Dedicated to Your Physical Transformation
Q: Your 4X training is fantastic. It has me growing again, and it’s perfect with 3-way POF. My question is about muscle feel. How important is it for size increases? I ask because I have trouble feeling some major body parts, like shoulders and chest.
A: We think it’s EXTREMELY important to feel the target muscle working; if you don’t, you may be using other muscle groups to move the weight or simply not innervating enough muscle fibers for a big anabolic response. [Read more…]
Q: You’ve talked about doing different things on the last set of a 4X sequence, like rest/pause. Are there ways to change the other sets in the sequence for variety? I’m a big fan of “change to gain,” so I like as much variation as I can get. By the way, 4X training is incredible—I’ve gained almost 10 pounds in six weeks using it with POF. Thank you!
A: Yes, change to gain—if your workouts are the same, your results will be lame. (Maybe we should’ve been rappers—Nah.)
We’ve experimented in the past with a unique approach to 4X—but it’s not for the meek. Remember, for 4X you use a weight with which you can get about 15 reps, but you only do 10; rest 40 seconds between sets then do it again. Here’s the hybrid drill:
Set 1: Raise the weight in one second and lower in six, getting around eight reps. That’s what we call an X-centric, or negative-accentuated, set. (Note: That’s almost a minute of time under tension.)
Sets 2 and 3: Use a normal cadence—one-second positives and three-second negatives, going for 10 reps. (40 seconds TUT)
Set 4: Use a speed cadence—about one second for the positive and one second for the negative.Get as many as you can—probably around eight to 10, depending on the exercise. We call this a speed set.
The late Olympic coach and muscle-building expert Charles Poliquin said that the most underused mass stimulus is rep cadence—and the above gives your muscle three different ones to deal with as well as unique tension times—and you use the same weight on all sets…
The X-centric reps on the first set act as an excellent warmup, pushing a lot of blood into the target muscle with a tension time of almost a minute and providing a good stimulus to the nervous system with slow negatives.
They also provide muscle-building benefits right off the bat—you get myofibrillar stimulation with the slow negatives and sarcoplasmic expansion with the long tension time. That’s the double-dose of muscle growth we’re always harping on.
Next you do sets 2 and 3 with a standard cadence—one up and three down. Tension time is around 40 seconds.
Then, on the last set, you do more explosive-style reps, but you still control the weight. The 2-second-reps tempo is speed style and has been shown in studies to activate dormant 2B power fibers, so be prepared for some major fiber churn and burn. Good luck getting 10 reps on this set.
We recommend trying it on just the big midrange movement of a Positions-of-Flexion workout because it can be so traumatic. If you try it on all 3 POF exercises for a muscle, do a 3X sequence for the stretch- and contracted-position moves—only one standard set instead of two. It’s another mass tactic to get you huge.
If you don’t have the 4X Mass Workout yet, you can pick it up for just $9 HERE.
Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
—Steve Holman and Jonathan Lawson
www.X-Rep.com
Here’s a new probiotic product to help your good gut bacteria dominate for optimum anabolic uptake so you get massive muscle gains. See for yourself with a FREE trial. This is great get-huge news…
To celebrate selling nearly 2 million bottles of their premium probiotic formula Pro-X10®, the founders of BioTrust Nutrition want to reward anyone who visits the link below today with a FREE 30-count bottle of this revolutionary gut-health yielding, muscle-building probiotic supplement… with ZERO strings attached!
It’s truly FREE (no autoship, no future charges – nothing; you pay only a small shipping fee). The premium and patented ingredients in Pro-X10 have been shown through research to:
Talk about research-backed results, not to mention off-the-chart muscle gains with renewed nutrient assimilation! Stop wasting workouts due to a “bad” gut. You’ve got nothing to lose, and plenty of new muscle to gain. Go to…
> FREE offer: Restore GOOD gut bacteria to increase your muscle gains (limited inventory)
Q: What do you think about stretching between sets? I’ve heard a lot of big bodybuilders do it, but I’ve seen studies that show stretching can make you weak.
A: The old study you’re referring to showed that stretching a muscle for 20 to 30 minutes before training it compromised strength. That’s a lot of stretching—and one reason we don’t do much prior to a workout-—just some range-of-motion loosening… [Read more…]
No, it’s not turkey and roast beef on whole wheat. It’s just a funny name for a method of training that can super-charge your mass gaining. It’s something we came up with years ago but haven’t mentioned in a long time… [Read more…]
Q: Your 4X training is fantastic. It has me growing again, and it’s perfect with 3-way POF. My question is about muscle feel. How important is it to feel your muscles working for size increases? I ask because I have trouble feeling some body parts, like shoulders and chest.
A: We believe it’s EXTREMELY important to feel your muscles working; if you don’t, you may be using other muscle groups to move the weight or simply not innervating enough muscle fibers for a big anabolic response. [Read more…]
Q: All the info I’ve read on full-range Positions of Flexion makes total sense. It’s a killer concept, and I’m so psyched to use it. My problem is time. Even though your POF [bodypart] routines are only about six sets, I only have time for half that [maybe 3 sets for each bodypart]. I don’t want to use only the Ultimate Exercise because I see the superiority of training the three positions for total development. Or should I try just the Ultimate Exercise for each muscle and use POF on only certain bodyparts?
A: Using the Ultimate Exercise for each bodypart in a program is one way to go. Your idea of using full POF on one or two bodyparts is a good one. Simply add one set of a stretch- and one set of a contracted-position exercise for those two muscle groups. For example, for chest, the Ultimate Exercise is decline presses… [Read more…]
Q: I’ve read that you can tense your muscles enough so that you can essentially pose to grow. But there’s no resistance involved at all, so I really don’t see how that’s possible. What do you guys think?
A: We used to be skeptical too, but we always notice that as we begin getting in shape and start flexing more as we check our progress (whether it’s in front of a camera or our bathroom mirrors), our muscularity increases quickly.
We thought it was just a coincidence, and that our training and diet were primarily responsible for our accelerated gains—and we were probably right for the most part. But a study we’ve discussed before suggests that flexing a muscle for extended periods does indeed help make your muscles larger and more detailed… [Read more…]
Q: I just want the best workout program for building muscle. Please simplify all the rhetoric and just tell me which one is the absolute best.
A: That’s easy. There is no best routine. It’s the nature of how the human body adapts. We always say it takes
That’s the reason our own programs are constantly evolving—a new exercise, a new X-hybrid tactic, a drop set, etc. And after 10 weeks or so, we often move to a new program from one of our e-books (Jonathan recently went all the way back to our first X-Rep transformation program, with a few new alterations).
[Read more…]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.
[Read more…]Q: Okay, your before and after photos at X-Rep.com are unreal. I can’t believe you made those changes in only one month, and my friends say you used drugs. What’s the truth? How did you do it, what kind of training did you do, and were drugs involved? Please be honest.
A: Trust us, no drugs were involved. Truth: Jonathan is a drug-free for life bodybuilder and Steve experimented with 5 milligrams of Dianabol once a day back in his early 20s—but after three weeks of dreams that his liver would explode, he stopped. BTW, he saw no visual improvement during those 3 weeks on that dosage.
[Read more…]
