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Muscle Flow: Get it and Grow
In the last e-zine we discussed continuous tension—putting the target muscle in a stranglehold with no-pause repping to produce occlusion, or blood-flow blockage. If you do that for long enough during any one set, you can jack up the growth stimulation significantly. So, is it the choking off of blood from the target muscle or the intense rush of blood to the bodypart after blood flow resumes that creates the anabolic reaction? Who cares; it works!
“Rob Thoburn, a muscle-science researcher, has been corresponding with Japanese scientists involved in experiments with occlusion techniques. [In one study they got] a 7 percent increase in quadriceps cross-sectional area in four months with standard training, but when they used occlusion, they got an 8 percent increase in cross-sectional area—in only two weeks! Better results in one-eighth the time. That’s about an 800 percent increase in gains when blood flow was impeded.”
You can see why we say that continuous tension is very important for maxing out growth. The biggest bodybuilders on the planet know that. Ronnie Coleman and Jay Cutler, winner and runner-up at the ’05 Mr. Olympia, both use partial reps on most of their sets. They appear to have some kind of intuitive muscle connection that tells them which exercises are best for partials to get supercharged occlusion effects.
For example, you see most trainees in gyms do their triceps pushdowns slowly, pushing the bar from the chest down to lockout, where they squeeze their triceps. But if you think about it, there’s a lot of bone support at lockout due to the angle of pull, and tension on the triceps is diminished. Plus, your lats and pecs help hold the bar at that lockout position. So even if you squeeze your triceps at the bottom, you may be losing some of the occlusion effects.
How do Coleman and Cutler do their pushdowns? Rapid fire from just below chest level, the semistretched point, to well shy of lockout. They just keep firing the triceps in the max-tension zone, blasting down at the max-force point. Oh, and they never hold and squeeze at the bottom. Obviously, they know it’s not so much about flexing the muscle as it it about generating more force, exploding with control at the top semistretched point, and maintaining tension on the muscle with pistonlike reps—which results in occlusion and a blood-flow tidal wave after the set! Rarely do they ever squeeze in the contracted position of any exercise.
Even exercises that don’t have bone support at lockout, like leg extensions, get the rapid-fire-rep treatment from these two mass monsters. Why? Our guess is that the target muscle may relax somewhat due to tendon and ligament support when a joint is locked. That could diminish tension and occlusion effects. When you rep continuously, however, every stroke is like the pendulous action of a hammer-head oil derrick, pumping blood out of the muscle on every stroke for more and more occlusion—and X-treme size and strength side effects, along with a wicked bodypart bloodbath after the set!
That’s why in the last installment of this e-zine we suggested you do all of your multijoint Ultimate Exercises in partial-rep style—to just short of lockout—and keep moving. Never rest at the top or bottom. If you do the Ultimate Exercises in that manner and then follow those nonlock reps with X-Rep partials right at the max-force point, you jack up force production, activate more fast-twitch fibers and—this is important—enhance the occlusion effects!
We’ve even suggested that if you do your Ultimate Exercises correctly, you may not need isolation work to grow at a rapid rate because you can get all of the requirements for growth stimulation from that one exercise (that means quicker workouts). For example, a nonlock set of decline presses with X Reps added at the back end, followed by a heavier X-Rep-only set or a drop set, either of which amplifies occlusion effects, gives your pecs extreme fast-twitch fiber activation, semistretched-point overload and critical continuous tension.
So if you don’t have time for extra isolation exercises, don’t worry. You can get most of the growth effects by doing only a couple of sets of one Ultimate Exercise per bodypart—average workout about 30 minutes. Now that’s efficient mass building!
Now is the perfect time to go back to basics. Pick one big ultimate exercise for each bodypart and give it the X-Rep treatment. Shorter workouts. More muscle recovery. Big gains. It’s grow time!
In the last e-zine we discussed continuous tension—putting the target muscle in a stranglehold with no-pause repping to produce occlusion, or blood-flow blockage. If you do that for long enough during any one set, you can jack up the growth stimulation significantly. So, is it the choking off of blood from the target muscle or the intense rush of blood to the bodypart after blood flow resumes that creates the anabolic reaction? Who cares; it works!
“Rob Thoburn, a muscle-science researcher, has been corresponding with Japanese scientists involved in experiments with occlusion techniques. [In one study they got] a 7 percent increase in quadriceps cross-sectional area in four months with standard training, but when they used occlusion, they got an 8 percent increase in cross-sectional area—in only two weeks! Better results in one-eighth the time. That’s about an 800 percent increase in gains when blood flow was impeded.”
You can see why we say that continuous tension is very important for maxing out growth. The biggest bodybuilders on the planet know that. Ronnie Coleman and Jay Cutler, winner and runner-up at the ’05 Mr. Olympia, both use partial reps on most of their sets. They appear to have some kind of intuitive muscle connection that tells them which exercises are best for partials to get supercharged occlusion effects.
For example, you see most trainees in gyms do their triceps pushdowns slowly, pushing the bar from the chest down to lockout, where they squeeze their triceps. But if you think about it, there’s a lot of bone support at lockout due to the angle of pull, and tension on the triceps is diminished. Plus, your lats and pecs help hold the bar at that lockout position. So even if you squeeze your triceps at the bottom, you may be losing some of the occlusion effects.
How do Coleman and Cutler do their pushdowns? Rapid fire from just below chest level, the semistretched point, to well shy of lockout. They just keep firing the triceps in the max-tension zone, blasting down at the max-force point. Oh, and they never hold and squeeze at the bottom. Obviously, they know it’s not so much about flexing the muscle as it it about generating more force, exploding with control at the top semistretched point, and maintaining tension on the muscle with pistonlike reps—which results in occlusion and a blood-flow tidal wave after the set! Rarely do they ever squeeze in the contracted position of any exercise.
Even exercises that don’t have bone support at lockout, like leg extensions, get the rapid-fire-rep treatment from these two mass monsters. Why? Our guess is that the target muscle may relax somewhat due to tendon and ligament support when a joint is locked. That could diminish tension and occlusion effects. When you rep continuously, however, every stroke is like the pendulous action of a hammer-head oil derrick, pumping blood out of the muscle on every stroke for more and more occlusion—and X-treme size and strength side effects, along with a wicked bodypart bloodbath after the set!
That’s why in the last installment of this e-zine we suggested you do all of your multijoint Ultimate Exercises in partial-rep style—to just short of lockout—and keep moving. Never rest at the top or bottom. If you do the Ultimate Exercises in that manner and then follow those nonlock reps with X-Rep partials right at the max-force point, you jack up force production, activate more fast-twitch fibers and—this is important—enhance the occlusion effects!
We’ve even suggested that if you do your Ultimate Exercises correctly, you may not need isolation work to grow at a rapid rate because you can get all of the requirements for growth stimulation from that one exercise (that means quicker workouts). For example, a nonlock set of decline presses with X Reps added at the back end, followed by a heavier X-Rep-only set or a drop set, either of which amplifies occlusion effects, gives your pecs extreme fast-twitch fiber activation, semistretched-point overload and critical continuous tension.
So if you don’t have time for extra isolation exercises, don’t worry. You can get most of the growth effects by doing only a couple of sets of one Ultimate Exercise per bodypart—average workout about 30 minutes. Now that’s efficient mass building!
Now is the perfect time to go back to basics. Pick one big ultimate exercise for each bodypart and give it the X-Rep treatment. Shorter workouts. More muscle recovery. Big gains. It’s grow time!
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