Advanced Cycles For Advanced Lifters (Part 3) | Bodybuilding

By MickHart
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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 remainder of your exercises can be split across the week at whatever set and rep scheme you choose. Say for example you are specialising in the overhead press you might wish to squat + press on Monday, chin + press on Wednesday and bench + press on Friday. I find it best to keep poundages for the other lifts at about 80 - 90% of maximums for whatever 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.

For example if your specialisation lift is the overhead press then rotate your bench press so that it always falls on one of the 6 x 2 days, not on one of the more intense days. This makes sure that your heavy overhead pressing does not make benching impossible. The same would apply if squats were your main lift and you were deadlifitng for assistance work. You would not squat heavy and deadlift on the same day, as your deadlift would most likely not be worthwhile. The name of the game is maintenance when it comes to your other lifts.

Once the six week period is over you will have to go onto your next specialisation lift and begin all over. You may even like to consider going back to a more traditional bodybuilding routine so you can get your new strength working on making more and bigger muscles, so you should increase the rep range a bit. It is so sad to say though and to my horror, that so many bodybuilders just disregard their newly formulated strength and go back to doing leg extensions once per month as training my way is just "too tough".

I'm sorry to be such a mean old sod but it is utterly true. People are all too quick to disregard methods that work extremely well if they take them out of their comfort zone. Need I remind you that if strength training and bodybuilding were comfortable then everyone would be big and strong?

People often ask me just what sort of results are we talking about when it comes to strength gains in a routine like this. Well I can boast 7.5 - 10% on a lift for each session of suffering and big increases on repetition work post 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.

We all have our differences and I'm not quite Mr Universe, but I can assure you that there are a great number of bodybuilders in the world who could better my results. You really just have to kick yourself and get doing new routines and ones that hurt. If you come across any good one just e-mail them to me, Mick Hart. Check out the MickHartBlog which is there for those who like suffering.

About the Author

Written By top international Bodybuilding And Steroid Expert Mick Hart. For further Bodybuilding And Training Information visit Mick's New blog

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