• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

CAN I JUST WORK OUT EVERY 12 OR 24 DAYS AS GURU X SUGGESTS? I’M STILL GETTING STRONGER.

There are some trainers who advocate training as infrequently as possible to produce strength gains. This can mean one workout per month in some cases.

This isn’t a bad thing, but let us make an important distinction:

Doing the least possible to experience strength gains

vs.

Doing the least necessary to maximize size gain

The latter is the objective of Occam’s Protocol.

Tissue growth is our highest priority, even though there will be significant strength gains. Doubling and tripling of your lifts in one to two months, as Neil and other trainees have experienced, is not uncommon.

To support a high rate of fat-free growth, we need to overfeed and direct those excess calories to muscle. This is accomplished by stimulating protein synthesis and increasing the insulin sensitivity of muscle tissue itself through activation (translocation) of the GLUT-4 glucose transporters. Recall from “Damage Control” that the latter is best done through exercise, as we don’t want to overdose on insulin.

If you work out just once a month, this might represent one whole-body GLUT-4 window per month for effective overfeeding. This is unacceptable for us, and we’ll aim for one workout per week at a minimum.

WHAT TO DO IF YOUR GAINS SLOW WITH ONE SESSION PER WEEK?

Rather than doing one full-body workout every 10–14 days, for example, test a split routine to facilitate strength gains while increasing your GLUT-4 windows to at least two per week.

This is how you get very big, very fast without getting very fat.

I’ve successfully used the following three-workout split, most notably in 1997:

Session 1: Pushing exercises

Session 2: Pulling exercises

Session 3: Leg exercises

If you are unconditioned or deconditioned (atrophied), take one day between workouts (e.g., pushing, one day off, pulling, one day off, legs, one day off, ad nauseam) for the first two weeks, two days between workouts for the next three weeks, then move to three days between workouts.

The exercises I used, all performed at 5/5, were:

Push:

• Incline bench press

• Dips (add weight when possible)

• Shoulder-width grip shoulder press (never behind the neck)

Pull

• Pullover

• Bent row

• Close-grip supinated (palms facing you) pull-downs

• Slow shrugs with dumbbells (pause for two seconds at the top)

Legs

• Leg press with feet shoulder width (do higher reps on this; at least 120 seconds before failure)

• Adduction machine (bringing the legs together as if using the Thighmaster)

• Hamstring curl

• Leg extension

• Seated calf raises

In retrospect, I believe this volume of exercises to be excessive for most trainees. Using the first two exercises listed for each workout will produce at least 80% of the desired gains with less risk of plateauing.

“It’s just water weight.”

This dismissive comment is common in the lifting and diet worlds.

Now, carrying so much subcutaneous water that your head looks like a Cabbage Patch Kid is bad. However, purposefully putting more fluid and substrate in specific parts of muscle tissue can be incredibly useful. There are two different types of muscular growth that you can use to your advantage with a bit of inside knowledge.

The names of both sound complicated—myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic—but the difference is really very simple.

Let’s start with a basic primer on muscle fibers.

Every muscle fiber has two main parts: myofibrils, which are cylinder- shaped filaments that contract to create movement, and the sarcoplasm, which is the fluid surrounding the myofibrils that contains glycogen stores and mitochondria to provide energy (ATP).

Myofibrillar hypertrophy20 can be thought of as growth for maximal strength. The myofibrils in the muscle fiber increase in number, adding primarily strength and some size to the muscle. This kind of muscle growth is achieved by high tension—doing one to five reps at 80–90% of your one-repetition maximum, for example. The strength