Hardcore Bulking Part II - Training

In the first article of the series we attacked hardcore dieting and how to gain maximum mass without maximum fat gains. There are two more pieces to this puzzle, training and cycles. This article is going to focus on the aspects of hardcore training, the type of training that goes along with all those calories you have been eating. Off-season is the time we hit the heavy weights, a return to the basics, meaning no cable-curls, no chrome weights, and no listening to Backstreet Boys while training.

In a return to the basics, I assume and hope that you have been to the basics before, if not this article is exactly what you need to start making gains again. We need to define the basics, what they are, what they mean and why you need them. When I refer to the basics, it is in reference to basic compound weight lifting movements; squats, deadlifts, bench, clean and press, etc. The core of your weight training should consist of basic compound movements since they work the maximum amount of body parts at one time, they require stabilizer muscles for support, and you can use the most weight possible to create hypertrophy.

A compound movement such as the bench press is used primarily to train your chest, but in addition to working your chest you will also train your triceps, deltoids, rotator cuff, biceps, lats, and all tiny stabilizer muscles required to balance and support the weight. Core exercises use more muscles than isolation exercises; therefore, you can use more weight since more muscles are recruited to lift the weight. If you want big triceps, you should bench heavy. This may go against ingrained logic, by now you might be thinking how the hell am I going to get huge triceps when I am benching to get a big chest.

Well, look at simple logic'.if you do the ever popular tricep pushdowns as your mainstay of tricep training, you are short cutting your way to huge tri's. If you are truly strong on tricep pushdowns, say you are so strong you can do the entire weight stack at your gym, you might be pushing 200 +/- pounds and you're probably thinking you are gonna get huge triceps'wrong. An isolation exercise will never give you the mass you are looking for. Even if you can pushdown 200 pounds and you get a great pump, that is nowhere near the amount of weight you are putting on your triceps for growth when you are benching 315 pounds or more. No matter how much you can pushdown, it will still never be as much weight as you can press, and with that logic, you will never get big triceps because you are short cutting yourself on gains. Obviously if you are doing pushdowns with 200 pounds but can bench press 315 pounds, you are not using the most efficient training to grow big triceps.

This logic applies to all your body parts; bicep curls are nowhere near as effective as reverse grip bent over rows for back, leg extensions will never get your legs big like squats and on and on. So now that you understand the importance of compound exercises, you need to incorporate them into your training off-season for ultimate growth. There is a time for isolation exercises, like during pre-contest training, or when doing pre-exhaustion movements for higher intensity training.

The whole training program is designed with the idea of maximum weights, maximum recovery, and maximum growth. It is important to remember that muscular growth takes place outside the gym, not inside it. Growth comes from rest and proper nutrition. In the gym training is actually causing trauma and damage to your muscles, you are not going to grow until you leave the gym, eat and sleep. This training program is designed to incorporate with my hardcore bulking diet, the training matches the eating. Compound movements burn a lot of calories, cause the most tissue damage and require massive amounts of calories and protein to repair and recover.

Each muscle is only trained one time per week, you can train most body parts multiple times per week when you are doing primarily isolation exercises, but heavy compound movements require lots of rest, usually one week will suffice for recovery in most trainees, but since many exercises overlap body parts, if you do not feel fully recovered before your next workout, don't train.

Ectomorphs require more rest than mesomorphs or endomorphs. If you are not making gains on this training program and you are following my hardcore bulking diet, chances are you are overtrained. Common signs of overtraining include; restlessness, sleepless nights, chronic fatigue, lack of appetite, loss of interest in usual activities, decreasing strength, and body aches among others. There is an old saying that there is no such thing as overtraining, just under eating. While this may be true in many individuals, this will not be true if you are following my hardcore bulking diet.

The following is a 4 day per week workout, designed to train each body part one time per week, with overlap usually working each part twice per week. Each workout day should allow for one hour of training, rest periods are to be 2-3 minutes between sets for all large compound movements, and 1 minute for smaller exercises. You should strive to increase weight by 5lbs per week in all large compound movements, and 2.5 lbs in small movements. It is important to either go up in reps or weight each workout. Do not guess, keep a log book, just as with your diet, you cannot know what you are doing and where you are going, if you do not know where you have been. It takes 2 seconds to write down your sets and reps in a small book, and then refer to it the next week so you know what you need to improve on when you start your workout. Have a solid game plan, do not walk around the gym with imaginary lat syndrome like the rest of the morons who do not make any gains year after year. Commit to making gains, follow my training and diet and you will grow'it is that simple.

By Gavin Kane