ronnie coleman Archives

Pack On More Muscle: Are You Making This Mistake?

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…

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Muscle Mass and Power With Negative Overload

Q: My training partner and I are arguing. He wants to start using heavy negative-only training, but I told him that your e-book [the X-centric Mass Workout] warns against it. He reads your newsletter, so please convince him that it’s not a good idea.

A: In the X-centric e-book we cited a study that showed the extreme damage caused by negative-only training (someone lifts the weight for you, and you lower slowly). Muscle recovery for some of the subjects took weeks; however, most of those subjects were untrained, so they didn’t have the cumulative capacity to handle traumatic loads. If you’ve been training for a year or more, that’s probably not your case… [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…

Here’s how a Stage Set works for Smith-machine incline presses. You position yourself on the incline bench, grip slightly wider than your shoulders. Unhook the safety catches and then lower the bar to about an inch above your upper chest. Without pausing, you blast it back up, but only to just slightly higher than the midpoint of the stroke.

When you reach that point, lower back to the semi-stretch position, and so on, doing low-range partials till you can’t stand the burn. Notice that you’re essentially doing piston-like exaggerated X Reps right off the bat through the max-force point, which is how pro bodybuilders and former Mr. Olympia winners like Jay Cutler and Ronnie Coleman would train most of their exercises, but we take it a step further.

When you can’t do another exaggerated X Rep—you should get about 10 of those lowdown partials—get the bar to lockout, with help from your partner. Now you do the top stage of the stroke. First, squeeze your pecs hard, contracting them in the lockout position, then lower through about the top one-third of the movement. Blast back to the top and squeeze your pecs again. Flex at lockout on every one of those top-end reps.

We like to do a Stage Set as the last set for an exercise. They work exceptionally well for most types of squats and any type of press—flat, incline, decline, and even leg presses. You get extended tension time and a division of work that provides unique mass-building stimulation. Try it, and prepare to grow!

Note: For more on Stage Sets as well as many other X-hybrid mass techniques, see the Beyond X-Rep Muscle Building e-book. It also contains our complete post-X-Rep-year program that incorporates many of those fast-mass techniques, taking our physiques to a new level of impressiveness. For photos and more info, see our Beyond X-Rep page.

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

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

NEWEST RELEASE: The Anabolic After-40 Muscle-Size Manual contains new mass-building XRX workouts featuring Pure Positions of Flexion mass training with moderate-weight 3X density sequences plus rest/pause X-Reps. In addition, you’ll get 3 FREE bonuses—“20 Pounds in 10 Weeks Blueprint,” “Anabolic After-40 Bodyweight Edition,” and “X-traordinary Arms.” Add them all to your mass-building library for a limited-time price ($100 value) of ONLY $15 HERE.

Big and Ripped Muscle: Pack-It-On!

“You gotta feel the muscle working if you want it to grow.” So say many of the biggest, freakiest bodybuilders. Trainees in search of big and ripped muscle interpret that to mean that they need to slow down their reps to a snail’s pace. Not true. Once again, it’s a case of watch, don’t ask, or you could go down the wrong road. The champs rarely do slow reps; usually they’re more like the pistons in a car engine. So what the heck do they mean by “feel the muscle?” [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…]