This is a first of a series of articles
that will focus on what I call “hybrid training.” Unlike some – but not all of the material –
on this blog, this series will focus on specifically on bodybuilding. And by “bodybuilding,” I simply mean the kind
of training that I believe most guys (and gals) are interested in: building
shapely muscle, adding muscle mass, keeping their bodyfat relatively low. I other words: looking good.
Hybrid Chest Training
Bodybuilding for the 21st
Century and Beyond
“Hybrid - a composite of mixed origin. Complex, composite - a conceptual whole made
up of complicated and related parts.”
There was a time when bodybuilders trained
in one, and only one, fashion. Of
course, in the early days – the “Golden Age” if you will, the age of Steve
Reeves, the age of the original “Muscle Beach”, the age when bodybuilders
engaged in “physical development” – this wasn’t the case. In those days, the men who roamed the sands
of southern California consumed their days not just with pumping ponderous
amount of iron, but with increasing their flexibility and their agility, and
with building muscles that (as they say now) were “functional.” But that early “hybrid-ism” gave way to the ‘70s,
the ‘80s, and the ‘90s – and with each increasing decade, bodybuilders focused
more and more on “specificity”. They
realized that if they focused all of their attention on training in the gym –
training that was performed predominately with cables, pulleys, machines, and
other fixed planes of motion – and if they did little outside of the gym other
than consume enormous quantities of “good” protein and carbs, take boatloads of
anabolic steroids, and then “relax” as much as possible, that they would build heaping
amounts of muscle mass.
Enter the 21st century: Things
began to change.
“Functional” training – though the people
who uttered it only vaguely knew what the hell it was – became the vogue thing.
The strength sports – powerlifting and
strongman – gave way to Crossfit and MMA.
(And the four seemed to have formed a sort of uneasy, sometimes
unknowing, alliance. The kind of
trainees who enjoy engaging in any one of these sports probably have the kind
of psyche that would also enjoy any of the others.)
And in the midst of all of this,
bodybuilders began to realize something: If they engaged in some form of
training other than just bodybuilding – be it Crossfit, Westside-style
powerlifting, or “strongman” style training – their bodybuilding workouts
became all the more effective. Many
bodybuilders of today – whether they call themselves this or not, or whether
they even know it or not – are now “hybrid” bodybuilders.
Hybrid
Training Outlined
The “style” of training I’m going to
recommend in this series may not (and sometimes it may) be the kind of training
that most of these “hybrid” trainees perform, but it is the kind of
training that I believe to be the most effective for building muscle, for
burning bodyfat; in short, for looking good naked!
First, we are going to take a look at the
kind of training that needs to be performed on a steady basis for these
workouts to be effective.
The lifter who wants to build the most
amount of (shapely) muscle in the shortest amount of time needs to do adhere to
these following integral factors:
1. The bodybuilder needs to train as frequently
as possible while being as fresh as possible.
This means that a fine line must be walked between overtraining and
undertraining. This means also training each
muscle group every 72 to 96 hours, although sometimes it could mean training
every 48 hours, and sometimes it could mean waiting more than 96 hours before
training again (especially if the bodybuilder has put him/herself in a
purposeful state of overtraining).
2. The bodybuilder needs to get a good “pump”
in the majority of his/her workouts.
3. The bodybuilder needs to average
around 100 reps per muscle group. These
100 reps should be achieved by performing a moderate to high number of sets
with a moderate number of repetitions.
10 sets of 10 reps is the most obvious choice (the math’s certainly the
easiest). Personally, I would prefer if
the bodybuilder perform 12 sets of 8 reps or 16 sets of 6 reps. In other words, I don’t think you can go
wrong with 12 to 16 sets of 6 to 8 reps per bodypart.
4. This form of training should not
be concerned with training to the point of “momentary muscular failure” or with
various forms of “intensity techniques.”
That sort of training should be used sparingly.
5. The bodybuilder should – instead of
using intensity techniques – focus on making each set of each rep as explosive
as possible. (We’ll get to this in more
detail a little later).
6. The bodybuilder needs to pick
exercises that work more than just one bodypart at a time. The more the body “moves through space”
during an exercise, the more productive that particular exercise is.
7. In addition to these “bang-for-your-buck”
exercises, the ‘builder also needs to make sure that he/she is squatting,
deadlifting (in all of its various ‘guises), and overhead pressing on a regular
basis.
Okay, if that’s what you should be doing
the majority of the training time, the hybrid bodybuilder using my
system also needs to do workouts that focus on the following factors:
- 1. “Strongman” training. This doesn’t have to be complex. It simply means that some training days should focus on stuff such as farmer’s walks, tire flipping, sled dragging, sandbag training, and/or the prowler.
- 2. Explosive training, also known as the “dynamic effort” method. These training days are set aside exclusively for speed. Multiple sets of low reps using only 50-60% of a one-rep maximum should be used.
- 3. Maximal effort training. These workouts focus on working up to a maximum triple, double, or single on one or more lifts.
- 4. Multiple sets of low reps. This should be the second most-often used form of training (after the 12 to 16 sets of 6 to 8 reps workouts). These workouts should consist of multiple sets (15 to 20) of low reps (5 or lower).
