A Golden Era-Inspired High-Volume Mass-Building Program but with a Twist Since I started working on my recent series on the training methods and workouts of the golden era bodybuilding legends, I’ve had a lot of old-school routines, ideas, and plans running through my mind. Those thoughts led me to write the program here. This is a routine that uses some of the golden era methods but does so in a way that will better allow the bodybuilder to recover while still taking advantage of the various benefits with higher-frequency, high-volume training. If you’ve read at least a couple of the articles in my on-going series—I have two more still to go—then you realize by now, if you didn’t beforehand, that most of the old-school bodybuilders, particularly those from the 1970s, favored training antagonistic bodyparts in the same workout session. These days, many bodybuilders favor training just one muscle group at a wo...
Some Thoughts and Ideas on Designing a Workout Plan Made for You I’ve mentioned in other essays that what makes training so unique and ultimately rewarding—though also downright frustrating for many, though I ain’t one of ‘em and proud of it, despite “pride goeth before the fall” and all that—is that training itself is unique to you . What builds muscle—sometimes a whole heapin’, heckuva lot of muscle—for one person in spades doesn’t do jack-squat for another lifter. If that guy you know who grows huge arms with 2 heavy, super-intense sets and a workout that lasts a grand total of 15 minutes done twice per week attempted a high-volume, 15-20 sets per muscle regimen, he’d make near-zero gains. But if my buddy Mac, who thrives off 25 sets per bodypart workouts, tried the Heavy Duty dude’s system, he’d shrivel up worse than Charles Atlas’s scrawny beach geek who got sand kicked in his face and his gal taken away from him by the muscle-bound j...