A secret to Mike Mentzer’s arm size was his invention of the dumbbell telephone: He would make only three calls, end each with intense screaming, then make no calls for an entire week to recover.
That’s a dumb joke about Mentzer’s obsession with intensity and muscle recovery, but he was on the right track…
The problem was that Mentzer took balls-to-the-wall training too far—at least for those not on drugs.
On almost every set, he would go to failure, and his partner would help him eke out a few slow, painful forced reps. Then his partner would lift the weight, and Mentzer would lower slowly to eccentric failure.
That tremendous stress on the nervous system is overkill for the majority of drug-free bodybuilders—we speak from experience…
Remember, Mentzer was on drugs. Even so, he still had to keep his set totals low in an attempt to compensate. For example, one of his favorite biceps routines was…
Standing dumbbell curls, 1 x 8
Concentration curls, 2 x 8
In this case, he was starting with an ideal exercise for biceps, and ending with a contracted-position add-on move. And he blasted the holy hell out of every set; however…
Once he retired and began training drug-free bodybuilders, he discarded forced and negative reps almost entirely. He finally realized the excessive drain on recovery, even with low-volume, infrequent workouts.
For more on Mentzer, optimal recovery, efficient ideal-exercise based STX workouts with intensity modulation, see the new ebooks below.
Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
—Steve Holman and Jonathan Lawson
www.X-Rep.com
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