Q: Before the start of my spring/summer job a month ago, my muscle development was progressing nicely. I was using your Positions of Flexion and X-Rep techniques on my three-days-a-week split: chest/bi’s, legs, and back/tri’s. My strength-and-size gains were steadily increasing. Then I started my summer job, and I was a lot sorer after my workouts, I take longer to recover, and I’m losing the size I had in my arms. The job is 40 hours a week of outdoor physical labor. I thought that by eating frequently with adequate protein and eight hours of sleep each night, I’d be fine, but that’s not working. Do you have any suggestions to help get me back on the muscle-building track, especially in the arm department?

A: A demanding physical-labor job can make it more difficult to grow, but not impossible. Even a high-pressure office job presents a similar problem: too much stress. It’s similar to being a hardgainer with low recovery ability and high cortisol output: You have to find the right balance and workload so you don’t overtrain, which means you sometimes have to cut back to grow.

As for your situation, we notice that while it appears you’re training each bodypart once a week on your split, that’s not really the case with arms…

When you do chest and biceps, you’re also training triceps during chest work—bench presses, etc. Then at the end of the week when you train back and triceps, you are also training biceps during back work (chins, pulldowns, etc.).

So you’re actually training arms hard and heavy twice a week, in addition to whatever you do at work, which may be why they are shrinking. Your arms are being hammered continuously with no time to recover.

First try altering your split as a way to cut back to grow: Day 1: back, biceps; Day 2: legs; Day 3: chest, triceps. If you don’t see results after a few weeks, cut back on your arm work. You may not need a full POF program for biceps and triceps, only the big midrange move plus one isolation exercise. So your anchor exercise for biceps would be barbell curls…

Do that for two sets, then follow up with one or two sets of the stretch-position exercise, incline curls…

The following week do two sets of the big midrange exercise again, but follow with one or two sets of a contracted-position exercise for biceps, like concentration curls…

That’s Split-Positions training—you still hit all three Positions of Flexion but over two workouts instead of all at one session. Here’s how your arm programs would look:

Biceps 1
Midrange: Barbell curls 2 x 9
Stretch: Incline curls 1 x 12

Biceps 2
Midrange: Barbell curls 2 x 9
Contracted: Concentration curls 1 x 12

Triceps 1
Midrange: Decline extensions 2 x 9
Stretch: Overhead extensions 1 x 12

Triceps 2
Midrange: Decline extensions 2 x 9
Contracted: Kickbacks or pushdowns 1 x 12

Feel free to substitute exercises and/or manipulate the set totals. For example, you may be able to handle two sets on the second exercises or maybe a drop set. You’ll have to experiment and monitor your recovery and hypertrophic adaptations to get the right mix of how much to cut back to grow (without cutting back too far), but the above is a good place to start to get your growth into gear.

Note: There’s more on Split-Positions training in Chapter 10 of the Beyond X-Rep Muscle Building e-book, including a complete Split-Positions mass workout program.

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

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