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Cut Back to Grow Muscle

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. [Read more…]

What Are Stage Sets? (Hint: They Work!)

Q: I read in one of your previous articles where you mentioned that you sometimes do Stage Sets. What are Stage Sets, and is that a good mass technique for me?

A: Many years ago, even before we developed X-Rep partials, we noticed that every time we introduced Stage Sets to our workouts, we got sudden muscularity and vascularity increases—and now we know why: The technique is essentially a unique type of X overload—an intense out-of-the-blocks blast right at the max-force point where the target muscle is semi-stretched, like near the bottom of an incline press… [Read more…]

Use DXO to Grow

Q: Positions of Flexion is working great for me, but I’m having a problem with chest, specifically flyes. I know how important the stretch position is. You guys talk about the animal study that produced the huge [300 percent] muscle gain in one month with only stretch overload. That’s why I’m using the more focused 3-way POF pec routine in Chapter 5 [of the 3D Muscle Building e-book]. I do bench presses as my first [midrange] exercise, then flyes for stretch, and cable flyes for the contracted position. I just don’t feel the flyes at all, so I know I’m missing important mass stimulation. Any suggestions?

A: For those of us with below-average nerve force in our pectoral muscles—that includes both of us—dumbbell flyes can be difficult to feel. Well, that’s not completely true; they sometimes “feel” like a waste of time. That’s because the front delts and arms tend to take over and get the brunt of the size-building stress. [Read more…]

The Most Important Muscle-Building Exercises

Q: I know the big midrange exercises, like squats and presses, are most important for mass, but after that, do you think the stretch-position exercise or the contracted-position exercise is the best followup for extra muscle growth? The reason I ask is that I don’t have a lot of time to train, so I’m going to do the Ultimate Exercise for each bodypart [identified in The Ultimate Mass Workout e-book] and one more, either stretch or contracted, whichever you say will give me the most growth.

A: Interesting dilemma, but both the stretch- and contracted-position exercises are important for different reasons. Each triggers growth along different pathways (but there is an easy solution to your problem, as you’ll see)… [Read more…]

Stage Sets: Two Sets in One

Q: I recall from some of your previous newsletters that you’ve done something called stage sets. What are those?

A: The stage technique is a great one for jolting new muscle growth because it does two critical things: emphasizes the semi-stretch point of the exercise’s stroke and extends tension time on the target muscle. Let’s look at Smith machine squats as an example… [Read more…]

Analyzing Mr. Olympia’s Workout

Beyond X-Rep Muscle Building E-book Excerpt Analyzing Mr. Olympia’s Workout From an X-Rep Perspective

Throughout this e-book we’ve mentioned how Ronnie Coleman, Mr. Olympia, trains with an emphasis on semistretched overload. Those observations were the result of watching his latest DVD, “The Cost of Redemption,” which is an ungodly display of muscle mass and raw strength captured by videographer Mitsuru Okabe. In fact, his mass-training style is a prime example of max-force-point overload on almost every exercise. [Read more…]