In my first ten years of hitting the gym consistently with the focus of building muscle, I built approximately 10kg of muscle. Now almost 20 years later, when I look back, I’m almost a little bit embarrassed. At the time I was ecstatic with my results, within the first 3-6 months, I had increased my body weight by half a stone (3kg). This was extremely motivating for me, it was working and I couldn’t quite believe it. After one solid year of using free weights my body weight was up by about 12-13lbs and my numbers on my lifts were moving up. However, if I could start over, I would do things drastically different and in this blog post I will cover five things that I would do differently that would have made my results even better.
1 – Varied rep ranges
Literally for the first ten years I stayed in the 3-4 sets of 8-10 reps on virtually all exercises. In 1997 when my muscle building venture began, access to good training information simply didn’t exist. I was relying on the information from the guys at the gym and body building magazines. These magazines would typically detail routines from professional body builders, which typically had far too much volume for mere mortals who were drug free to recover from. Back then the thinking was that to build muscle you had to train between 8-12 reps, anything higher was for endurance and anything lower was for strength. In recent years that notion has been fully tested and we now know that you can build muscle with much more varied rep ranges. If you keep doing the same rep range, with similar loads, your body eventually adapts to it and no further adaption occurs. So the training stimulus must change to drive further adaptions.
2- Specialised focus
In those first ten years I never once put the focus on any particular area of my body, I trained everything equally. I think this is a mistake and if you really want to maximise your potential to build muscle and strength, you need to have periods of training whereby you bring up weak areas. A weak area for me was my upper back. This is an area where you absolutely do not want to be weak! A strong upper back gives you a stable base to bench press from and its also going to help you deadlift more weight. The typical gym rat puts their focus onto the mirror muscles (chest, biceps, shoulders) and neglects the back. Often times they’re doing twice the volume for the front the back. This is a huge mistake and one that I also made during those first ten years. The way to set your training up for a specialised focus is to first decide what area you need to work on, you then put other lifts/areas on maintenance mode (3-4 sets per week is enough to maintain), and increase volume on the lift or area you need to bring up. Anyone interested in developing an impressive physique should spend time focusing on there leg drive (squats), upper back strength, core strength, stabiliser strength, and glute strength. Take a good honest look at your training and ask “what am I avoiding”? because its often the thing you don’t like training that’s the problem. Then some experimentation is in order to find 1-2 exercises that you enjoy so that you can train them hard and make that weakness a strength.
3 – Train different qualities
What does this mean? Well in those first ten years, I only trained for hypertrophy (muscle size). You can train your muscles to become bigger and/or produce more force or of course, to be more enduring. All have benefits that interweave with one another.
What I am about to explain is the biggest single reason why I believe I left gains on the table during those first ten years.
I should have been using periodisation. This means you split the year up to train specific qualities.
Remember previously where I said that the training stimulus must change, well this also ties in with that. Here’s the theory:
12 week strength block > 12 week hypertrophy block > 6 week strength block > 6 week hyper trophy block and so on.
The primary driver for hypertrophy is mechanical tension which refers to the load and effort placed on the muscle. If you are entering every hypertrophy phase with higher loads than used previously, you are repeatedly increasing the mechanical tension stimulus throughout the year, rather than allowing your training stimulus to remain largely unchanged. Can you honestly say this has been happening with how your training is currently set up? It absolutely wasn’t for me. Although my back squat went from 60kg to 110kg over those ten years, it moved up incredibly slowly and so the training stimulus was mostly staying the same. it was just always hard, and that’s a mistake. You should spend some of your training volume moving easier loads. This allows for adaption to occur.
Furthermore, Soviet research into training-load progression found that abrupt changes in training load could produce better strength adaptations than simply making small, continuous increases.
Specifically, that above paragraph refers to intermediate and advanced lifters.
The problem – Not everyone understands how to get themselves out of the beginner stages. Their training plans are too short, they don’t have the right environment to truly set PR’s, they aren’t getting feedback from anyone on their form so they fall short of really meeting their true potential. Again, all these points were absolutely true for me.
If I could go back in time, this is the one major change I would have made and I’m 100% certain my results would have been way superior. With the correct planning, technique and recovery strategies, I think 20-30kg increases on compounds for the first 3 years is achievable for a drug free lifter.
4 – Plan for the year
“People who have a 30 year goal, will achieve results far quicker than they imagine”
That’s a quote from the entrepreneur Sir Richard Hill and I’m using it in this context to get you to think beyond the initial steps.
In those first 10 years the only thing I changed was my body part split. I essentially switched between using a one day per week split or a two day per week split in slightly different variations.
Don’t get me wrong. I was very happy with the results I had got, but you know what its like. You always want more!
So the change here I would have made would be too plan my training phases for the entire year. Probably the number one reason why people don’t get results is having no plan, and something I have learned in health and fitness is that if you want a different kind of result, do the opposite to what “most” people do.
As you’ve seen above I would consistently bounce between strength and hypertrophy blocks until out of the beginner stages of strength. So that would be a 1.5 body weight back squat 1RM, and 2 x BW deadlift 1RM, and a 1.25 BW bench press 1RM.
That would mostly likely take the first 1-2 years. After which time I would cycle in some cardiovascular phases. I would always include cardio training, but spending more time to develop your aerobic engine will pay dividends later as your strength work becomes more intense.
Intermediate to advanced strength work needs careful planning, fatigue can be built up very quickly. Having an optimised aerobic system helps you to recover in-between sets but also session to session.
In year 3 during an 8 week cardio-vascular phase, my week might have looked something like this:
Monday – Cardio
Tuesday – Hypertrophy
Wednesday – Cardio
Thursday – Strength
Friday – Cardio
Saturday – Hypertrophy/Strength
The good news is that once you’ve built a quality, you don’t need to keep training it with the same volume to maintain it. Pavel Tsatsouline gives the example of just 3 sets of 3 at 80% of your maximum once a week being enough to maintain strength for months. Research also suggests that strength can be maintained with remarkably little training volume, provided intensity is maintained.
Additionally training should be planned around your holidays and activities. If you’re skiing in the winter, it might make sense to end a quad focused phase 2 weeks prior. If you’re biking in the summer, end your quad focus in June etc.
5 – Maintain the chassis
In order to express your max year after year, you’re going to need to keep your stabilising muscles strong along with your prime movers. You also need to maintain or build mobility. Although I didn’t run into any issues in those first ten years, I did eventually and this means interruptions to your progress.
I like to think of the compound lifts as the engine, meaning they are what will really drive you forward. The stabilisers are the chassis, and without the chassis you can’t get to your destination as smoothly and efficiently as you would have otherwise.
Specifically you need rotator cuff strength, thoracic mobility, core strength, pelvic control, scapular control etc
Kettlebell exercises like Turkish Get ups, arm bars, windmills, over head carries, suitcase carries are all excellent tools for this job.
Have standards and maintain them, for instance the ability to front plank for one minute and side plank for 30 seconds and it not be a grind lets you know that you have pretty decent core stability. Being able to walk with a 24kg kettlebell over head for 20 metres tells you that you have pretty good scapular control, rotator cuff strength, and general structural integrity.
I’m not saying being able to do these things will 100% prevent injuries, but having the capacity to do these things will allow you to keep doing the big lifts that build the engine.