Strength and Physique

Just a quick update: I have a new article here at Bodybuilding.com, an online reprint of my Planet Muscle article “Power Bodybuilding.” The article addresses training for the entire strength spectrum: explosive power, maximal strength, hypertrophy and strength endurance. Also, Tactics and Strategies is currently unavailable. It’ll be re-released soon with some additional chapters, including a chapter on ab training, which a lot of readers have been asking for.

Hey James,

Kind regards,
Thomas

My Answer: I think everybody, not just ectomorphs, can gain more muscle if they adhere to the principles in the 10-8-6-15 article. This doesn’t mean everybody should follow this particular program all the time. But if you follow the principles of brief but frequent training with one exercise per body part, then you will gain and maintain muscle much better than a split routine with multiple exercises for each body part.

Rest periods are flexible. You rest briefly during density phases where you’re pushing your muscles to the limit. You rest for 3 minutes or longer for decompression phases where you pull back on your training and allow your body to overcompensate and grow.

But the principles of frequent training (hitting each body part directly or indirectly 3 times per week) and focused training (one or two exercises per body part) is at the core of all my programs. The Neo-Classical program has workouts which allow for multiple exercises for each body part, but this is because the Neo-Classical program is meant for advanced bodybuilders.

The Neo-Classical program also has a hybrid design with regards to frequency. In other words, it is a combination of a full body routine and a split routine. I devote a whole chapter to this hybrid design in Strength and Physique Volume One.

With regard to diet, I prefer to pay attention to macronutrient profiles as opposed to calorie intake. You should still follow bulking and cutting phases, but during your bulking phase follow a macronutrient profile of 33% protein, 33% carbs and 33% fat or something close to this ratio.

During your cutting phase, follow 60% fat, 30% protein and 10% carbs. Those carbs should be from primarily greens. So to sum up, follow a higher calorie Zone diet to bulk for a couple weeks, then follow an Atkins diet for a couple of weeks.

A great service to use that’s free is Fit Day. It allows you to analyze your diet and observe both your calorie intake and your macronutrient profile.

"I am a police officer in a small town and I am starting your strength training for the law enforcement warrior program. My goal I would like to achieve out of this program is to better my appearance in uniform. I would like to gain muscle and lose fat. I am 28 yrs old approximately 5′ 8″ and 145lbs with a relatively high metabolism. Only until recently have I began to gain fat weight around my mid section.

“As a cop you realize that I don’t have the opportunity to eat where and when I please and usually I just bite and swallow my food. My question I would like to ask is, what would you suggest as a nutritional program for this type of workout?

“I do work day shift which gives me the opportunity to eat breakfast around 9:00am and then I eat lunch anywhere between 11:30 and 1:30. I then come home and eat again around 5:00 to 7:00pm.

“We have a Dairy Queen, Pizza buffet, Subway, Chinese restaurant, and a soul food dinner in the town I work in. I normally eat one of the above and rarely if ever bring my food from home. On a cops salary I do not have the money to buy all those fancy meals and usually I don’t know how to make or cook them if I did have the money.

“Do you know of a relatively cheap easy meal plan for dummies that would allow me to eat nutritiously for this workout that I am starting to do?”

Thank you for your time and patience,

Detective Wilkes Fraser
Wrightsville Police Department

My Answer: Oh it’s tough being a lawman going from case to case, lead to lead and eating when you can. When aspects of your life are not under your control, such as diet and time, then you really don’t have control over the outcome with regards to your physique. So I strongly suggest you learn how to cook or at least pack cold meals. That way you control what you eat.

With you at 5′8″ 145 lbs. with some midsection fat, I’d say you’re heading toward the skinny/fat look. Essentially you’re an ectomorph with some belly fat, which is a result of physical and mental stress (duh! you’re a cop) and poor diet. You can’t control the stress you get, only how you react to it.

What you can control is your diet, so I suggest you eliminate as many white carbs from your diet as possible. That means no sugar, bread, pastas, fries, potatoes, rice, alcohol, etc. Your body is producing a lot of cortisol due to the stress, so you’re not able metabolize carbs very well, which is why it’s being dumped as fat around your midsection.

Of course, given your list of restaurants, easier said than done. For breakfast, have eggs in any form. Bacon and sausage are fine, but no cereal, hash browns or toast. Coffee (no sugar) is fine.

For lunch, eat a protein portion with a vegetable portion, but no starchy carbs, no soft drinks. So if you eat at the Chinese restaurant or soul food place, meat and veggies would be fine, but rice, noodles and corn bread would not. Dinner: same thing.

Be sure to drink lots of water throughout the day to alleviate the detrimental effects of cortisol on your health. Strength and Physique V1 has a chapter on diet, so be sure to look into that.

"I am following your Shotgun program, and after 6 weeks I’m in love with it. I do really like the template, and the possibility to choose exercises for the troubleshooting days.

"However I have a question about the shotgun movement of the third day, the bench press. I found that even if I lift a lot less with the dumbbell bench press (52 lbs) than the barbell bench press (132 lbs), my pecs are much more sore the next day with dumbbells.

"Is the dumbbell bench press intense enough to be a shotgun movement? Can it help increase strength (and eventually mass) as much as barbell? I’m working with the format 6×3. Thanks in advance for your input."

Regards,
Guillaume

My Answer- Yes the dumbbell press performed in a 6×3 format would qualify as a Shotgun movement. Even though you are using less weight on the dumbbell bench press as opposed to the barbell bench press, the dumbbell version is superior for hypertrophy for 2 reasons:

1) There is a greater range of motion with the dumbbell bench press. Whereas the movement stops at the bottom of the bench press when the barbell touches your chest, the weights will go past your chest in the dumbbell version. This will give you a greater stretch in the pecs, and stretching a muscle under high tension (i.e. heavy weight) will induce greater muscular size.

2) Dumbbell movements require greater stabilization from the muscles being worked. In other words, your chest, triceps and stabilizer muscles have to work much harder to move heavy dumbbells in a straight line as opposed to a barbell.

In general, heavy dumbbell movements are superior to barbell movements for hypertrophy for the upper body.