Massive Iron Newsletter - Volume 2 (August 25th, 2024)
Welcome to Sunday and the 2nd edition of the Massive Iron newsletter. The question I have for you today is...
Should near advanced lifters bulk in the same way that beginners or intermediate should?
Now. what I'm going to share is simply my opinion and everyone can process things and make up their own decisions. But here are my thoughts.
Someone that is an advanced lifter and still wants more mass and strength even if it's seemingly trivial, or slow to produce, should still be the same. Why? Here are my two reasons.
- First, they are training each day with heavy, heavy weight. This is harder to recover from and a few extra calories per training day will only be a bonus.
- Even though the lifter will be gaining at a much slower rate, the rules of the game don't change. Calorie intake is the great facilitator of progress.
So, just know this if you are near advanced lifter: the question is how deep of a hole do you want to put yourself in? Do you fear a moderate bulk? How badly do you want the last 5% of muscle and strength gains? Do you want it badly enough to bulk?
If not that's okay. The game is yours to play. Just know the rules.
Introducing the PP FULL 3 Day Workout
This is a workout routine for someone that can train only 3 days a week. As with all things, this is not magic and I present it simply as an option. The three training days are as follows:
- Day 1 - Push
- Day 2 - Posterior
- Day 3 - Full Body
Now, this is simply a structure. You can add any exercises you want on these training days. I'm going to present an example below but don't hesitate to change it. It is simply that... An example. Here are the suggested body parts you should train for each day:
Push - Chest, shoulders, and triceps (optional biceps)
Posterior - Legs and back
Full Body - One exercise each (at minimum) for chest, back, delts, quads, biceps, triceps. Add in anything else you want.
This approach allows you to train with frequency and hit the body in a quality way over the course of only 3 days of training. For those of you that like to squat and deadlift, I suggest squatting on the posterior day and putting deadlifts on the full body day, or vice versa.
You could certainly have a brutal day where you put both squats and deadlifts on the posterior day. If you do so I would rotate and have A and B weeks like this:
- Week A - Hard Squats, moderate deadlifts
- Week B - Hard deadlifts, moderate squats
Massive Mantra - Heavy Weight Feels Heavy Because it is Heavy
"I am going to wait until a weight feels light before attempting to move up."
This mindset is the biggest killer of gains for the average lifter who is struggling. If you want to get big and strong, you have to stop worrying about your feelings. Stop worrying about how heavy a weight feels. Focus on quality exercise form and progress when your program tells you to progress.
Too many lifters hit their progression indicator, and because the weight feels heavy, they hesitate to move up. There is a belief that eventually, a weight will feel so light that it will make sense to move up. This is nonsense. The only real-world gym application where this actually applies is when you move your bench press, for example, from 135 pounds to 315 pounds. Then, 135 pounds will feel light.
But if you think that you will wait for 55-pound dumbbells to feel light before you move up to the 60s, you're lying to yourself. If you want to build muscle, there is no place for fear of the iron. Injuries, strains, and soreness are going to happen. Get over it.
Training Intelligently. I'm not encouraging you to train recklessly. We always train intelligently and wisely. We always live to fight another day.
With that said, as long as your exercise form is decent and manageable, when you hit your progression indicator—which is a trigger that tells you to move up in weight—you better move up in weight.
Heavy weight feels heavy because it is heavy. That's a good sign, not anything to be afraid of. Embrace that.
Personal Experience. When I was at my strongest, squatting with 600-645 pounds on my back several times a week, you would think that many of my early warm-up sets felt light. This is not true at all.
When warming up to attempt 600-645 pounds on that day, a 315-pound warm-up set felt heavy because it was heavy. Three hundred fifteen pounds is a heavy-ass weight. Three hundred sixty-five pounds felt heavy because it was heavy. Four hundred-five pounds felt heavy because it was heavy. Five hundred and 545 pounds felt heavy because they were heavy.
Embracing the Heavy Feeling. To build muscle, you need to become comfortable lifting under stress, with loads that feel heavy. If you do not get used to this heavy feeling, you will never build a quality amount of muscle mass. There is no way around this feeling.
You must learn to have an acute focus on exercise form while also pushing out of your mind how heavy a weight feels. Stop being a wimp. Pick up the weight and move it for as many quality reps as possible. This is how the process works, and the process doesn't give a damn about how heavy a weight feels.
