So now that I’ve been back in the gym and completely natural for nearly four months, at the ripe old age of 43, what can i say?
I’m making progress like crazy! It is awesome! I’m not benching what I benched when I was juicing yet but it is getting closer and closer all the time. (quite close now actually) I have no doubt my strength will continue to increase and my body fat will continue to decrease as I keep following my workouts. By the spring of 2010 I should be stronger than ever. I’m already healthier.
Here are the things that work for me. If you want to build muscles, this is what I believe:
1. To build big muscles you have to stress them in a big way. This means you must force them to work against heavy resistance. That means a weight you can’t lift more than 6 times (give or take a few) without failing.
Benefit from lifting heavy weights
2. To build big muscles you have to do exercises that stress groups of muscles together – like deadlifts, squats, benches, dips, pullups (or pulldowns with enough weight). Avoid cable or isolation exercises unless you are adding them in for some spice… Make sure the meat of your workouts are the bigger movements with barbells and dumbbells.
3. Heavy lifting stresses your muscles and nerves heavily, so you need to provide your body with plenty of rest and nutrition. 99% of what the magazines say is total bullshit. You do not need a bunch of supplements. Protein powder, a multi-vitamin, plenty of sleep, and a healthy diet is more than enough to help your body recover. You tend to hear these things over and over again – because they are time tested and honest.
Sleep and Eat Healthy
4. To combat boredom and also keep your muscles adapting (this is KEY, the idea of making your muscles ADAPT) you should keep changing your routine around.
5. Eat enough calories (I like protein shakes for convenience) to support what you are doing in the gym
6. Don’t worry too much about fat loss in the beginning – just don’t pig out if you are overweight. Try and direct your diet toward food that helps you instead of empty calories. Lean meat, lowfat/skim milk, complex carbs (whole grains if you can eat them, grapefruit, cantaloupe, green vegetables) and healthy fats/proteins (peanut butter, salmon, tuna, olive oil). Remember that your muscles are the ENGINE that burns the GAS (fat) in your body. So the more muscle tissue you have, the more fuel your body will use. All day, every day. Even when you aren’t lifting.
7. Cardio (bike/elliptical/treadmill/stairmaster) is good for your heart – but doing too much is counterproductive to gaining muscle mass. Keep cardio sessions short and intense (I like 15-20 minutes a few times/wk). Weight training can actually be a better fat burner – especially if you keep your rest periods down to a minimum or combine sets (bench and row as one super set for example).
Short Sharp Cardio Sessions
8. Now a contradiction: don’t use too much weight! How much weight should you use? It should vary – I can go in and do a whole pile of plates on the leg press. The sets are slow and grueling. That’s one kind of workout, but I always use good form and keep the weight under control both lifting it and putting it down. The other kind of workout I like to take half that weight, put it onto the hack squat machine, and do ten reps of hack squats followed by ten reps on the leg press. I love this combination because it adds intensity. I’m not lifting as much weight, but I’m putting my body under a huge oxygen demand to pull off these two sets in a row with no rest. It forces my body to adapt.
9. When you are first doing a new movement, use an empty bar or very low weight. You need to learn the mechanics of the movement and how it feels. A lat pulldown has a certain feel to it. If you don’t do it right, it becomes a forearm and bicep exercise, not a lat exercise! So take the weight of and learn how to focus on the muscle you want to develop. You have to learn how it is supposed to feel and how to target the muscle you want to train. This usually means using *less* weight than you think you should.
Workout Tips and Results
10. Vary the order of exercises. Right now I can only get in the gym three times a week. I split my body into upper and lower. So I get to hit everything twice a week no matter what. My favorite lower body exercises are deadlifts, squats, leg presses, and hack squats on the machine. Some days I start with heavy deadlifts – doing 3 to 8 reps and pyramiding up and own. Some days I start with stiff-leg deadlifts standing on a platform with much less weight and do 10 reps minimum. Some days I superset both kinds of deadlift together. For a really brutal workout I might superset deadlifts and squats. I try and keep changing it around so I have to adapt to something new. For upper body, I like benching and rowing, upright rows, presses, lat pulldowns, arm curls and extensions… again I try to vary and combine them to keep it interesting for my brain and my muscles.
I hope this helps you get the muscles you’re after!
By: Charley Socci
