Q: I’ve made the best gains of my life the past year with X Reps, going from 185 to just under 200 pounds. But my gains have stalled. You talk a lot about muscle adaptation, so I’m wondering if I’ve adapted to X Reps. Should I stop doing them for a while so I can pack on more muscle?

A: Adaptation to training techniques and even bodypart routines can happen in as few as six workouts. If you train a muscle twice a week, that means you can adapt in three to four weeks. We’ve talked about phase training, which is downshifting intensity for one week with sub-failure workouts after four to six weeks of all-out workouts. But sometimes even that’s not enough to kick-start new gains once you resume a high-intensity phase. Usually, you have to mix things up somehow…

We noticed that adaptation phenomenon after our initial X-Rep gains. We improved for about five months with standard X Reps, using phase training along the way, but we could tell size increases were slowing down. That forced us to think and develop X-hybrid techniques, which we outline in the Beyond X-Rep Muscle Building e-book. We suggest you give end-of-set X Reps a rest and try these two X-hybrid tactics on the second set of your big midrange exercises (like presses, squats, etc.) instead…

Stage Sets. Here you do slightly exaggerated X-only reps first, like the bottom two-thirds of squats—say, nine of those non-lock partials—moving from the low position to just above the halfway mark. When you can’t get any more of those low-end reps, you push to lockout and do top-end X Reps, moving through the top one-third of the stroke for about six partial reps (we like to flex our quads hard on each lockout for extra occlusion).

As we explain in Beyond X, Stage Sets work well for almost all midrange moves. Some not so well, however, such as dumbbell upright rows, chins, and machine rows. If you do the semi-stretch range first on those exercises, the top contracted position will be even weaker, with no chance for you to get partials in that range. For those exercises, do DXO…

Double-X Overload (DXO). These emphasize the important semi-stretch position with an extra hit on every rep. How? You simply do an X-Rep partial between each full-range rep. On dumbbell upright rows, for example, you start with the ‘bells at the arms-extended position in front of your thighs. Pull them up and out till your upper arms are parallel to the floor, lower, pull them up one-quarter of the way, lower, then pull for another full rep. Repeat, with an X-Rep partial, the quarter rep down low, after every full rep.

DXO provides a double hit at the point where you get the most fast-twitch fiber activation—the semi-stretch point, or X Spot. It works very well on chins and other exercises that don’t accommodate Stage Sets. [We discuss the best exercises in the Beyond X e-book. Also, See Bonus Chapter A—Analyzing Mr. Olympia’s Workouts From an X-Rep Perspective, page 93 in that e-book, for how Ronnie Coleman used to use DXO sets for mass.]

Remember, use one of those two techniques on the second set of your big midrange exercises instead of X Reps for four to six weeks. Then you can go back to X Reps—but mix in Stage Sets, DXO, and other X-hybrid techniques as well. That mix-and-match strategy worked incredibly well for us after we adapted to X Reps. We added another 10 pounds of muscle the very next year—the first two photos below are before and afters from our first X-Rep phase (after only 35 days) and the last photo is after adding even more muscle with X-hybrid techniques (these techniques work!)…

You gotta have change for maximum gains.

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

—Steve Holman and Jonathan Lawson
www.X-Rep.com