Train, Eat, Grow 113

In the last installment of TEG we discussed the Power week of our X-Rep version of Eric Broser’s Power/Rep Range/Shock protocol. The big change we made was doing the last sets of the contracted-position exercise for 15 to 20 reps. We did that in order to end each bodypart routine with a full-blown pump. That’s especially necessary for Steve, who doesn’t respond as well as Jonathan to low-rep work-total low-rep workouts makes Steve look like a small boy.

After Power week comes the Rep Range phase. Here you use three different rep schemes: seven to nine, 10 to 12 and 13 to 15. That works well with our Positions-of-Flexion mass-training method because it’s a three-exercise hit for each muscle group. For example, for quads we do seven to nine on hack squats, leg presses and squats, the midrange moves; then we do 10 to 12 on sissy squats, the stretch-position exercise; and we end with 13 to 15 on leg extensions, the contracted-position exercise.

To refresh your memory regarding the P/RR/S protocol, here’s a quick summary of every week:

Power: Straight sets with heavy weights, four to six reps per work set.

Rep Range: On the first exercise the rep range is seven to nine, on the second it’s 10 to 12, and on the third it’s 13 to 15-or higher.

Shock: The rep range is eight to 12 on most exercises-but with intensity techniques like drop sets, slow negatives, DC training, X Reps and X-hybrid techniques to shock new growth.

After Shock week you go back to Power and begin again-although recently we’ve been doing two weeks of each. Because we’re training each bodypart only once every seven days, we’ve found that two-week stints help us get the most out of each protocol before moving on.

Speaking of our current split, here it is again. We train four days a week:

Monday: Chest, calves, abs

Tuesday: Back, forearms

Wednesday: Quads, hamstrings

Thursday: Off

Friday: Delts, triceps, biceps

To make the split even better, we should really take Wednesday off and work quads and hams on Thursday so we don’t train three days in a row; however, Thursdays work better for us from a work standpoint, so we’re keeping that as our off day.

New Moves, Better Gains

As we said last month, the only way to train each bodypart once a week and make gains is to get enough muscle microtrauma at each session. We discussed doing a set or two in negative-accentuated fashion-that is, a six-second negative on every rep. We’ve also made a few exercise changes to better attack each muscle.

Low-incline Smith-machine presses. We’ve always preferred doing our incline presses on a Smith machine because we both tend to use our triceps and front delts more with free weights. The Smith machine enables us to keep our arms in the exact plane that engages our upper pecs best without having to worry about balancing a bar or dumbbells; plus, we can drive our hands inward isometrically throughout the set to better innervate the pecs.

We’ve always used an incline bench set at about 40 degrees. Recently we decided to go low—down to about 25 degrees. What a difference! Our upper pecs blew up immediately. That could be because it’s a better angle or simply because it’s a different angle from the one we’re used to. Either way we’ll keep it low to grow for a while.

Flexsolate pulldowns. After reading the interview with Terry Baldwin, the developer of the Flexsolate grip-free isolation cuffs, in the January ’09 issue, we decided to give them a try. Wow—incredible. Steve has problems feeling his lats during chins and pulldowns, so taking his hands out of the equation forced him to drive down with his elbows to contract his lats instead of pulling the bar down with his arms. He got new soreness throughout his entire back. We do parallel-grip chins, wide-grip pulldowns and undergrip pulldowns with the cuffs, and the back pumps have been off the charts.

Bent-over dumbbell rows. We’ve been using the Nautilus leverage-machine rows for months now, and we’ve started to notice too much backward lean at the top of the stroke on the last few reps. That moves our torsos away from the chest pad, which reduces or eliminates scapulae retraction. In other words, the midback contraction is severly diminished. Solution: We’re now substituting bent-over dumbbell rows with chest support. Now there’s no way to rise up away from the pad, so if we pull the dumbbells up high enough, midback action is extreme. Plus, because we’re using dumbbells, our hands can move in closer at the bottom for more midback stretch and drift out wide at the top for a wicked shoulder-blade squeeze. The only problem is that Jonathan’s back is so strong that he may outrun our top-poundage dumbbells soon.

Dumbbell pullovers. We dropped these a few months ago on the assumption that machine pullovers were getting at the lats’ stretch position well enough; however, we noticed that during Rep Range week machine pullovers were classified as a contracted-position move, getting 13-to-15 reps along with rope rows. We were doing only one set of one exercise, undergrip pulldowns, in the nine-to-12 range. Solution: Add one set of dumbbell pullovers after the undergrips. They produce a unique lat stretch that’s hard to duplicate on a machine, and we’re already seeing new lat width-or maybe it’s from the Flexsolate pulldowns. Either way we’ll take it.

