Beyond Bodybuilding: Muscle and Strength Training Secrets for The Renaissance Man

I will restate my ‘iron communist’ views: 1. You must lift heavy. 2. You must limit your reps to five. 3. You must avoid muscle failure. 4. You must cycle your loads. 5. You must stay tight. Tension is power. 6. You must treat your strength as a skill and ‘practice’ with iron rather than ‘work out’. 7. You must strive to do fewer things better.

Roughly two out of three workouts should be dedicated to building mass with medium reps. Other workouts can zero in on ultra high or ultra low repetitions.

Russian scientists concluded that periodic gain and loss of sporting form is a law of physiology and it dictates a cyclical organization of the training process.

Indeed, many variables, from sunlight to your recent argument with your boss, affect your performance and it is difficult to map out a rigid twenty-week plan and follow it rep for rep.

apply the 60% Rule to your load planning. According to this experimentally calculated formula, the volume of the lowest load training unit (a workout, a microcycle/week, a mesocycle/month) should equal approximately 60% of the highest load unit, provided they are of the same length.

Multiple sets with a static weight, e.g. 200kgx5x5, are frowned upon by Russian weightlifters. They have the habit of following up a heavy triple or double with a double or a single with a weight reduced by 5-10% before making another heavy lift.

Instead of grinding out 200x5x5 sets try something like 185x5, 205x5, 195x5, 210x5, 190x5, 200x5, 185x5.

Train different goals in different cycles, or at least on different days.

Expert performers use full body tension as a lens to focus their energy into the primary muscles responsible for the job. So feel all your muscles, not just one.