Steps To Looking

10 Years Younger

#1. Built For Life Motto for a New You

Built for Life.” Kind of an interesting title, if you think about it, because it has two meanings.

The first is staying in attention-grabbing muscular shape for as long as you’re alive and able

to exercise—you will remain “built” your entire life, never embarrassed to peel off your

shirt at the beach, lake or pool. And as my colleague 60-plus-year-old bodybuilder Tony

DiCosta so aptly put it, “You’ll usually be the best built guy in the room.” (Talk about a

conversation piece!)

The second meaning is that you’re mentally and physically tough, prepared for whatever

life throws at you. You’re “built” to withstand the stress, pressures and problems that come

your way throughout your time on this planet—almost like you’ve created a bulletproof

mental and physical fortress, able to deflect any negatives, that attitude-altering artillery

shot at all of us every day.

Proper weight training can give you both of those—and contrary to popular belief, it

doesn’t take joint-busting, spine-crushing poundages to make it happen.

In fact, training with max weights can be a negative, especially as you get older. Sure, if

you’re a young ego-driven dude looking for a monster bench press, training heavy is where

it’s at. Low reps and lots of sets will build your strength to the extreme—but not necessarily

lots of muscle, as I’ll explain in future blogs—just be careful. There’s a cumulative cost. I’m

still dealing with injuries I sustained during my powerlifting years.

I’m not saying powerlifting or power bodybuilding are bad training models—just that

throwing around mega weights is NOT necessary for you to build an impressive

bodybuilder-type physique, a body so muscular that people comment on the size of your

arms or the width of your back or the vascularity streaking down your forearms. You can

have a muscular look for a lifetime, and it doesn’t take soft-tissue damage or as much work

as you think—if you train smart.

Whether you’re 18 (that’s Jonathan Lawson, my former training parter, in his 20s in the

photo above with us) and just starting the muscle-building journey or a 50-something

trainee who’s been lifting for decades (like me), lifting smart means training in the most

efficient, safest and fastest ways to build muscle and burn fat.

I promise you that Old School New Body is a no-B.S. program—that’s because my sole

goal is for you to have all the ammunition you need to own a physique that turns heads

and raises eyebrows and one that supports your health and well being. I want you to be

able to keep that attention-grabbing, muscular look—and feel healthy doing it—for the

rest of your days.

#2. Fat Burning A Different Approach

No more cardio? Well, not quite—but if you train with weights correctly, you won’t need

to visit that boring treadmill quite as often to keep your abs sharp.

And I’m not talking about interval cardio, although the weight-training method I’ve been

preaching has an HIIT feel to it. That’s the F4X method, (featured in Old School New

Body) which is moderate-weight, high-fatigue training with short rests between sets. It

burns more fat and pumps up your muscles like crazy too. Here’s the drill:

You take a weight with which you can get 15 reps, but you only do 10; rest 30 seconds,

then do it again—and so on for four sets. On the fourth set, you go to failure, and if you

get 10 reps, you increase the weight on the exercise at your next workout. Notice how

those sets are like intervals with short breaks between—you can even pace between sets

to burn extra calories, but there’s more.

Fat-burning pathway 1: While that training style does great things for muscle growth, via

myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic expansion, you also get loads of muscle burn. That lactic acid

pooling has a spiking effect on your growth hormone output—and GH is a potent fat

burner. Fire up muscle burning to get your GH churning. (GH also amplifies other anabolic

hormones, so it effects both muscle and rippedness.)

Fat-burning pathway 2: If you do the reps correctly on every set, you’ll also get myofibrillar

trauma. The myofibrils are the force-generating strands in muscle fibers. By “damaging”

them with slower, controlled negative strokes, you force the need for extra energy during

recovery. In other words, your body runs hotter while you’re out of the gym as it revs to

repair the microtears.

To attain that extra fat-burning trauma, use one-second positives and three-second

negatives on all 10 reps of all four sets. On a bench press that’s one second up and three

seconds down. It’s the slow lowering that will produce the metabolic momentum after

your workout. (That rep speed will also give you 40 seconds of tension time on every set,

an ideal hypertrophic TUT.)

