Intense Cycles For Advanced Lifters (Part 3)
If you are in week 2 and find yourself unable to face the 80% x 6 x 2 light session because you “feel tired” then you can go back to reading Men‘s Health magazine cause you are not destined to be strong. Feeling tired is just a fact of life to an athlete, not an alarm bell that you need to take a week off and stay in bed playing with your pee-pee. You judge how well you are recovering by whether or not you made your lifts. If you are making your lifts you are recovering just fine, whether you feel like shit or not.
You can rearrange the remaining exercises over the week at whatever set and rep scheme you prefer. In the case that you were to specialize in overhead press, you could consider choosing to squat press on Monday, chin press on Wednesday and bench press on Friday. The best thing I like about this is that you can keep the poundages for the other lifts at around 80 – 90% of maximums and it doesn’t matter which rep range I am using.
For example say you can bench 100Kg for 12 reps, you would do sets of 80-90Kg for 10-12 reps in the bench. It is also worth rotating what days you do your assistance work on so that you never perform similar assistance to your main lift on a “heavy” day.
For example if your specialization lift is the overhead press then rotate your bench press so that it always falls on one of the 6 x 2 days, not on one of the more intense days. This makes sure that your heavy overhead pressing does not make benching impossible. The same would apply if squats were your main lift and you were deadlifitng for assistance work. You would not squat heavy and deadlift on the same day, as your deadlift would most likely not be worthwhile. The name of the game is maintenance when it comes to your other lifts.
When the first 6 weeks are up you can decide on another specialization lift and start again or just revert back to a more regular bodybuilding routine in order to put that new strength to work by creating even more muscle by increasing the rep range slightly. But anyway it goes without saying that most people have a total disregard for their incredible gains they have just achieved and revert back to doing leg extensions once a month cause training my way was just “too tough”.
I’m sorry to be such a mean old sod but it is utterly true. People are all too quick to disregard methods that work extremely well if they take them out of their comfort zone. Need I remind you that if strength training and bodybuilding were comfortable then everyone would be big and strong?
I have been asked by a few friends on what results can be expected on this sort of routine as far as strength gains are concerned. I can achieve a guaranteed 7.5 – 10% on a lift each time I suffer, plus big increases on repetition work after the program.
Past results I’ve seen from this exact program include a deadlift going from 200Kg to 220Kg and reps with 180kg from 6 to an easy 11 at a bodyweight of 93Kg. Not to bad for 6 weeks work eh? I’m shooting for 180Kg x 20 reps by the end of this year and I’ll train for that in a very similar manner to what’s described above, and by increasing my limit strength repetition lifting will increase automatically.
We all have our differences and I’m not quite Mr Universe, but I can assure you that there are a great number of bodybuilders in the world who could better my results. You really just have to kick yourself and get doing new routines and ones that hurt. If you come across any good one just e-mail them to me, Mick Hart. Check out the MickHartBlog which is there for those who like suffering.
Filed under: Training