Squats. We’ve both had problems with free-bar squats. Usually we reintroduce the exercise up front in our quad routine, and all is well. We feel our quads working, and our form is perfect. As we get stronger and our depth remains low, our lower backs inevitably crap out. We’re not sure if it’s a structural problem or damage done a few years ago when we thought we were powerlifters and just had to squat 500 pounds. Doing doubles like that compressed our spines—we probably both lost an inch of height-stupid is as stupid does. Yes, we understand that free-bar squats provide good quad stimulation as well as metabolic effects, so we’ve kept them in but moved them to the end of our midrange-exercise sequence-after hack squats and leg presses. Just to make sure we don’t get injured, we do then in the negative-accentuated style mentioned earlier, which is six seconds on the down stroke of every rep.

After the negative-accentuation set we recently added a standard set with the same weight. Because the negative-accentuated reps on the first set cause so much quad fatigue, the standard reps are much easier to feel in our quads, rather than our lower backs, and our thighs are getting the brunt of the work. Bonus: That’s without extreme spine-compressing weight on our shoulders.

Smith-machine presses. We’d been doing standing dumbbell presses as our leadoff shoulder exercise, but we got strong quickly. They worked great for a while, but before we knew it, we felt like Olympic lifters doing a heavy clean and jerk to get the dumbbells in position. Our injury-prone lower backs began to warn us that maybe it was time to move to another exercise, so we went back to Smith-machine presses to the front.

A few months ago when we were using Smith-machine presses, we were doing the behind-the-neck version toward the end of our delt routine. We’ve moved presses to the leadoff delt exercise for now, so pressing to the front is a safer option with heavier weights.

Oh, and we’re still doing one set of standing dumbbell presses. We do them after two sets on the Smith machine, which means lighter dumbbells. Plus, we’ve been doing the set in the negative-accentuated style-and they burn like heck!

One-arm leaning laterals. Delts are one of our most stubborn bodyparts. That means we really have to cover all the angles to get them round, especially considering we’re working them only once a week. We’ve noticed that forward-lean laterals and standing laterals don’t let our upper arms move above the plane of the shoulder. Because different fibers can fire throughout the stroke, we decided to add one-arm leaning laterals. To do them we grab onto one side of the crossover machine with one arm, our feet next to the base. With a dumbbell in our free hand we extend the stabilizing arm so the body is angled out away from the machine. Now we do one-arm lateral raises. Because of the body angle, the dumbbell rises above shoulder level for a killer top-end contraction-and unique fiber activation.

Lying extensions. We do these after two sets of close-grip bench presses in order to attack the triceps’ long heads. Close-grip bench presses tend to neglect that head, focusing more on the medial and lateral heads. On lying extensions we do one set regular style, two seconds up, two seconds down. Then on the second set we reduce the weight slightly and use the negative-accentuated style. We don’t stop at positive failure, however. When we can no longer drive the weight through the positive stroke, at the bottom of each negative rep, we pull the bar to our chest, press it up and then do another slow negative. We get about three or four of those additional slow-mo negatives-and the long heads are usually very sore the next day.

While we haven’t made the switch yet, we’re talking about going back to barbell preacher curls instead of dumbbell curls. We’ve built up to some pretty heavy dumbbells using the PowerBlock set, and the weights are so wide, they’re hampering our form-our hands have to move out very wide, which makes it awkward and could tweak our elbows.

Size Shockers

Next month we’ll discuss our Shock workouts. While our Power and Rep Range sessions are similar-straight sets with only slight variations in rep ranges-Shock week is stacked with painful techniques like drop sets, supersets, Double-X overload sets, postactivation and many more. The object is to annihilate the fibers so they have no choice but to grow.

One last comment about P/RR/S: Our strength is through the roof! Each time we go back to that training style, we can add poundage to almost every exercise at almost every workout. While gains in strength don’t necessarily correlate to gains in size, it’s very motivating and should provide a hypertrophic spurt in the future as we continue to train consistently. At the moment P/RR/S is the perfect program for our winter mass-building phase because our philosophy during this period is strength surges with a size side effect. Our hats are off to the creator, Eric Broser.

(A version of our current P/RR/S program is listed in the e-book 3D Muscle Building.)

Editor’s note: For the latest on X Reps, X e-books and the X-Blog training and supplement journals, visit www.X-Rep.com. A few of the mass-training e-books are shown below. IM