A mate is a personal trainer, he said in five years of training he basically got to around 80kg BP. Since he started doing a new workout, in three months he has gone from that to 110kg BP - and get this, he works out
once a week for
20 minutes!The idea is to work to complete failure. He does flyes to failure then immediately starts bench pressing (with a spotter of course). Once he gets to his last possible rep, he holds it static for as long as he can, then he lowers it as slowly as he can. The next workout (two weeks later, because the following week is either legs or arms) he is stronger,
every time.
What's Possible
With a properly conducted high-intensity training program, the individual will grow stronger every workout, without any serious breach in progress, until he has actualized his strength/muscular potential. I had a client several years ago who improved the functional ability of his quadriceps such that he was able to perform 10 reps with the whole stack, or 250 pounds, on the Nautilus Leg Extension after only being able to do seven reps with 170 pounds two months prior, a tremendous increase. (This type of response is not experienced by every one of my trainees; but it is far from atypical.)
The strongest client I ever had was able to perform 33 reps on the Nautilus Leg-Extension with the whole stack. And that was an incredibly well-developed, strong "genetic freak," the famed David Paul of the Barbarian Brothers. When David first started having me supervise his workouts, he performed 15 reps on the Leg-Extension and then went immediately, in superset fashion, to the Nautilus Leg Press where he performed 18 reps to complete failure with the full stack, 510 pounds. One week later David performed 25 reps on the Leg-Extension and immediately ran to the Leg Press where he did 38 reps. Impressive? You better believe it. But, keep reading.
One week after that, he did 33 reps on the Leg-Extension followed by a hard-to-believe 71 reps on the Leg Press! In both exercises, he again, employed the entire weight stacks. No, the above is not a misprint. David improved his Leg-Extension from 15 to 33 reps and his Leg Press from 18 to 71 reps as a result of only two leg workouts that lasted less than 15 minutes each. That represents an improvement of 388 percent in the functional ability of the quadriceps of an already highly advanced bodybuilder. In the one month I trained David, he gained seven pounds of muscle. These are phenomenal increases, especially when considered against the fact that for the previous five years, David's volume training, involving training sessions that lasted for at least two hours (sometimes twice a day ) six days a week, yielded zero strength and size increases.
Since David was capable of such a rate of improvement, imagine what a rank beginner - (with similar genetics) - might achieve on such a program. I've already provided you an indication, with the description of the first individual. If a beginner can improve as I described above, going from 170 for seven reps to 250 for 10 reps on the Leg-Extension in two months, he has only 23 reps to go with the same weight before achieving the functional capacity of a super genetic freak. How long would that take him? He'd probably never achieve it, as he, by all appearances, was only average - or slightly above - in genetics. My point is: Given the enormous improvement he made in only two months, it wouldn't even take year before he actualized his strength/muscle potential. (We'll never know exactly; because of enormous career pressures he had to cease training after two months.)
Bear in mind that a prerequisite for growing larger muscles is that one grow stronger. Since the individual I described would cease growing in strength in less than one year, his muscle growth would cease soon thereafter.
http://www.mikementzer.com/actpotentialthree.htmlThis is, AFAIK, without drugs, just science of exercise in practice. Really fascinating stuff. He also competed alongside Arnie.
