genetics Archives - X-REP.COM

Blown Away by Before and After Pics

Q: I’m always totally blown away when I see Jonathan’s 10-week Size Surge before and after pics. I want to yell “bullshit,” but I’ve been reading your stuff for so long, I trust you guys. So he really didn’t use any steroids?

A: Okay, one more time: No, absolutely no steroids, GH, or drugs of any kind. Jonathan is natural for life. But keep in mind that he was REGAINING a lot of mass he’d already had—and it’s much easier to put it on the second time around. That’s one reason he added muscle so quickly—20 pounds in 10 weeks…

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Pros, Drugs, and Juicing Your Own Muscle Gains

Q: You’ve said a lot of pro bodybuilders have used versions of the 4X mass method and made great gains. But weren’t they on drugs? Don’t steroids make a huge difference? Will this type of training really work for me if I don’t use drugs?

A: Several years ago, Steve interviewed a colleague who trained with many of the legendary pros, including the Mentzer brothers, Danny Padilla, and Rory Leidelmeyer to name a few…

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Small Bones, Big Arms

Q: I’ve been training like a madman for six months, but my arms haven’t budged. I’m getting stronger, and I do see more veins on my biceps, but my arms are still skinny. A guy at the gym told me it’s because I have small bones. My wrists are under 7 inches around, and he said I can’t expect much size with small wrists. Is that true?

A: Um, in a word, NO. It’s not true. The size of your wrist has nothing to do with where your biceps and triceps attach, how much muscle-fiber density your muscles have, or your ability to pack on muscle mass.

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Eye-Popping Biceps Peak—and More Muscle on Your Physique

Q: I have X-traordinary Arms and really appreciate the “in-for-out, out-for-in” rule. My question is, because concentration curls are an “in” exercise and work the outer head, should I do those first if I want to concentrate on more biceps peak?

A: Yes, switching the order of the exercises in Positions-of-Flexion protocol can positively affect a target-muscle’s development. Biceps is a perfect example.

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Change the Shape of Your Biceps

Q: I keep reading that the shape of your biceps is genetic and you can’t change it, but in the X-traordinary Arms e-book that came in my Anabolic After 40 package (which I love, by the way!) you say you can change the shape of your biceps. I’ve even seen respected scientists say that changing the shape of a muscle can’t be done. How do you respond?

A: What those scientists are referring to is the length of a muscle. For example, if you have a short biceps, with a gap between the lower part of the muscle and the elbow joint when it’s flexed, you can’t fill in that gap. You’ve simply been born with a high biceps insertion point (like a high calf muscle). To fill in the gap would require muscle reattachment surgery, which we obviously don’t recommend.

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Bodyweight Lies and Muscle Size

Q: I get depressed when I read the bodybuilding magazines I’ve been handed down from my uncle. I’m 19 and weigh 185 with abs, but I see that the pro bodybuilders weigh anywhere from 250 to 280 pounds, and that’s at 3 percent bodyfat. I don’t want to take steroids, but it seems like that’s the only way to get impressive development, right?

A: If you’re looking for us to give you the okay to take drugs, you’re barking up the wrong tree. We love bodybuilding (the lifestyle, not necessarily the competitions); however, resorting to steroids to get an “impressive,” extremely muscular physique is not mandatory. Look at this shot of Jonathan…

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New Size With Full-Body One-Hit Mass Workouts

Q: I’ve been reading about the 4X training and am wondering if you have any advice on how to use it with a full-body three-days-per-week routine. I just started using the 4X method for each bodypart. I do one exercise per muscle. Monday I do chest, shoulders, back, bi’s, tri’s, abs, legs. Wednesday I do the same body parts but in a different order and using different exercises. The same goes for Friday. I take the weekend off. I’m drug-free, so I think I’ve been overtraining till now. I’m hoping that 4X will help spark some new gains.

A: That sounds like a great plan for building more mass. First, skeptical readers need to realize that three-days-per-week programs can do incredible things. We discuss the Colorado Experiment in Size Surge 2.0 and 3D Muscle Building, a four-week research project in which Casey Viator gained 60 pounds of muscle… [Read more…]

Big Arms, Veins, and Muscle Gains

Q: I notice you guys never really mention doing dips for triceps. I know Mike Mentzer said that the parallel bar dip is one of the best triceps exercises—and he had some big arms with some of the biggest, most vascular tri’s I’ve ever seen from the “moderate-steroid era.” Do you consider dips a good triceps move?

A: Dips can work well as a compound, or midrange, exercise for triceps—in place of close-grip bench presses, for example… [Read more…]

The Forgotten Muscle-Size Trick

Q: You guys don’t seem to like training each muscle only once a week like a lot of pro bodybuilders. How come?

