Six of the best: six champs reveal a favorite Weider training principle

Flex, July, 2002 by Julian Schmidt

Every body builder employs exercises, sets and reps to get bigger, but there's a big difference between bigger and biggest. The latter finds an edge, a catalyst that prods his muscles to grow a little faster, swell a little larger, crack a little deeper than everyone else's, until he stands superlative in the sport. It may be something as brutally simple as an "overload shock" or as cephalalgically intellectual as the mind-muscle connection in "continuous tension." Maybe it's supersets, trisets, descending sets or giant sets; or maybe quality training or instinctive training. Perhaps it's peak contraction, forced reps or even a combination of any number of ingenious techniques cataloged and codified by Joe Weider in his passion to perpetually push the envelope of possibility. Joe calls them training principles. The champions call them magic. Here, six champions, themselves products of these principles, each casts a vote for his favorite.

SHAWN RAY

DESCENDING SETS

I've been one of the top five bodybuilders in the world for more than a dozen years, and I can trace much of my success to the fact that use descending sets--or what I call "drop sets"--during the last four weeks of contest training. Drop sets shock everything: my muscles, my system and my mind--or motivation--by stimulating me in a different way and forcing me to a new level of fatigue and the muscles to a new degree of pump.

Let's say I'm doing leg extensions: When I reach my last set, I'll do 10 repetitions at 250 pounds, then quickly drop the weight to 200 pounds for another 10 repetitions, then drop it to 150 pounds and immediately do 10 more repetitions. Drop sets for me are continuous, with virtually no rest between sets, so all of those are counted as one set of 30 repetitions.

A major advantage of drop sets is that they are applicable to just about any body part and any exercise. I especially like to use them for bench presses, standing barbell curls and squats, where the final set burns so deep that you can literally feel the striations being acid-etched into the muscle. For barbell exercises, I have a couple of spotters standing by; then, the instant I reach failure, I have them strip a plate off each side, so I can keep right on going into my next set of 10 repetitions. Dumbbell work is also ideally suited for drop sets; I just work my way down the rack.

Regardless of the exercise or equipment, the principle behind it all is that you're compressing more sets and reps into a shorter time period, thereby hitting the muscle more frequently and burning in more detail. That's why, when a competition is right around the corner, I know it's drop-set time.

TOM PRINCE

FORCED REPS

No muscle can grow unless you teach it how to lift beyond its present capacity. So, for the last set of each exercise, I go to failure at five, six or seven reps, then I have someone help me squeeze out two or three more. By training past failure, or muscle fatigue, I'm introducing my muscle to a new region of superstress that it would otherwise never experience. This is extremely important, because it's in this region that the best growth occurs.

Let me put it another way: A muscle will not grow unless it's taught how to grow, then forced to put that knowledge to the grindstone with practice, which means workout after workout of forced-rep training. It's no different from learning to ride a bike: Your dad first has to help stabilize you until you develop the coordination to do everything on your own. In lifting heavy weights, your body first needs to become acquainted with new stresses and balances more cumbersome than it is accustomed to handling. Forced reps are a means of demonstrating to your body that it can do it, when it thought it couldn't.

I use forced reps with every bodypart except abdominals and traps, and they're especially effective with barbell exercises. Free-weight compound movements, such as bench presses, squats and military presses, involve a manifold of stabilizing forces that are initially more awkward to control but ultimately more mass-producing, once learned.

Machines also lend themselves to forced reps, except that the restricted plane of the movement renders this technique more effective for increasing the size of isolated muscles. This is not to say that forced reps on a machine are ineffective for a compound muscle group; it's just that on a machine, the best use of forced reps is to target a lagging muscle.

CRAIG TITUS

FLUSHING

My whole career, I trained heavy just for the sake of heavy, but my most eye-opening physique improvements came when I switched to using Joe Weider's Flushing Training Principle. It was also an education in physiology; it taught me that a muscle grows like a glutton when you pump it so full of blood that it can't hold one more drop.

Blood is muscle food, so that's understandable, but I use flushing primarily as a gauge for the quality of my workout. The tighter and more swollen my muscle, the more blood I've pumped in there with quality reps, so that fatigue is determined not from the muscle going dead, but from the swelling having reached a pain threshold I can no longer endure.