Rest-Pause: The Brutal and Underrated Tool
There's many different muscle-building tools you can use—things like run the rack, run the stack, drop sets, especially on the last set of an exercise. There are a lot of great muscle-building tools that are not essentials.
There are very few essentials when it comes to muscle building: having a reasonable exercise selection, a reasonable amount of volume, training consistency, progressive overload, nailing your nutrition, and having a reasonable degree of exercise form.
We all know what the core essentials are for muscle building, but there is one tool that I feel should be worth considering—should be worthy of your consideration—when it comes to muscle building.
Now, I'm not saying it is an essential, but I'm saying it is a very impactful tool and, I believe, a very underrated tool. It's something I've used a lot in my own training, and I feel it can increase the hard training factor. It can take hard training to the next level and really make your average rep quality go up.
Now, I'm going to get into it in just a second, but before I do, I want to say it is not for every exercise. This tool is not something you need to use on every exercise or even that you should use on every exercise.
This tool is rest-pause training.
I'm going to explain what it is. There are many different ways to incorporate rest-pause training, but let me start by framing it like this.
You have straight sets—something like three sets by eight on Pendlay rows or three sets by ten. Then, you can take the same amount of reps, do them rest-pause style, and increase the average rep intensity. Let me explain.
Let's say you're doing three by ten on bench press. We all know the first few reps are rather easy, and then the intensity starts to creep up towards the end. With rest-pause, what we basically do is we start with our same 10 reps like we would on a normal set—whatever, we're just using this as a generalization.
Once the set is done, we rest very, very briefly. We don't allow the muscles involved in the lift to fully recover. This rest period should be short enough just to rock, take a deep breath, gain your senses, and get back after it again.
I have a rest-pause protocol that I call the bulldozer system, and usually, you rest about 10 to 15 seconds between mini-sets. A mini-set is doing your regular set, then resting briefly, then doing this tack-on or add-on mini-set.
Now, in rest-pause, using this bench press example, you do your first ten reps, and then you rest 10 to 15 seconds. Before you fully recover, you're doing more reps again. You can continue to do this in a series of what's called mini-sets—two, three, four, even five. In the Massive Iron world, we have bulldozer training, which is five total mini-sets. You do the first big effort, then you do another series of rests—10 to 15 seconds—a mini-set, rest 10 to 15 seconds, a mini-set, and you do that for five total sets.
Now, what ends up happening—I know this can sound a little bit confusing—what ends up happening is we end up getting about the same number of reps using the rest-pause style as we would with straight sets.
So, if we were doing three by ten on straight sets, rest-pause, we would probably get about the same number of reps—around 30. We don't need to be perfect, but what happens is the average rep quality goes up, and the set intensity goes up. Now, we're not talking about intensity meaning weight relative to one rep max here, but the average rep intensity goes up, and that increases the average set intensity.
On a straight set, you're doing your ten reps, and the first few are just rather easy. You're going to have about maybe 50% of your reps on straight sets that feel a little bit easier. There's nothing wrong with that as long as you have progressive overload in the mix—it's a great way to train.
But with rest-pause, you're going to push it to the limit. You're going to push it close to failure. We don't train to failure in the Massive Iron world, but you're going to push for max safe reps. Before you get a chance to fully recover, you're pushing again.
Then, you rest just briefly—10 to 15 seconds—and you're pushing again, and you're repeating and repeating. So, you're going to get about the same number of reps as you would with three sets by ten reps, but the average rep intensity is going to increase. Does that make sense?
While rest-pause isn't magic, it is increasing the intensity of your training. It's taking hard training and making it harder training. Now, I just want to say a few things as an endnote. Rest-pause can be molded any way you want depending on the exercise. You can change the rest in between sets, you can add on as many mini-sets as you want, you can keep it going.
In the first iteration of what I call bulldozer training, or my rest-pause style, I tried this in about 2008, and I ran it for a full year. I found it made my muscles so much more sore than just standard training. So that was an indication that I was really pushing things hard—I was pushing my muscles hard in a way that they weren't used to.
In this first iteration of bulldozer training, what I would do is progressively expand the rest periods over time. Whereas in the bulldozer system now, we have about 10 to 15 seconds of rest in between mini-sets, back then I would do, say, 10 to 12 reps on my first set, rest 30 seconds, do max safe reps, rest 30 seconds, do max safe reps, rest 60 seconds, then 90 seconds.
