Great Cycles For Advanced Lifters (Part 3)

If you are in week 2 and find yourself unable to face the 80% x 6 x 2 light session because you “feel tired” then you can go back to reading Men’s Health magazine cause you are not destined to be strong. Feeling tired is just a fact of life to an athlete, not an alarm bell that you need to take a week off and stay in bed playing with your pee-pee. You judge how well you are recovering by whether or not you made your lifts. If you are making your lifts you are recovering just fine, whether you feel like shit or not.

The remaining exercises can be organised throughout the week at any set and rep scheme you like. Let’s take you doing overhead press as your speciality, well you may choose to squat + press on Monday, chin + press on Wednesday and bench + press on Friday. What works for me best is keeping the poundages for the remaining lifts at around 80 - 90% of maximums, regardless of the rep range I am using.

Should you be able to bench 100Kg for 12 reps, you would have to be able to sets of 80-90Kg for 10-12 reps in the bench. Another important tip is to rotate the days you use for assistance work so that you never perform similar assistance to your main lift on a “heavy” day.

Let’s say that your specialisation lift were the overhead press, well then make your bench press so that it always falls on one of the 6 x 2 days, and not on a more intense day. This way your heavy overhead pressing allows benching to be possible. It would be exactly the same as if squats happened to be your main lift and you should then do deadlifting as assistance work. That means that you just couldn’t squat heavy and deadlift on the same day as you just wouldn’t get anything out of your deadlift. The only way forward for other lifts is by maintenance only.

When the first 6 weeks are up you can decide on another specialisation lift and start again or just revert back to a more regular bodybuilding routine in order to put that new strength to work by creating even more muscle by increasing the rep range slightly. But anyway it goes without saying that most people have a total disregard for their incredible gains they have just achieved and revert back to doing leg extensions once a month cause training my way was just “too tough”.

I hope you don’t take it the wrong way or anything, but it’s true. Great training methods are turned down just on the grounds that it gets uncomfortable. It may have gone unnoticed but not everyone around us has got big muscles and that’s because it takes dedication and resistance.

A few guys have asked me what kind of results they can expect on a routine like this in terms of strength gains. I get a guaranteed 7.5 - 10% on a lift every time I put myself through this torture, with bigger increases on repetition work following the program.

I can actually share with you past results for this very program with a deadlift going from 200Kg to 220Kg and reps with 180kg from 6 to an easy 11 at a bodyweight of 93Kg. Pretty good for a six week training program, I’d say. I am actually looking at shooting for 180Kg x 20 reps by the end of this year and to do that by increasing my limit strength repetition the lifting will increase automatically.

No 2 people are the same and I am hardly the incredible hulk, and I am sure other bodybuilders could get better results by doing my routine. You need to have balls to go out there and look for better routines and if you find any, well please share them with me. Just look for the Mick Hart blog and you will see what I mean when there are a lot of great bodybuilders out there and I am honoured to have them sharing their thoughts and ideas with me.

Related Articles

• Great Cycles For Advanced Lifters (Part 2)
• Intense Cycles For Advanced Lifters (Part 1)
• Full Face Helmet - Motorcycles Are Cheaper In The Long Run
• The Importance of Advanced Eye Care
• Keeping Track of Your Cycles After Tubal Reversal