practice. This effect is sometimes referred to as muscle memory and is one of the reasons you will find doing a totally new exercise so hard the first time you try. You will notice that it is not just the load that is hard but the fact that moving that loads is not a task you have asked the body to do in that particular way. You will spend the first few sets doing it quite slowly and maybe with a few shakes and wobbles, this is until your body specialises its self to be more efficient at the task. It will then tweak and fine tine itself and over time you will find that movement easier. You will sometimes hear athletes for example talk to young starters and say to them “you are doing well, your strength is good but you need to work on technique”. All that this means is that over time your body learns what it needs to do, it’s all about specialized fine tuning. It’s exactly the same as learning to ride a bicycle, you have all the strength you need but you simply don’t have the fine tuning and pathways in place to be able to do the task, also you need to learn the overall technique of how to ride a bike as well. Still not so convinced that the nervous system can have much of an effect on your ability to lift weights? Let me give you the most stunning example of this. If you take an untrained individual and make them do leg curls on just one of their legs for a few months they will gain muscles in that leg, obviously the unused leg will not gain any muscle but guess what? The untrained leg will now be able to lift more weight than it did before the test started. How the hell can the untrained leg have gained any ability if it did nothing? Simple, the central nervous system upgraded the pathways that tell the legs to do a leg curl and this would also include the second untrained leg. Obviously the trained leg will be superior as it now has bigger muscles but the cross over effect is a stunning example of proof that the CNS will upgrade its workings as an adaptation to resistance training. I know that might sound hard to believe but take the time to read the scientific papers on this and you will learn this is not myth but repeatable fact(2). When making use of the human adaptive system to grow bigger many people consider the process to be an exercise in vanity. Although I would agree that body building will give you a large muscular form which is obviously aesthetically pleasing and also naturally attractive to others. The healthy and vital look will naturally for example make males visually more attractive to the opposite sex there is one thing I always remind people when they tell me they don’t need to body build. That thing is sarcopenia (derived from the Greek language and meaning loss of flesh or more accurately ‘poverty of flesh’.) Almost every single person I speak to has no idea what this is and what effect it has on the body, let me say right now that sarcopenia is the constant slow loss of skeletal muscle. Believe it or not but this can cause you to loose muscle mass at up to 1% a year. This process usually starts from around the age of 25 onwards, depending on the individual. Sounds like nothing to worry about right? 1% of something is so small it’s not even worth worrying about is it? Wrong, think of losing 1% over say 25 years, you just lost a quarter of your muscles!, ever wonder why old people find it hard to get out of a chair and climb stairs or ride a bike? Simple, it stems primarily from the constant loss of muscles over the many years they live for. Obviously the degeneration of joints and tissues will also not help but the point I am making here is we are all on a slow inescapable downward slope, if we like that or not. This slow and onward degeneration is something that will happen to us all to smaller and greater degrees. However there is good news, if you spend your time in the gym body building rather than sweating to death on a step machine for hour after hour you are actually promoting muscle growth. In effect you are fighting back against one of the major conditions of old age and that is loss of muscle mass. What tends to exasperate this condition is the sedentary lifestyle of the developed world. Let’s be honest here we don’t even have to chop a carrot these days; you can just buy a bag of already diced carrot from the store. Convenience and computers and the fact we are all living much longer means that the effects of sarcopenia are becoming more apparent in my opinion. Therefore the next time someone asks you why you choose to body build you can tell them not only is it a challenge but you are setting in motion a way to live which fights one of the most debilitating side effects of the aging process. I personally stared weight lifting and body building because I tend to thrive on extremely difficult things and I absolutely love it when people tell me I can’t do something or I am wrong. I then spend every waking moment proving them wrong no matter what it takes, but obviously as a side perk I am fighting the aging process. The adaptive body is a fantastic miracle of nature, don’t let that ability go to waste, set about making the most of the complex and amazing body you have been given and build it into an impressive life preserving healthy vessel to carry you through many happy years. I want to end this chapter with a quote from one of my heroes.
