Archive for June, 2009

The stress must be heavy enough to exceed the nor­mal thresh­old of your mus­cles. Train­ing with weights at your 60–80% 1 Rep Max (RM) will not stim­u­late NEW mus­cle growth.

In other words, if you sim­ply want to have the abil­ity to lift weights to ‘fail­ure’ using 60–80% of your 1 Rep Max, then keep doing this because your mus­cles will accom­mo­date this spe­cific stress. Your mus­cles will not grow larger than they must to accom­mo­date this one spe­cific stress.

Don’t get me wrong. Your body will adapt mus­cu­larly, neu­ro­log­i­cally and struc­turally to this spe­cific stress – but it will stop and end there. Even if you are increas­ing reps and sets, the mus­cles will grow min­i­mally, but there will be NO suf­fi­cient rea­son for them to grow fur­ther because you are still within your nat­ural threshold.

So if you want to gain 2–5 pounds of mus­cle a year, keep fol­low­ing con­ven­tional train­ing pro­grams because they are not made for extra­or­di­nary gains. I did not gain 41 pounds of mus­cle over the course of six months by accident!