20 Pounds of Muscle
In 2 Months

We’ve gotten a tremendous amount of positive feedback on our e-books, but the best yet recently came from an experienced bodybuilder who used a lot of our information to pack on some serious mass—20 pounds of muscle in two months. Now that’s a helluva big gain! How did he do it? Nope, no drugs were involved, only smart training and eating. He’s a natural bodybuilder with some new titles under his lifting belt. Here’s a quote from the new heavyweight Mr. Utah and overall winner at the Northwest Regional Natural Bodybuilding Championships, Mike Semanoff, that provides some insight on how he got his latest and greatest size surge:

“On December 1 of last year I set out to prove I could put on 20 pounds of lean body mass in two months. I wanted to show that I could do it 100 percent natural, relying on high-intensity-training techniques and workouts and a solid diet. I started at 7.8 percent bodyfat, weighing 198.5 pounds in the morning before breakfast. I ended on January 31 at 6.5 percent bodyfat and weighing 217 in the morning before breakfast. After running the numbers through the computer, [the researcher monitoring my progress] got 19.5 pounds of lean body mass.”

An incredible gain, Mike, but we’re sure readers want specifics. Give us the goods on exactly what you did to pack on so much mass in record time...

“I knew I had to provide my muscles with a unique stimulus to really kick-start growth. I found my answer when I started reading about X Reps at X-Rep.com. I was very intrigued by the concept and started thinking of how I would incorporate these end-of-set power partials into my workout. The whole concept of attacking the semistretched point of the muscle really opened up a new world of training potential. The fun thing about X Reps is the creativity I could use within my workout to really hit the max-force point and overload the target muscle.”

Now that’s what we like to hear (although saying that X Reps are fun is a little insane because they burn like hell!). Mike also used another favorite concept of ours to jack up anabolic hormones, extended tension:

“I did a lot of supersets. I would take my last superset to muscular failure and add X Reps. Once I got the hang of X Reps, I started adding poundage fast and incorporating the technique on almost every set. Like clockwork, the gains just kept coming.”

As we’ve explained in detail in our e-books, X Reps help you generate max force, one of the big keys to achieving extreme muscle growth, right at the key fiber-activation point on an exercise’s stroke. But just doing straight sets with X Reps, however, won’t cut the mass mustard for most bodybuilders—you also need longer tension times. Blasting the target muscle with extended tension via supersets and drop sets is essential because it can help develop the endurance components of the fast-twitch 2A fibers, something lots of intermediate bodybuilders neglect and a big reason they don’t get, well, big much faster.

We’ve suggested using the Ultimate Exercise routines from The Ultimate Mass Workout e-book, doing the first set with X Reps and the second as a drop set, with X Reps tacked onto the second phase to get even more extended-tension mass-building effects. You can also use multi-rep rest/pause, as in the 3D Muscle Building programs in our new 3D Muscle Building e-book (Jonathan gained 20 pounds of muscle in 10 weeks in the late 1990s on that program—his before and after pics are at www.3DMuscleBuilding.com). Supersetting two exercises is another way to do it. He said his goal was to keep his intensity maxed out for 45 minutes to an hour so he could maximize the key elements of his body’s natural growth mechanism. That’s why we designed most of the X-Rep programs, such as the Ultimate Exercise workouts in UMW, to last about an hour—to ward off overtraining and trigger anabolic hormone surges.

Take a tip from Mike: Red line your intensity in the gym for about an hour—using, but not abusing, X Reps—and throw some extended tension into the mix via supersets and/or drop sets, and you’ll get some big gains fast. Couldn’t you use about 20 pounds of new muscle?

—Steve Holman and Jonathan Lawson
www.X-Rep.com