Some Odds and Ends

Unique Training Concepts and Ideas for Gaining Size and Strength or Getting in Shape

     I have a lot of stuff that I’m trying to write.  So much that it can get overwhelming—a book I’m trying to finish but seem to constantly get stuck in neutral in the process, about 20 different notes for articles and essays, along with a handful of others that I’ve already begun and need to simply finish—that I don’t really know where to start.  Or finish.  With that in mind, I thought it might be good to just write an “odds and ends” essay, the very thing that you’re now reading.  These are a few of the ideas that I wrote down for some articles, but I’m not really sure if there’s enough there for each one to comprise an article of its own.  I thought, well, what-the-hell, I’ll just throw a few of them together in one essay.

     With that short preamble out of the way, let’s get going and see where this thing will go.

Rest-Pause Singles for Hypertrophy

     I’m really not a fan of Mike Mentzer and his later (as in the ‘90s) “Heavy Duty” version of so-called “high-intensity training.”  His early stuff was pretty good, however, back in the ‘70s, before he had a mental breakdown, became an overweight alcoholic who constantly smoked cigarettes, and started publishing the bulk of his material and training others while never actually picking up a weight himself.  His training philosophy was by then, in reality, a lot less about actual training than it was about his whole-hog buy-in to the God-awful “philosophy” of Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism.”  If there’s a top-5 list of worst philosophies in the history of mankind, hers has to be right there at the top.

     Sorry, I have to be careful that I don’t get off on a rather mindless rant but, as mentioned, Mentzer did have a decent training approach when he was, you know, actually training in the 1970s.  He would train with a couple of hard, all-out sets per muscle group, followed a 2-way split, where he might train on, say, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, hitting each bodypart 3 times in 2 weeks with really heavy weights on the big, compound lifts.  During that time, he had one unique training concept that I still think is pretty damn good.  After warming up, he would select a weight where he could only get a few reps, maybe 3 or 4 before reaching momentary muscular failure.  But, he wouldn’t do one set with that weight.  Nope.  He did rest-pause singles.  He would do one rep.  He would then rest very briefly, maybe 20 seconds, and do another single.  He continued until he couldn’t do a single with that weight.  At each workout, he’d try to add a single.  Once he got a certain number of singles, maybe 8 or 10, he would add weight at the next workout and repeat the process.

     Mentzer counted that as “one” set.  I’d say that it was 8 or 10 sets, but that didn’t fit into his “system.”  A lot of what Mentzer wrote, to be honest, came down to how he wanted to interpret it.  If he followed Bill Starr’s 5x5 system of progressively heavier sets of 5 reps, he would have said that he did 1 set of 5 reps to failure, since he would have only counted the last set.  It’s all in the semantics, I’d say.

     If you want to try this, I’d start with a weight that’s 90% of your 1-rep max.  For bodybuilders seeking hypertrophy, I think it works best on “pull” movements, such as weighted chins, deadlifts of any stripe, and barbell curls, in particular.  If you use it on a heavy pressing or squatting movement, make sure you have a spotter, though it would work well on rack movements—bottom-position bench presses, bottom-position squats, or partial movements.  I think 8 singles is a good number to shoot for before adding weight.  Here’s a training plan that would work:

Workout A:

Bottom-position squats

Bottom-position bench presses

Seated military presses in the rack

Workout B:

Deadlifts

Weighted chins

Barbell curls

     Train any 3 non-consecutive days each week, such as Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, following the “sane” Mentzer by training each lift 3 times in 2 weeks.  You can also just add it to one of your regular workouts if you follow a more multi-split approach.  At the start of arm day, use it on barbell curls, for instance, before moving on to the rest of your “regular” workout.

Lift with Unbalanced Weights

     When I first started training at home, I didn’t have a complete home gym like I do now.  I bought a small rack, a bench, an Olympic bar, and some weights.  Then—this was back in the previous century—I would look through the newspaper on a regular basis to see if anyone was selling equipment or weights.  If someone had a 30-pound and a 40-pound dumbbell for sale, I’d purchase them.  I ended up with a bunch of mis-matched weights, but not many “equal” pairs.  But I discovered something: lifting with mis-matched dumbbells is a pretty darn good way to train.  Doing a set of dumbbell bench presses with a 50-pound dumbbell in one hand and a 55-pound in the other forces your body to balance and "accommodate" in a way that an “equal” set does not.  It builds your stabilizing muscles in a manner that can’t be accomplished with a more conventional approach.

     This works particularly well on pressing movements, such as dumbbell bench presses and overhead presses.  You can even try it with barbells by loading the bar with a heavier weight on one side and a slightly lighter weight on the other.  If you’ve ever accidentally loaded the bar this way yourself, then you realize just how demanding that first rep can be when you go to unrack the weight.  If you decide to try this, just make sure you do an even number of sets by swapping weights around on every other set.  If you do one set of bench presses with a 40-pound dumbbell in your right hand and a 30-pounder in your left, make sure you do at least one more set by swapping hands on the next one.

