How many sets should be performed for optimal progress? How many repetitions per set for maximal muscle growth? How many training days per week are best? Which exercises are recommended? Split training or even double split training? How many warm-up sets? Heavy or light weight? Strict exercise form or cheating?

There are so many questions concerning training that it is not surprising that many people are confused. Looking at each of these questions may actually contribute to neglecting another question that is not only more important but also the base for all answers to these individual questions. And this question is:

How does training work?

Training processes have been studied for many years using the most recent scientific methods available. The relevance of training parameters (for muscle stimulation) as well as the importance of rest (for regeneration) have been identified in detail and provide us with all the information necessary to make the body adapt in the desired way to build up lean muscle.

This book is about how training works and what this means if the goal is to gain lean muscle. As a sports science professor I often come across misconceptions of training that have been disproved long ago but are still being passed on. One of these misleading concepts is the “the more, the better” approach that is still followed by millions of trainees world-wide. However, sports science has proven many times that the quality of training is much more important than its quantity. This book deals with the reasons for this “lie that will not die” and how current findings of sports science can be used to one’s advantage. Making the quality of training a priority has the pleasant “side-effect” that the quantity of workouts can be reduced. In fact, it even has to, if quality is the top priority.

If you want to know more about the theoretical background and practical implications for training, read on.

Table of Contents

1 Survival of the fittest? How much and what kind of exercise our body needs

2 How training works

3 Intensity of effort

4 The discovery of High Intensity Training

5 The (missing) scientific background of multiple-set training

6 The Holy Trinity: All good things come in threes

7 The paradigm shift that never happened

8 The essence of High Intensity Training

9 Training programs

9.1 Sample full-body workout A

9.2 Sample full-body workout B

9.3 Sample full-body workout C

9.4 Sample full body workout with pre-exhaustion A

9.5 Sample full body workout with pre-exhaustion B

9.6 Sample full body workout with post-exhaustion A

9.7 Sample full body workout with post-exhaustion B

9.8 Split program: Sample upper/lower body split

9.9 Split program: Sample upper/lower body split with pre-exhaustion

9.10 Split program: Sample upper/lower body split with post-exhaustion

9.11 Split program: Push-pull split A (two-way split)

9.12 Split program: Push-pull split B (three-way split)

10 Intensity and consistency

List of Figures

Figure 1:... Lack of physical exercise causes negative adaptation and regression. 12

Figure 2:... Milo of Croton. 21

Figure 3:... Improved muscle fiber activation precedes muscular hypertrophy. 26

Figure 4:... The General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS). 32

Figure 5:... Friedrich Nietzsche. 33

Figure 6:... The process of supercompensation. 34

Figure 7:... The training threshold. 37

Figure 8:... Arthur Jones. 44

Figure 9:... Cross referencing by physiologists who recommend the execution of multiple sets (Carpinelli, 2002, p. 320). 55

Figure 10:. Strength gains after ten weeks of HIT compared to ten weeks of three-set training. 60

Figure 11:. Mike Mentzer. 83

Figure 12:. Drop set: reducing the resistance immediately after reaching muscular failure. 99

Figure 13:. Leg press. 109

Figure 14:. Back row.. 112

Figure 15:. Shrug. 114

Figure 16:. Pec-deck fly. 116

Figure 17:. Incline bench press. 116

Figure 18:. Leg extension. 118

Figure 19:. Squat 118

Figure 20:. Lat pull-down. 120

Figure 21:. Pullover. 120

Figure 22:. Dips. 122

Figure 23:. Push-up. 122

Figure 24:. Leg curl 124

Figure 25:. Shoulder press. 126

Figure 26:. Leg extension. 128

Figure 27:. Leg press. 128

Figure 28:. Biceps curl 130

Figure 29:. Leg curl 132

Figure 30:. Calf raise. 132

Figure 31:. Dumbbell lateral raise. 134

Figure 32:. Chin-up. 136

Figure 33:. Incline dumbbell press. 138

Figure 34:. Back row.. 140

Figure 35:. Abdominal crunch. 142

Figure 36:. Incline bench press. 144

The images in Figure 1 and 2 were created by Udo Buffler. Julia Suchoroschenko created the image on the front cover, the images in Figure 3, 4, 6, and 7 and all portraits and illustrations of training exercises in this book (Fig. 5, Fig. 8, and Fig. 11-36).

List of Tables

Table 1:.. Intensity of effort: the four degrees. 41

Table 2:.. Studies that found no significant difference in strength gains as a result of performing a greater number of sets (Carpinelli, 2002, p. 322). 61

1 Survival of the fittest? How much and what kind of exercise our body needs

For thousands of years adapting to the demands of one’ s environment and living conditions was the best one could do in order to survive. Those best suited to their environment and its particular demands on physical activity had the greatest chances of survival (and of passing on their genes). For thousands of years being the fittest meant being able-bodied and powerful. It meant coping with an environment by covering large distances every day looking for water and food, collecting whatever could be eaten, hunting and killing prey while avoiding being eaten at the same time. Therefore, those who were fast, strong and enduring were the fittest and had the best chances of surviving.