‘No citizen has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. What a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which the body is capable’- Socrates
Have you ever wondered why a guy who works fixing roads all day or a guy who moves heavy house furniture and fixtures all day doesn't have a body like Arnold Swarchenegger? Well when I first started weight training I used wonder about this glaringly obvious question. And to be perfectly honest no one I knew would give me a convincing answer. Logically the removal and road fixing guys are both indeed moving heavy weights around over and over all day for weeks and months at a time, so that sounds the same as a body builder right? Why then do they not have huge bulging biceps and a back like a mountain gorilla? The answer is pretty simple, and they are doing exactly the thing that prevents most people from adding muscle to their frame. When a guy who moves furniture around all day wants to move a large box for example he will do it in the most energy efficient way. By that I mean the method which will result in the fewest calories burned the method which makes full use and takes full advantage of leverage, mechanical advantage and momentum. When you want to add muscle to your body you need to do the opposite of this, sounds crazy yes but without doing that the muscles in question will not reach a point of failure where they are forced to grow. Let’s take as an example the simple bar curl for biceps. If you were to watch in any gym for people doing the biceps curl you will see people training with this exercise in a way which although energy efficient is not going to build much muscle. What people tend to do is stand there pulling the bar upwards in an ok fashion at first. Then after about 1 repetition they lower the weight and their subconscious mind takes over, it starts telling them to forget any correct form they should be using and start using a more efficient method. They start swinging the weight up; this uses momentum which spares the biceps. They then start slightly bouncing from the legs although only a small movement it helps give extra momentum to the swing, this again takes stress off the biceps. They then start raising the elbows higher and higher with each repetition, this decreases the distance the weight needs to move and also moves the weight from a plane which resist gravity. Then they start getting faster and faster to make it easier. This all continues until they reach a point where they are bouncing, swinging speeding up and raising elbows so much that the biceps have almost gone to sleep! Sure the weight is moving up but it’s not going there because of the biceps alone, it’s going up and down in a symphony of cheat methods, leverage and momentum. They have gone from a body builder to a weight lifter. Why are they doing this? They want to put on muscle don’t they? Well you see no one has told them that without proper form and a slow steady speed the muscle will not grow, or at best grow a miniscule amount. Remember form is not just a rule to follow to stop injuring yourself it is there to make sure that the movements you are doing stress the muscles you choose as much as possible. I once talked to a runner who had started weight training and she was completely perplexed as to why her efforts in the gym were not resulting in noticeable muscle growth, this was after 8 months of reportedly hard training. After discussing it and making sure she was not overtraining, eating well and resting enough I asked if I could observe her train a simple round of shoulder exercises. As it turns out she was doing what she thought was right she was weight lifting. She was completing the exercises she had read in a book and she was doing them in what I would refer to as an energy efficient way, she was raising the weights with momentum then locking out at the top (thus resting the muscle) then lowering the weights by just letting them drop which places no stress on the muscles at all. This being the case during a set of 15 simple shoulder raises her actual shoulders were only being used about 10% of the time. Now from a runners point of view she was doing it right, as the point of running is to be energy efficient and keep going as long as possible. When it comes to resistance training you need to have the opposite mind set. I say it now and I keep saying it to people who I try to teach ‘Embrace failure’. Without it the body will simply become more and more adept at cheating each rep and set, and you will always have the body you have now. A quick lesson for all beginners here, you might have heard the often used saying 'no pain, no gain' before in gyms. What is being reinforced here is the idea of enduring the pain in order to gain benefit (in effect, ignoring the minds instructions to rest). Ok so with that in mind what exactly is failure? It can’t just be stopping when your mind says take a little break can it? Why is it so dam important? Let’s take the simple example of a person choosing to do a set of arm curls for the biceps. No matter how strong that person is there is going to come a point when they reach failure, now failure is not when you feel a little bit tired. Failure is not the exact moment your brain starts to tell you it’s time to stop and have a nice relaxing rest. Failure is not when you stop because your muscle feels a bit sore and it’s a bit uncomfortable. The way to tell when you reach failure is to do the following and ask yourself one question. Try doing the following simple test, when you think you have reached failure, ask yourself the following and answer truthfully. If someone held out a bag of gold and said "do one more rep and you can keep this gold" would you be