Complexes Might be the Best Muscle-Building Method for Limited Training Time

     If you have a limited time to train because of work, family obligations, or whatever, I can’t think of a better training option than complexes.  Even if you do have plenty of time to spare in the gym, they just might be the best option for hypertrophy.  In addition, I think if there is a method of training that can both build muscle and strip bodyfat simultaneously, it might be complexes.

     With complexes, you do a series of lifts without ever setting down the barbell, dumbbell, or kettlebell.  Start with the hardest movement and follow it up with the progressively easier lifts.  Not “easy” as far as the lift itself, but for the weight that you are using on the complex.  You can obviously deadlift a weight a lot easier than you can curl it, so you’d start with curls.

     Using kettlebells, my favorite complex is to do double kettlebell overhead presses, followed by double KB cleans, double KB front squats, double KB deadlifts, and then finish off with single KB swings by dropping one of the ‘bells.  A good barbell complex is front raises, military presses, cleans, front squats, and deadlifts.  You can also do that complex with dumbbells.

     Do between 6 and 12 reps on each lift.  Rest a couple of minutes, but no more, between each complex.  5 to 6 complexes is a good workout in-and-of itself.  You can also add 2 or 3 complexes to the end of a full-body workout.  You might start by doing 3 to 4 sets of squats, bench presses, overhead presses, and barbell curls, and then finish with the complexes.

     If you want to do multiple complexes back-to-back, then don’t rest between complexes, but just drop an exercise with each subsequent complex.  So, on kettlebells, you might do the presses, cleans, front squats, deadlifts, and swings.  As soon as you finish, drop the presses from the rotation and immediately do another complex of cleans, front squats, deadlifts, and swings.  Then it’s front squats, deadlifts, and swings.  And so forth until you’re just doing a set of swings at the end.

     Maybe it’s the “time under tension” or just the amount of work you’re doing on the “big” lifts in such a short time.  I’m not entirely sure.  I’ll leave that up to the “science” lifters.  I just know they work.

For Building Muscle While Staying Lean, Fast from Either Fat or Carbs from Day-to-Day or Even Meal-to-Meal

     I’m not much of a “nutrition guy.”  It’s why I pretty much give the same advice in all of my essays and articles, just to “cover the bases.”  I know enough to know you need to get plenty of protein each day, and if you want to add some mass, you dang-well better get your calories in without fail on every single day, day in and day out.  I also know that you’ll never get lean if you eat both a lot of carbs and a lot of fat.  You have to eliminate one or the other.

     I suppose it’s the “either/or” mentality of our culture, but most of your physique athletes, bodybuilders, or, heck, just fitness “influencers” believe that fat is either the enemy or the savior.  Same thing with carbs.  Now, they are correct, to some extent.  As just written, you can’t get lean if you’re eating a bunch of both.  You need protein no matter what, but you have to eliminate, or severely cut down, on either carbs or fat.  A high-fat, high-protein, “keto” or “carnivore” diet will work.  But the thing is, so will a high-carb, high-protein, and low-fat diet.  When I “came of age” in bodybuilding, back in the ‘80s, almost every single competitive bodybuilder on the planet got shredded with a diet that was 60% carbohydrates, 30% protein, and 10% fat.  But then along came Dr. Mauro DiPasquale, touting his “Anabolic Diet” of extremely high-fat eating.  He wasn’t saying anything new, however.  Back in the ‘50s, and ever since then, Vince Gironda preached his “steak and eggs” diet or even his “36 eggs a day” diet.  He even touted drinking a mixture of raw eggs and heavy cream for getting shredded.  And Serge Nubret in the ‘70s basically got ripped on nothing more than eggs and horse meat.

     Since both work, I’ve believed for a long time that you actually could get in great shape by eating both ways, just not at the same time.  You could, however, eat a keto diet for a couple of days, followed by a couple days of 60/30/10, carbs/protein/fat ratio.  Heck, you might be able to alternate back-and-forth like that from day-to-day or, believe it or not, from meal-to-meal.  In the morning, eat a breakfast of steak and eggs.  In the evening, eat a meal of chicken breast (or fish) and rice or sweet potatoes, but eliminate your fat completely.  I’m pretty sure you’d not only get lean but would build plenty of muscle on top of it.

     For this approach to work, you would need to be “metabolically healthy” to begin with.  If you are carbohydrate insensitive, I doubt it would work.  In that case, you need to get on a low-carb diet to begin with.  But once your metabolism does function in a healthy manner after eating carbs, you’d be good to go.  My son, Garret, for example, eats plenty of protein, fat, and carbs, though the only carbs he eats are from their “natural source,” i.e. how they come out of the ground.  He eats plenty of red meat, butter, eggs, and whatnot, but he also eats oats, rice, and potatoes.  It keeps him ripped and he still builds muscle while doing so, looking as if he could step on a bodybuilding stage at any time of the year.

My son Garrett stays shredded while consuming ALL of the 3 macronutrients.

     Would this approach work for you?  Like a lot of things in lifting (and life).  Try it and see.  The same thing goes for all of these odds and ends.  Try is one of the most important words a lifter can learn.  And apply.  Maybe it’s time to head to the gym, or the kitchen, and apply them for yourself.