Today things are different. They have changed tremendously and are almost reversed. Those who best fit to their environment will not walk for miles each day. They are more likely to work in a factory or an office, carry a notebook instead of a spear and a meal-to-go instead of the prey they have hunted. They use contemporary methods of transportation like cars, taxis, planes, trains, busses, and the underground, which require almost zero physical activity from the passenger while travelling from one place to another. And this kind of modern, effortless transportation is not limited to roads and streets. It is also available within buildings. For example, there are elevators, escalators, assembly lines and other devices that transport items or people. Basically, hardly any physical activity is needed to be well-equipped for our modern world.

For the contemporary consumer food does not have to be picked from trees, much less hunted, killed and skinned. It is available in all kinds of variations from all around the world and in all seasons. Some kinds of food, especially fast food, are available 365 days a year 24/7 and can be ordered by a mouse click (which is physical activity, too, but not exactly intense) or a phone call and are delivered to our door step if we wish so. Instead of having to follow our prey for miles to finally hunt it down with intense effort, all we have to do is get up from the armchair and walk to the front door where we receive the ready-to-eat food. In terms of physical activity we have come a long way (or rather just the opposite) from what our ancestors had to do in order to survive.

The consequences of these changed living conditions are obvious. Unless we provide for it ourselves, we are tremendously lacking physical activity and, even worse, we lack resistance. Our muscles atrophy when there is no need for them to contract against an appropriate resistance. And this is a rational thing for the body to do. Why waste a lot of energy on maintaining resources like muscles when they are not needed?

Figure 1: Lack of physical exercise causes negative adaptation and regression

In our modern world we are deprived of two things we desperately need in order to be healthy: physical activity in general and intense muscular contractions in particular. And we must clearly understand that the two are not the same: There is a difference between low-intensity aerobic activities like walking or jogging and intense anaerobic work like resistance training. Physically, our body benefits from both kinds of activity.

By simply increasing the amount of physical activity, like walking and running, we can improve our general well-being but it will not do much in terms of keeping our muscles from atrophying and keeping our bones dense. The solution to this problem is very simple. We have to do both. What we need is physical activity on a regular, preferably daily basis and regular workouts with a proper degree of intensity to stimulate muscle growth or at least keep our muscles from atrophying.

The World Health Organization recommends walking at least 10,000 steps per day for maintaining or improving health. It needs to be said that even though this is a reasonable rule of thumb, this number was chosen arbitrarily. Today, most people walk 5,000 and 6,000 steps per day on average whereas just a century ago our ancestors were likely to walk between 10,000 and 20,000 steps on an ordinary working day (which was basically every day).

Increasing our daily walking range is very simple. All we need to do is take the stairs instead of the elevator, park our car further from the office entrance, or leave the car in the garage when our destination is within walking distance. It is well documented that even small increases in physical activity will have a positive effect on health. And generally speaking: the more physical activity, the better.

However, and this needs to be pointed out very clearly, this “the more, the better” approach cannot be applied to muscle training. However widespread this misconception may be, modern science has proven repeatedly that training stimuli need to be specific in terms of intensity, volume, duration, and frequency. To be effective, training has to be prescribed like medicine.

The more, the better?

The concept of “the more, the better” may be true for some things but it is definitely not a universal principle. This means that whereas it is beneficial to be physically active every day and get our 10,000 steps daily, working out every day is not necessary and may even be counterproductive.

Training volume, i.e. the quantity of training, is just one aspect of a complex process that consists of at least four interdependent factors: intensity, volume, duration, and frequency.

There is a prevalent but inappropriate overemphasize on the quantity of training (volume, duration and frequency) whereas the importance of quality of training (intensity) is often underestimated.

Volume, duration and frequency are thought to be the crucial factors for best training results because it seems to be logical that the more you train, the better results you will get out of your training. But that is not the case. There is no proportional correlation at all between the time spent training and the extent of physical improvement.

This misconception arises when transferring facts from one context to another. But working out is not the same as working even though both terms contain the same verb. In fact, working out is completely different from working in many ways. If someone has a job and is paid a certain amount of money per hour, then there is a proportional correlation between the time spent working and the amount of money earned. The more you work, the more money you get. Therefore, it may seem natural to suggest applying the same approach to working out.

Falsely assuming that there is a proportional correlation between training volume and training results, however, is to miss the whole point of training.

Intensity, rather than volume, is the crucial factor that decides whether a successful training stimulus can be achieved. If training is not intense enough, there will not be any need for the body to adapt. This is a well-known fact that is often overlooked.