The remainder of this piece will focus on
what several weeks of chest workouts might look like when training hybrid-style,
but first I want to go into a little more detail about speed training, or why
you should at least attempt to move a weight as fast as possible throughout
each and every rep. (Fred Hatfield
coined the term “compensatory acceleration training” or C.A.T., for short.)
I could attempt to explain this myself –
something I’ve done in other articles in the past – but for this article, I
want you to read the words of Scott Abel (one of the best trainers in the world
when it comes to putting muscle mass on people and making them look good). He’s a firm believer in moving the weight as
fast as possible. Here, he explains his
reasons:
“Alan
Cosgrove once said that although methods are many, principles are few. What an
insightful statement. What I see, however, is that these "methods” are so
varied that they're violating key fundamental principles.
The
result is that you the trainee aren't getting results from your gym time by
following questionable methods that fly in the face of real world principles.
This
is the frustrating thing for me. I train people in the real world. I'm not
sure what's being taught at certification courses these days, but what is
interpreted as "principles" is faulty at best. In this article I want
to use a real world example for those of you training to gain size, muscle, and
thickness, and have the mistaken belief that this is accomplished with
"max weights." This is another term I have trouble with as it's quite
misleading as we will see.
The
other day I received an E-mail from a client, who sounded a little confused. It
seems that a so-called "personal trainer" walked by while my client
was training, and offered this brilliant advice: "You should lighten the
load substantially, and do 4-4-1 tempo, to get more out of the set!"
Say what? My
client was confused because I had advised to lift explosively, regardless of
rep range. So who was right?
Let's
take a look. If I lift 100 pounds for 5 reps, and you lift 100 pounds for 5
reps; I do 5 reps in about 5 seconds, you use the tempo above and take about 30
seconds to lift it. We both performed the same amount of work. But
here's a question for you: whose set required more power? Whose set
placed a higher metabolic demand on his body? The answer should be obvious. My
set, of course.
Power,
folks, is a rudimentary principle expressed in many ways, but is essential to
training for size, strength, thickness, etc. The simple basic premise is that
it takes more power to move a weight in one second than it
does to move it in two seconds. Over the course of a workout this is seen
as an expression of more work in the same amount of time,
or the same amount of work in less time. These are all
expressions of the principle of power. You'll notice, of course, that the
"method" of tempo suggested above by the moron "personal
trainer" violates this principle.
Next
question. In the above example which one of us achieved the most overload? The
answer is that it's a trick question. If that 100 pounds is a weight we are
used to performing, then neither of us achieved overload for that set.
Therefore, the advice of lightening a load you can already do explosively and
take 4 times as long to do it, is faulty logic that does not follow basic
principles. It means negating max load, and therefore negating the overload
principle in general. This is just one example of "methods" being not
only many, but also mistaken.
Now
if you follow this so far, then you may be thinking that maximum load is
therefore the way to abide by the Overload Principle. Well yes, but only if you
understand max load. I want you to read the next sentence a few times and let
it sink in before we continue.
Max
load is not the same thing as max weight.
Why
don't most people get this? I blame the industry for detailing external cues as
the be all and end all of performance. How much you "can" lift is not
the deciding factor. The deciding factor is how much stress a muscle endures as
overload.[1]”
Chest
Training Hybrid-Style
Here are several weeks of workouts the
focus on my version of hybrid training.
Keep in mind – as with all of my programs – these are not to set in
stone. These are examples of what your
training should look like over the course of several weeks.
Week
One:
Monday
(Typical):
1. Incline Dumbbell Bench Presses: 5 sets
of 6 reps
2. Flat Barbell Bench Presses (wide
grip): 4 sets of 6 reps
3. Wide Grip Dips: 4 sets of 8 reps
4. Incline Dumbbell Flyes: 3 sets of 8
reps
Thursday
(Typical):
1. Flat Bench Flyes: 4 sets of 8 reps
2. Cable Crossovers: 4 sets of 8 reps
3. Incline Dumbbell Bench Presses: 8 sets
of 6 reps
Week
Two:
Monday
(Dynamic):
1. Flat Dumbbell Bench Presses: 12 sets
of 3 reps (use approximately 60% of your one-rep maximum)
Wednesday
(Typical):
1. One-Arm Incline Dumbbell Bench
Presses: 4 sets of 8 reps (each arm)
2. Bench Presses to the Neck: 4 sets of 8
reps
3. Gironda Dips: 3 sets of 10 reps
Sunday
(Multiple Sets of Low Reps):
1. Bottom-Position Bench Presses: 15 sets
of 3 reps (using 85-90% of your one-rep maximum)
2. Incline Barbell Bench Presses: 10 sets
of 3 reps (using 85-90% of your one-rep maximum
Week
Three
Wednesday
(Maximal Effort):
1. Flat Barbell Bench Presses (medium
grip): Work up over progressively heavier doubles to a maximum double.
Saturday
(Typical):
1. Feet-Elevated Push Ups: 10 sets of 10
reps
At this point, you could actually repeat
this whole series of workouts beginning with the next time you trained chest. Or you could, of course, elect to do a few
weeks of something completely different.
Also, one thing that we didn’t get around
to in this article was “strongman” training.
In the next installment, we’ll discuss hybrid-style leg training, which
can make for some even more innovative – and even slightly off-the-wall –
workout sessions.
On my way to the gym, sir!!
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