So, I would have an expanding rest period. This is a great way to do rest-pause as well—the more fatigued you get, the more you increase the rest in between sets on an exercise. This expanding rest period is a great tool.
We can't get caught up on the rest periods—they don't always have to be uniform, right? The goal here, and what we should always remember when using an intensity technique like this, the goal isn't necessarily precision.
The goal is always a focus on hard training. Always, no matter what you do in the muscle-building world, keep your focus on hard training and progressive overload.
Now, there are some exercises where it doesn't make sense to do rest-pause training, where actually unracking or unloading the weight and reloading it can be extremely tedious.
Squats, for example, would be a difficult exercise to do rest-pause on because the actual act of racking the weight and preparing and unracking is going to be almost as taxing as doing the rep work itself. So, you have to use common sense when you're doing rest-pause and adjust based on the exercise.
My 3 Shoulder Workout Tips
Shoulders are like the redheaded stepchild of the bodybuilding and powerlifting realm. Everybody does them, but nobody really wants to do them, or most people don't want to do them. When you see the average trainee doing shoulders, it's usually a really half-assed effort. You see maybe a couple of compound movements, then some machines, front delt raises, and face pulls.
So I have three tips for you that will help you better train your shoulders.
The first tip is probably going to be a surprise to many of you, but it is: no need to train your front delts. No need at all. The front delts are hit a lot during your pressing movements on chest day and during your overhead pressing movements.
I've been in this game a long time, and it's very, very rare—actually, I've not met one lifter—who didn't have developed front delts. It's usually the opposite; experienced lifters will have overdeveloped front delts compared to their side or rear delts. This is because of the sheer volume of bench pressing movements that we like to do.
The bench press hits the front delts just fine. You might say, "Well, what's the harm in doing front delt movements?" Well, we want to have balance in the shoulder girdle. We're doing tons of presses this way and that way, and we just don't need to continue to hammer that front delt. It's overstimulated as it is.
If anything, you need more side delt and more rear delt work. So just keep that in mind—there's absolutely no need, unless you're a genetic freak born with incredibly small or weak front delts, to ever train your front delts.
The second tip has to do with compound pressing volume. Back in my day, and I started training around '86, people feared doing too much overhead pressing volume with compound movements. They looked at the shoulders as some body part, some group of muscles, that was almost as fragile as glass.
It's kind of ironic because lifters will hammer the heck out of their front delts and their delts during bench presses, but when it comes to shoulder movements or compound shoulder movements, all of a sudden the shoulders are made of glass and very fragile.
The shoulders can take a lot of compound sets. I've usually done two compound movements per shoulder exercise, anywhere between five, six, seven, or even eight sets of dumbbell and barbell movements. Sometimes I even do a run-the-rack on dumbbells, where I start with 30s and do 10 reps, do the 40s, 10 reps.
I've done this many, many times over the years, and it's an effective way to train the shoulder. So don't fear a high volume of compound movements. Just mix it up between front presses, military presses, dumbbell presses, Arnold presses.
Some good variations are standing single-arm presses or even standing or seated alternating presses. So don't be afraid to hammer your shoulders with volume, and don't use the excuse "my shoulders are made of glass" when you're hammering your bench pressing movements.
The last tip I have for you has to do with proper grip width when you're doing barbell overhead pressing movements. A lot of guys don't understand where to put their elbows and wrists when they're doing an overhead pressing movement.
Basically, you want your wrists over your elbows. If you're doing a front press or a military press or a push press, you want to set up with your wrists about over your elbows and then press up like this. You don't want to go like this because the more you rotate those elbows down, the more strain you're going to feel on your shoulders.
If you don't believe me, get in this position right now and rotate those elbows down—you can feel extra stress on your shoulders. When you move behind the neck, it's going to change, and you're probably going to have to pull your hands out a little bit. When you're up here, you can see your wrists are about right here.
When you pull back a little bit, you have a tendency to move those wrists in. So you want to make sure if you're doing behind-the-neck presses that your wrists are about over your elbows as well. Another bonus tip: when you're doing behind-the-neck presses, I usually don't bring the bar below about mid-ear—that's good enough—or elbow just a little bit below parallel compared to the shoulder. That is a good enough range of motion.
Thanks!
I appreciate everyone that supports this newsletter and the world that is Massive Iron. A couple of notes before we go.
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Thank you for being a part of the Massive Iron community. Stay strong and keep pushing your limits!
-- Steve Shaw (The big hairy ugly dude)