Fat-burning pathway 3: Now if you really want to get some blubber-busting microtrauma,

try your last set of a F4X sequence in X-centric style. That’s one-second positives and

sixsecond negatives. You may have to reduce the weight, but it will be worth it. Try for

eight of those, 56 seconds of tension time, and you should feel the results the next day.

Your muscles will be aching, but it’s a good indication that fat is baking.

F4X for a GH surge, slower negatives for fat-burning micro trauma and X-centric for even

more time under tension and fat extinction. It all adds up to faster leanness with less

meanness—because you’ll need less cardio. Prepare for acid-etched abs! Yes!! Even as you

age this system works, in fact it is the closest thing we have to the fountain of youth.

#3. Reviving Your Lean Machine : The Truth About Soreness

When you first started working out, you probably hated it. Soreness hurts! But as you

progressed, you no doubt embraced it—most of us consider it a signal that we’ve done

our diligence and stimulated plenty of muscle growth. But is that true?

The fact is, there are no studies connecting muscle soreness to hypertrophy. Okay, don’t

stop reading yet; you will get some good stuff from being a bit sore–and you’ll probably

even want to strive for it. But first you need to know what causes muscle soreness.

It’s believed that the pain is caused by microtrauma in muscle fibers—and it’s primarily

triggered by the negative, or eccentric, stroke of an exercise—like when you lower a bench

press, squat or curl rep.

Once your body repairs those microtears, it follows that the muscle should grow larger;

however, that trauma is in the myofibrils, the force-generating actin and myosin strands in

the fiber. Those strands grab onto and pull across one another to cause muscular

contraction. When you control the negative stroke of a rep, there is friction as those strands

drag across each other in an attempt to slow movement speed to prevent injury—and that

dragging, it’s believed, is what inflicts the microtrauma.

That’s a simplification, but you get the idea. So it appears that some growth can occur after

muscle soreness is repaired, but it’s in the myofibrils. More and more research is beginning

to show that those force-generating strands do not contribute the majority of muscle size;

serious mass comes via sarcoplasmic expansion. That’s the “energy fluid” in the fibers that’s

filled with glycogen (from carbs), ATP, calcium, noncontractile proteins, etc.

So if soreness is an indication of only small amounts of muscle growth, why strive for it?

Well, even small amounts of growth contribute to overall mass. Most of us want every

fraction we can scrape up. But the real reason to seek some soreness is to burn more fat.

When the myofibrils are damaged by emphasizing the eccentric, the body attempts to

repair them as quickly as possible. That repair process takes energy, a lot of which comes

from bodyfat. The process usually takes many days, so your metabolism is stoked to a

higher level for 48 hours or more, helping you get leaner faster. (Note: High-intensity

interval training, like sprints alternated with slow jogs, damages muscle fibers during the

intense intervals, the sprints, which is why HIIT burns more fat in the long run than

steadystate cardio where no muscle damage occurs.)

Do you need heavy negative-only sets to get that extra bit of size and metabolic

momentum? That’s one way, but negative-accentuated, or X-centric, sets may be a better,

safer way.

For an X-centric set you take a somewhat lighter poundage than your 10RM and raise the

weight in one second and lower it in six. That one-second-positive/six-second-negative

cadence does some great things, starting with myofibrillar trauma for some soreness. While

you’re coping with that extra post workout muscle pain, remember that it can build the

myofibrils and that it’s stoking your metabolism during the repair process for more fat

burning.

The second BIG advantage is sarcoplasmic expansion. At seven seconds per rep and eight

reps per set, you get almost an entire minute of tension time (seven times eight is 56

seconds). A TUT of 50 to 60 seconds is something most bodybuilders never get—which is

a shame because that’s optimal stress for an anabolic cascade and this is the perfect way to

train as you age. I call it Old School New Body!

You can do an X-centric set after your heavy pyramid—if you’re into heavy training. In

other words, use it as a backoff set.

If you’re more into moderate-poundage, high-fatigue mass building, as I am with the F4X

method featured in the Old School New Body method, you can use X-centric as the last

set of the sequence. Reduce the weight and do a one-up-six-down cadence. You’ll get sore,

build some extra size and—bonus—burn for fat. How great is that?

More details, CLICK HERE

Till next time, stay tuned, train smart and be Built for Life.

Steve Holman