Q: After your recent newsletters on rest weeks, add-on exercises, and recovery, I’m starting to wonder if I’m doing too much to grow. I just turned 50 and am a hardgainer, more so than yourself. Do you think I would do better with just a few sets of the ideal exercise for each muscle, not doing any add-on exercises?
A: This is one of the factors that makes bodybuilding so difficult: Everyone has different capacities for recovery.
It’s hard to prescribe an exact workout, so experimentation is necessary—not to mention some introspection in determining what you’ll stick with…
And to make things even harder, your ability to recover can and will change. It’s a moving target…
That recovery fluctuation is due to lifestyle—such as sleep and nutrition patterns, alcohol consumption, and daily stress—as well as age.
Also, as mentioned above, there’s the sustainability aspect. Even if you could benefit from more volume, you may not want to do it. Forcing yourself usually results in sporadic workouts and often quitting altogether.
Considering your circumstances, my advice is to try an ideal-exercise-only workout and see what happens. Use the STX method, so two quick sets per muscle.
Later, you could try using an add-on exercise for specific lagging muscles…
For example, if you’re doing low-incline one-arm lateral raises or one-arm cable laterals for your medial-delt heads, you could add a set of one-arm standing laterals to load the contracted position…
It takes experimentation for maximum mass creation—and don’t forget change to gain. More on that in future newsletters.
Your Efficient Mass-Building Handbook: For complete mass workouts that include Speed Sets, the ideal exercise for each muscle, and the best stretch and contracted add-on moves, get your copy of 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.
