Train, Eat, Grow 182

w installments I’ve been outlining quick bodypart routines you can use when you’re pressed for time. I covered all the muscle groups, and you can find most of them incorporated into the programs on pages 56 and 58.

Notice that most of the bodypart workouts include multiple exercises, as I tried to cover the three Positions of Flexion—midrange, stretch and contracted—when possible. Sometimes, though, you may want to go even simpler and use just one key exercise. Can you really stimulate muscle growth with just one move per muscle?

The double-drop method is a spectacular mass builder because you cram a lot of work into a short amount of time. If you do three rounds, that’s nine sets; and it should take you less than 10 minutes.

If you’ve been following Mr. America Doug Brignole’s “Muscle Mastery” series [find Part 3 on page 104 of the Dec ’14 issue], you know he does it very successfully. Doug has a passion for kinesiology and physiology and has been able to whittle down his workouts to only one “best” exercise for each muscle. Let’s look at his method and a few others that you can use to blast new muscle mass quickly, with only one exercise.

Super TORQ (tension-overload repetition quantity). That’s the name I gave to Brignole’s high-rep-to-low-rep technique. Basically, his reps for each exercise look like this: 50, 40, 30, 20, 10(9)(9). He does 50 reps, rests about a minute, adds weight, then does 40 reps. He rests for another minute, adds weight and does 30 reps, and so on down to 10. On the last set he does drop sets, reducing the weight and then repping out two or three times.

Yes, it’s a lot of work—and it hurts. Just keep in mind that you’re doing only one exercise (unless you’re a complete masochist). I do use Super TORQ every so often, but I much prefer standard TORQ, in which the reps look like this: 30, 20, 15(7)(6). It’s the same principle; you just start with fewer reps on the first set—30 as opposed to 50. You still add weight on each set, but you cut the rests to 45 seconds. You also want to go to failure on each set—and don’t forget the drop sets after the last one.