A: More muscle-training frequency is a BIG size stimulator, especially for drug-free trainees—if you do it correctly. Many pros can get away with training each bodypart with excessive volume only once a week because of genetic superiority and, of course, excessive drug use. In fact, if you look back at the best bodybuilders of yesteryear, when steroid use was minimal, training each bodypart THREE times a week was the norm prior to a contest. It’s a bit of a forgotten muscle-size trick… [Read more…]

Are You Working Out Too Hard?

Q: I train my butt off in the gym. I hit it harder than every other guy in there, but I haven’t gained much muscle in a long time. Is it my genetics? My nutrition is perfect, so I should be growing like crazy, but I’m not. It’s very frustrating… Help?!

A: Yes, your genetics could have something to do with it; HOWEVER, you may have just been working out too hard for too long. It’s time to step back with a new plan…

Even hardgainers start growing at warp speed when they snap to the fact that too much ALL-OUT training stops all muscle gaining flat in its tracks. You need to take new less-stress action for a major mass-building reaction (we’ll outline that exciting change to gain in a moment)…

But isn’t intensity the key to muscle-size results? To a point, yes—but too much triggers nervous system burnout and floods your bloodstream with cortisol. If you don’t know what cortisol is, realize that it’s the devil incarnate when it comes to building muscle (and even burning fat)…

Cortisol is a stress hormone that results from the emergency fight-or-flight response. When you’re in an extreme situation, cortisol spews from your adrenal gland and your body begins using muscle tissue for energy. In other words, your body starts throwing your hard-earned muscle tissue into the energy furnace. NOT GOOD!…

The ironic thing is that the all-out intense workouts you do to build muscle send your cortisol through the roof, especially if you overdo it. Too much and you can actually lose rather than gain muscle. That’s why most high-intensity routines call for only a few all-out sets per exercise…

But even doing only a few all-out sets per exercise results in a CUMULATIVE stress effect that can build to an overtraining cortisol crescendo—muscle gains stop and it’s time to back off. You need an intensity downshift…

In many of our e-books, we’ve mentioned phase training and the need to back down on your intensity after about four weeks of all-out training. We often suggest stopping every set short of failure—but a better MASS-ACCELERATOR is something many pros of yesteryear used to build muscle right up to a contest on low calories…

It’s 4X mass training. With this method, you trade in multiple all-out sets on an exercise for a fast medium-intensity supersaturation sequence. Take pulldowns for example…

Here’s the 4X drill: Take a weight that you could get 15 reps with, but only do 10; rest about 30 seconds and do 10 more; rest 30 seconds and do 10 more—and so on until you do four sets of 10 reps. If you get 10 reps on your last set, add weight at your next workout. It’s quick, simplified muscle supersaturation training for more super-size increases! And you use that 4X mass method for every exercise.

When we first started using a total-4X Mass Workout, we got dramatic muscle-size increases like we’d never experienced during our previous ripping phases. We believe that’s because dieting itself is a cortisol producer. We’d been training TOO HARD during our dieting phases, and that caused us to lose rather than gain muscle mass thanks to excess cortisol…

We believe that’s why so many bodybuilders of yesteryear, like Danny Padilla, used 4X-style workouts for a few months before their competitions—it minimized cortisol output and allowed them to continue to pack on muscle as they dieted away body fat. Check out Padilla’s results and judge for yourself (Note: He didn’t use the exact 4X method above but a tweaked version one of his former training partners discusses in our 4X e-book)…

We won’t say 4X workouts are easy, but your joints, tendons, and ligaments will get much less stress due to the medium poundages you use (great for older trainees). Less joint damage also results in less evil cortisol release…

Plus, each exercise takes you less than five minutes to complete, so you’ll be working hard, but you won’t be working out too hard—and the pump is unreal! Remember, only the last, or fourth, set is all out, and even then the muscle is pre-exhausted from the previous sets. But that’s exactly what allows you to reach the ultimate GROWTH THRESHOLD quickly and efficiently with minimal stress. Exciting stuff!…

Training hard is crucial for making gains, but working out too hard can backfire in a hurry… If you’ve been busting your ass in the gym with slow to no muscle growth, give the 4X Mass Workout a spin—and let your new muscle-mass surge begin!

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

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

Boost Testosterone…
With Cardio?!

If you want to build muscle (of course you do!) and ramp up your testosterone levels while burning a ton of fat at the same time, you need to try this workout if you haven’t already…

–> Use this cutting-edge cardio trick to boost testosterone and muscle growth
Note: This is NOT traditional HIIT or boring steady-state cardio

Boost Testosterone… With Cardio?!

Boost Testosterone…
With Cardio?!