Too much volume may compromise intensity and thereby compromise the effect of the training session altogether. Intensity and volume are inversely proportional. Training can either be intense or long, for example running can either be a long-distance run or a sprint but not both. There is no such thing as a sprint marathon. The same applies to resistance training. The more intensely you work out, the sooner you will fatigue. You can either train intensely or you can train long.

Therefore, training programs should be planned by determining adequate training intensity first, that is a degree of training intensity to surely pass the training threshold. Then all other factors should be adjusted accordingly.

Many people still believe that there is a proportional correlation between training quantity and training results, although they are not likely to not get better results the more they work out. Many people spend hours upon hours in the gym every week, yet they are disappointed with their progress. So why do they not question the concept of “the more the better”? This is no surprise considering what psychologists call effort justification.

Effort justification

Whenever we realize that the results we get out of something clearly do not match the amount of work we put into it, we find ourselves in a state called cognitive dissonance. In order to relieve ourselves from that unpleasant condition we tend to justify the effort and try to convince ourselves that “it is/was all worth it”. This is one reason why things that we have worked a lot on are more valuable to us. Someone who buys an old-timer and spends hundreds of hours working on it is unlikely to sell it a few years later, even if offered much more money than the purchase price.

If you went to dozens of garage sales until you found that out-of-print book which you had been looking for so long, how likely are you to sell it later? If someone studies at a University for years to pass the final exam and get the degree, it will be extremely valuable to that person, even if he or she chooses a completely different career option later for which the degree would not have been necessary.

The Sistine Ceiling paintings by Michelangelo are among the world’s most famous and most admired pieces of art. The fact that it took Michelangelo from 1508 to 1512 to finish his paintings illustrates what an effort it took to create such an outstanding piece of art. It makes us appreciate it even more.

Art is only one example where effort justification can be found. There are many others. Even architecture is one of them. The pyramids of Giza are a wonderful example of this. Although there are many higher and larger buildings today, the pyramids of Giza remain to be outstanding and rightfully remain one the Seven World Wonders. After all, it took presumably 20 years of incredibly hard work to build them and they remained the tallest man-made structures in the world for more than 3,800 years. It is very unlikely that four thousand years from now the same will be said about some of the buildings from the 20^th century.

In 1929 Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, mainly for his splendid novel The Buddenbrooks which consisted of 768 pages. On the other hand, the 1954 Nobel Prize of Literature went to Ernest Hemmingway for his great short-stories and his grandiose 99-page novel The Old Man and the Sea.

The bottom line is: We might have every reason to value the effort that somebody puts into something, but whenever actions are taken to achieve a certain result, the key issue always is how adequate these actions are to achieve that particular goal.

More about Nobel Prize winners: In 1905 Albert Einstein finished several publications. All of them were so ingenious that the year 1905 was later called the wonder year of physics. One of these publications was Einstein’s doctoral thesis. When Albert Einstein first handed in his PhD thesis to Professor Alfred Kleiner, his doctoral advisor, Kleiner felt it was brilliant, yet he initially hesitated to accept the dissertation. The only thing that Kleiner criticized was that he felt Einstein’s dissertation was “zu kurz“ (German for “too short”) for a doctoral thesis. It consisted of 17 pages.

A scientist may spend his or her whole life trying to solve a problem or might solve it through a sudden flash of inspiration. Some of the greatest discoveries or inventions were brought about by coincidence. Alexander Flemming (another Nobel Prize laureate) discovered the substance he later called Penicillin when returning to his laboratory after spending some weeks on holiday with his family. When he came back he found one culture of staphylococci contaminated with fungus which destroyed the staphylococci near the fungus. His further research finally led to the development of the world’s first antibiotic. This discovery was responsible for millions of lives that could be saved by fighting serious infections with antibiotics.

But should we value Flemming’s work less because of the fact that the breakthrough in his research happened accidentally? I do not think so. Should Einstein have added some meaningless pages to his already brilliant piece of work? What if Michelangelo had not needed five years to finish his Sistine Ceiling paintings? What if he had finished them within six months? Should this make us appreciate his work less – or even more?

A side-effect of effort justification is that we do not only appreciate something more if we had to spend a lot of time on getting there. We also tend to attribute this success to the amount of work that we spent and underestimate the relevance of the quality of the process. After all, it is the result that counts, not the amount of hours we spend to get there.

We are rightfully impressed when someone says: “My car broke down. I called the mechanic who did not give up until he finally found the mistake after nine hours and then fixed it.” But is it not equally admirable if the story goes like this: “My car broke down. I called the mechanic who took one look at it, found the mistake and fixed it on the spot.” In the first version our appreciation for the mechanic’s effort is most likely caused by his not giving up, his persistence to keep looking for the mistake, but not his quality as a mechanic whereas in the second version the competence and efficiency of the mechanic clearly stand out.

