Q: You’ve mentioned that you’ve altered your workouts and intensity. Can you give me a rundown of what you’re currently doing and results compared to last year? I’m 52 and putting on good muscle size with the Old Man, Young Muscle workouts, but if I can make even faster gains, show me the changes.
A: You’ve obviously been reading this newsletter, so you know that I added a functional cable unit to my pathetic home gym last October. Once I got the thing together, I felt a burst of enthusiasm, a good thing; however, my workout times started creeping up. Before I knew it, I was spending almost an hour at each…
That’s dangerous—or at least depleting—at age 62…
Luckily, I was still training on the two-way split outlined in Old Man Young Muscle—in my gym only three days a week. Even so, I began to get stringy. That’s when I started researching various ideas about overtraining…
2019 Drug-Free Mr. Universe Doug Brignole, who is responsible for the ideal exercises I emphasize in the OMYM workouts and also 62, mentioned how he cut back back and began gaining muscle much faster.
So instead of the five sets per muscle I had pushed up to after my cable unit arrived, I backed off to three or four—which is what I was doing in OMYM. But instead of all sets to failure all the time, I began doing one workout with most sets to failure and the other all sub-failure.
I now do some exercises with cables, but I usually alternate at different workouts. For example, decline dumbbell presses at one chest workout, then cable chest presses at the next.
I usually do two or three sets of the ideal exercise, then I rep out on one set of an add-on exercise. For chest it’s cable flyes or dumbbell flyes.
As you can see, I’m still adhering to the workout structure and protocols in Old Man Young Muscle, only with slightly less ferocity. So if you don’t have a cable unit, those workouts are excellent. My workout times are now 40 minutes. Here’s a recent photo I snapped the other day in my home gym. My wife babysits our new granddaughter each day, so I had to selfie it…
This photo has me realizing that my face is getting a good tan from my runs, but not my body. Probably won’t be running shirtless, though, as loose boob skin could give me a black eye.
Back to my current training. I have been experimenting by rotating in a workout with some longer rests. I’ll use either an opposing-muscle superset, such as chest with mid-back, or do one-limb exercises in alternating fashion. Either way extends my rests between sets to 1 1/2 to 2 minutes. So far it seems like good change to gain.
For most gym sessions, however, it’s the Old Man Young Muscle Base workouts, similar to those on pages 60 and 61, with some substitute cable movements and only minor tweaks. Why mess with mass-building success?
New: Get the ideal exercise for each muscle, the best add-on moves for ultimate mass, complete 35-minute workouts, exercise start/finish photos, and details on building muscle fast and efficiently in Old Man, Young Muscle.
And you still get The Muscle-On, Belly-Gone “Diet” ebook FREE for a limited time when you add Old Man, Young Muscle to your mass-building library. Go HERE.
Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
Steve Holman
Former Editor in Chief, Iron Man Magazine
www.X-Rep.com
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