Q: I have almost all of your e-books. They’re all great, and I reread them often for motivation and ideas. Right now I’m on The Ultimate Fat-to-Muscle Workout. Can I Double-X Overload everything stretch-related in that program? It seems like that would produce even more muscle microtrauma similar to the negative-accentuated sets on the big exercises. That should speed up my fat loss and muscle gains, right?
A: If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day; if you teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. What does that have to do with your question? We’re just glad to see you taking techniques from our other e-books and applying them to your current workout. You’re learning how to “fish”—grasping the mass-building concepts and applying them when and where appropriate…
That’s the reason we continue to apply and experiment with new research and produce new e-books—they all have excellent workouts and relevant information that teaches you how to evolve your own training. You don’t have to just follow the workouts as they are written. In fact, we encourage you to experiment and shuffle in other mass tactics—like DXO (Double-X Overload) on the stretch-position exercises, as you suggest…
For the uninitiated, DXO is one of the X-Rep hybrid techniques from the Beyond X-Rep Muscle Building e-book. It’s simply putting an X-Rep partial between each full rep. For example, on flyes, you lower the dumbbells to the stretch point, raise about 10 inches, lower to the stretch point again, then raise them all the way to the top.
That X-Rep “hitch” between full-range reps produces more stretch overload, which helps induce more microtrauma and accelerate the fat-to-muscle process outside the gym. Plus, it’s linked to hyperplasia, or fiber splitting, and anabolic hormone release in muscle tissue. It also activates more muscle fibers via the myotatic reflex, which can jolt new size. You’ll see your bodyfat shrink and your muscle mass rise.
Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
—Steve Holman and Jonathan Lawson
www.X-Rep.com
Build MASS with bodyweight training
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