Achieving the same result in much shorter time by improving the quality rather than the quantity of effort, improves the efficiency of the whole process tremendously.

Efficiency and the time factor

Everybody knows the saying “time is money” (usually attributed to Benjamin Franklin). However, this statement is incorrect. In fact, time is much more valuable than money. According to psychologists Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd time is our most valuable possession. And who could argue with that.

With regard to classical economics Zimbardo and Boyd point out that the rarer a resource is, the greater is its value. Unlike most other things that can be possessed like jewelry, gold or money, time cannot be replenished. Their statement that “(…) nothing will allow us to regain time misspent” [1] hits the nail on its head.

The outstanding value of time is also reflected economically. Overnight delivery is more valuable because of the time saved and therefore more expensive than regular delivery which may take a few days. International flights are another example. Non-stop flights are more expensive than connecting flights with a stopover that may even require a change of planes before reaching the actual destination. Although connecting flights (sometimes called “direct” flights to hide the fact that it is not a non-stop flight) cause higher costs for the airlines, they can charge more for non-stop flights because they help us save our most valuable possession: time.

Training is no exception. A training program is more efficient if it produces the same results or even better results in less time. And that is why High Intensity Training is the most efficient kind of training there is.

Those who say “I don’t care if I am wasting a lot of time in the gym as long as I am making good progress” should think twice. Even if there was no such thing as overtraining, which in fact impairs training progress, there is another factor that nobody can escape from: opportunity costs. This is another economical principle that also applies to time. And since time is our most valuable possession, it even applies more to time than to anything else.

In an economical context the relevance of opportunity costs becomes obvious. When someone decides between investing a certain amount of money on stock A instead of stock B, this decision may earn this person a certain amount of money after some time. But if he or she would have made even more money by choosing stock B instead of stock A, the profit made by choosing A is as obvious as the opportunity costs of not choosing B.

The same applies to time. Just as money spent on one thing cannot be spent on something else, the time we spend in the gym cannot be spent doing something else. Even if somebody does not mind wasting time in the gym (over)training, opportunity costs of that decision cannot be denied.

And there is one opportunity cost directly related to too much time spent training: Every minute spent (over)training means less recovery time from the workout. So training more than necessary is not just a waste of time. It is much worse than that. Training more than necessary (regardless of whether the person may enjoy time spent training) is counterproductive!

For this reason it is obvious that the “the more, the better” concept neither makes sense in an economical nor in a physiological context. Actually, the principles that are responsible for making muscles bigger and stronger have been identified a long time ago and could have been available for more than two millennia.

Recently, training science has rediscovered the legend of Milo of Croton which illustrates how the process of muscle training works in a nutshell. The lessons that can be learned from this famous ancient legend have been ignored for too long.

Milo of Croton

Figure 2: Milo of Croton

Milo of Croton was an Olympic wrestler who lived in the 6^th century BC. In fact, he may have been the most successful wrestler in Olympic history. He won the wrestling competition at the ancient Olympic games several times and was also a multiple winner of the wrestling competition at the Pythian Games at Delphi. Milo remained unbeaten for about a quarter of a century. Contemporary authors described Milo as incredibly strong. Milo, a friend of ancient mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras, allegedly once saved Pythagoras from being crushed when the roof of the house they were in broke down. Milo supported the central pillar until Pythagoras and the others could get out and then he saved himself by rushing out.

Unlike other strong men in history who were described as “naturally strong” or “blessed by God with outstanding strength” young Milo was the opposite. He was a very weak child and was beaten by the kids in the neighborhood more than once. But Milo was determined to do something about that.

According to the legend, Milo took a baby calf, put it on his shoulders and carried it around his parents’ farm. He did that exercise once every day. After several years the calf had grown to a full-grown bull so that eventually Milo was carrying a bull around the farm. Not only had the baby calf grown but so had Milo’s strength. His muscles had developed due to the progressively increasing training stimulus that they were exposed to on a regular basis.

The legend of Milo may be a bit exaggerated but it clearly shows some of the constituent parts of how training works. Obviously, among other elements, training must be:

Intense enough: It took a lot of effort and strain to lift and then carry the bull. Carrying a mouse would not have made Milo the strongest man of his time.

Progressive: Lifting the same weight in every workout will neither stimulate muscle growth nor strength.

Regular but infrequent: After working out the body needs time to recover from the strain of the workout. After adequate rest and recuperation (and time for positive adaptation), the next workout can follow. Working out once in a blue moon will not be enough to cause any positive adaptation.

Apparently, this knowledge has been available for more than two thousand years.

By the way: How many “sets” of bull-carrying did Milo perform during each “workout”? That’s right – just one!

12 След.

High Intensity Training (HIT)

1 Survival of the fittest? How much and what kind of exercise our body needs

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