Mr. America Doug Brignole’s Training, Part 4

After Iron Man magazine was sold in 2014 and I semi-retired after 27 years there, I lost touch with Doug…

He was one of my favorite contributors because he always had something to add to the bodybuilding conversation with his biomechanics knowledge and savvy experimentation in the gym…

So I wasn’t surprised in 2020 when I found out that he had written a 400-page tome The Physics of Resistance Exercise. I got it a couple of months after it was released, and it rekindled my motivation at a time I desperately needed it…

With the pandemic shutting down gyms, I had been in a funk, trying to train in my bare-bones home gym…

Doug’s “ideal” exercises gave me some hope and a reason to experiment…

I won’t go into the details, as I summarized my experience in Part 1 of this series. It’s also detailed, with before and after photos, at the Old Man Young Muscle web page. (That ebook outlines how I adapted Doug’s ideas into my home training—released January 2022.)

Between my reading Doug’s book, tweaking my workouts, and the release of OMYM 1 1/2 years later, he and I had a number of back-and-forths on training ideas, research, and life in geezer-ville (he was in his 60s like me)…

In 2020, Doug was still doing around 7 sets per muscle, using only a single ideal exercise for each body part…

In contrast, I was doing 2 to 3—a couple on the ideal, then one set of an add-on exercise for either full stretch or complete contraction (see OMYM for my complete workout at that time; it required some creativity in my crappy home gym with only dumbbells—no cables or machines—but I still got amazing results).

Doug had pulled back from starting each body part exercise with a 50-rep set. Instead he kicked off with 30 reps. I liked the 17-to-20 range on my first set…

Doug added weight so his reps came down on each succeeding set; I used the same weight over 2 to 3 ideal-exercise sets…

Another difference: Doug was still doing his opposing-muscle supersets, so his rests between sets were 2 to three minutes—enough time to complete the set for the opposing muscle…

I chose to use a 20-to-30-second rest/pause between all sets for each muscle to quickly exhaust the total muscle-fiber array. My reps automatically came down on sets 2 and 3, which helped preserve my joints. I could fully stimulate each muscle in about five minutes.

So there were a few things Doug and I differed on at that point:

1) Volume: He was using 7 sets or more per muscle, I was doing 2 to 4

2) Add-on exercises: He believed all you need is the ideal; I like adding 1 set of a unique exercise—like stretch or contraction

3) Rest between sets: He used 3 minutes or more as he trained an opposing muscle; I like 20 to 30 seconds—Vince Gironda Density Training

I’ll delve into each of these with direct excerpts from the emails between Doug and myself in the next few training newsletters. It’s an interesting evolution and conversion of muscle-building ideas with which you can experiment.

Note: For info on Doug’s Build & Burn program, go here: https://buildburn.smarttraining365.com/combopack

Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.