able to do another one? If the answer is yes then you are stopping short of failure, plain and simple, this usually happens for one of the following reasons. You’re allowing yourself to be lazy, your concentrating too much on how many reps you need to do and stopping at an arbitrary number (I have a friend who does this all the time and it drives me absolutely crazy), or your mind is telling you to stop and you are listening to it. I hope now you have some idea of the fact that failure is the point at which you find it literally impossible under any circumstances to lift the weight again to do another repetition without either ruining your form or having a rest. Furthermore we know that lots of people don't reach failure for various reasons. What can be done? Most of the time all it takes is for people to be instructed in correct form by someone who knows what they are doing. You would be amazed at the amount of people I have spoken to in the gym who when asked tell me they don't train to failure and see nothing wrong with this. Without failure you will never be panicking the body into unleashing its full potential and the adaptive response will be dismal. The fact of the matter is that as a body builder you want size and to get the maximum amount of growth you need to train to the point of muscular failure, why is this? I will try to answer this by explaining that human skeletal muscle is made of 2 main types of muscle fibre. You have slow and fast twitch fibres, although this is technically an over simplification of the matter it helps to explain why I am asking you to always train to failure. So for the purposes of this book I will simply say you mainly have slow and fast twitch fibres at your disposal. Most people assume that all muscle is the same but as usual the amazing human body shows that it is a master at specialization. It has different fibre types in differing amounts in different parts of the body, even males and females have differing proportions of fibre types.
I will quickly describe the benefits and downsides to fast and slow muscle fibres. Firstly slow twitch muscle fibres are fantastic for any endurance exercise, so for example walking, running, swimming, tennis, soccer and so on. The down side to these muscles as far as a body builder is concerned is that they show no appreciable size gain when worked. So if I was to go for a jog around the block 2 times a week I would never develop large muscular legs. Now fast twitch on the other hand is fantastic at producing short lived but extremely powerful output. So for example if I was trying to lift a very heavy piece of furniture then I would be firing my fast twitch fibres to move the furniture. The problem with fast twitch fibres is that they fatigue very quickly in comparison to slow twitch fibres, But the important thing is they gain in size massively when worked. And on top of this when they are worked specifically in a rep range of around 6 to 12 reps you get the biggest gain in size. For this reason if you train muscles and you don’t train to failure you are tending to rely more on endurance muscles. If you coast along and do 12 reps and then place the weights down and you could have done a few more you are not fully hammering the fast twitch muscle fibres to complete failure, this failure is what spurs the human body on to make more fast twitch muscle fibres, these are the fibres that show the greatest size increase. Also on top of this the fast twitch muscle fibres can be separated into a type 'A' and type 'B' fibre type. Think of the type A and B as opposing ends of the definition of fast twitch fibres. Type B is, although a fast twitch fibre, at more of the endurance end of the scale and a type B fast twitch fibre is the extreme of a fast twitch fibre. See proceeding image for a more visual guide.
The point I am trying to make here is the fact that the harder and quicker you get the muscle to complete failure then the more you use the fast twitch muscle fibres, and forcing the failure with the super anaerobic type B fibres is how you get the biggest gain in size. This is the classic reason why people who spend all day in the gym doing a million repetitions on a machine never get big muscles. And it is why people who simply do about 12 reps and don’t reach failure only get moderate size gains over time as opposed to people who train to failure on every set. When I am in a gym there is nothing better for me to hear some body builder says things like "wow I couldn't make that last rep" this means they really tried and failed, this is the ultimate goal of every bodybuilder, the holy grail if you will. People spend their entire lives fearing and hiding away from failure but in the gym whilst body building you actually want to fail. Every single time you fail you get stronger, and you can keep doing that over and over for years resulting in constant muscle growth. It not only grows your body but all that tough training and steeling of the mind when up against it will also spill over into your everyday life, you will find that things that used to annoy you or trouble you will pail into insignificance. Trust me when you do a serious set of squats or dead lifts to your limits its one of the toughest things to ask of yourself. I used to get all annoyed about the weather but now when I compare a bit of rain against trying to get just one more rep out while doing a heavy deadlift the rain is really no big deal and now it takes a great deal to get my feathers ruffled in everyday life. I’m not trying to say that being a bodybuilder will change you overnight into a perfectly happy person but I truly believe it will have a positive and lasting effect on those who choose to spend some time at it.