If you saw me walking down the street, your first thought wouldn’t be, “Hey, that guy looks like a neurophysiologist.” You’d probably guess that I’m a musclehead, which is fine. That’s exactly what I am. And if you guessed that I make my living using my brawn as much as my brain, I’d still take it as a compliment. I used to work as a nightclub bouncer, asking belligerent drunks to leave the premises and not taking “no” for an answer. It’s a tough job, and I feel fortunate to have gotten out with minimal scar tissue. But I’m also a science geek who has a master’s degree from the University of Arizona, with a focus on neurophysiology, the study of how the nervous system works in conjunction with the muscles to enable movement and improve human performance. My interest in the subject isn’t remotely academic: I want to know everything I can about making the human body bigger, stronger, faster, and leaner. As soon as I think I’ve come across information that applies to those goals, I try it out in my own workouts. If it works for me, I try it with the clients and athletes I train for a living. And if it works for them, I write about it.
I’ve been writing for T-Nation, an online bodybuilding magazine, since 2000. If you had heard of me before you came across this book, that’s probably why. Each article I write is typically seen by tens of thousands of readers, and some articles have generated hundreds of comments, as well as discussions that spill over to other sites that aren’t affiliated with T-Nation. Those discussions can get heated, and some even turn vicious. But I’ve been around long enough to realize that heat and hate always accompany a genuine paradigm shift, even in something as apolitical as strength training.
When one of my articles gains traction, it’s usually because I’ve challenged a long-practiced and long-accepted idea. A few years ago, for example, everyone agreed that the best way to build muscle mass was with sets of 8 to 12 repetitions of each exercise in your workout program. If you did fewer repetitions, you were building strength at the expense of muscle size. I flipped that around, showing readers that working with heavy weights and relatively low repetitions- 3 to 5 per set-would build size and strength simultaneously. In fact, I argued, heavy weights are the best tool for building muscle mass.
That’s not just my opinion; it’s one of the most basic rules of exercise science. You can’t pass a course in exercise physiology without knowing this rule. Yet, almost every trainer and strength coach ignores it as soon as he leaves the classroom.
It’s called the size principle, which I explain in detail in . The executive summary is this: Muscle fibers come in different sizes and have different roles. But your body always uses them in the same order, with the smallest fibers going first and the biggest fibers only going into action when you absolutely need to generate all-out strength and power for a single, isolated action.
So I questioned the idea that the best way to build bigger muscles is with techniques that couldn’t possibly employ all the fibers within those muscles.
Here’s an analogy:
Imagine that you’ve bought a company, only to discover that a percentage of your employees sit around all day with nothing to do. And imagine that the previous owner of the company had done this deliberately, thinking it was a good idea to employ people who didn’t have any actual work to perform. If you wanted to make that company succeed, the first thing you’d do is … well, to be realistic, most business owners would layoff all those workers. But you’re smarter than most, and when you look at those workers, you realize they’re incredibly skilled in one particular area of your business, an area that the previous owner had neglected. When you give them work to do in that area, your business immedi- ately generates more revenue, at the same cost. After all, you were paying the workers any- way. Now you’re paying them and getting something in return.
The admonition to use heavy weights with low reps proved to be both popular and effective. For many lifters, the one thing they hadn’t tried was working with heavier weights. I’ve heard this from more readers than I could ever count. They’d been told for decades that lifting near-maximum weights was both dangerous and ineffective for building muscle.
Why were they told that? The standard explanation- that heavy weights would make their muscles stronger but not bigger- is a truly breathtaking misunderstanding of basic exercise science.
Why wouldn’t stronger muscles also be bigger, all else being equal? Or, put another way, why would muscles get bigger unless they needed to get stronger? Why would your body add muscle tissue unless there’s a functional reason for it to be there?
I wasn’t the first lifter to see the light, of course. Not even close. Coaches and trainers and athletes have observed throughout history that lifting heavy things makes humans bigger and stronger. If the Neanderthals had invented gyms before they went extinct, they might very well have figured it out before humans did.’
That said, the pursuit of muscle size has always been the bastard stepchild of exercise science the~ry and practical application. There’s a reason why thousands of scientists today work to expand our knowledge ofstrength training, while there’s no recognized discipline called size training. In the lab, an increase in muscle size is regarded as the by-product of an increase in strength. In the gym, an increase in strength is seen as the by-product of an increase in size. And in the places where the best strength coaches work with the best athletes, size and strength are both by-products of improved performance. If the process of making a sprinter faster also makes his muscles bigger and stronger, that’s fine- as long as the athlete keeps getting faster.
The three groups I’ve just described-lab rats, gym rats, and performance rats-don’t talk to each other. Or maybe I should say they tend to talk past each other. They’re all con- cerned with the same things. They just talk about them in different ways.
Which brings me back to my breakthrough as a popular giver of advice. I told readers to do something that many, many people before me had figured out. It wouldn’t be basic science if everyone who studied science weren’t aware of it. But nobody was telling the gym rats what everyone in the labs and high- performance training centers knew, under- stood, and sometimes even implemented. In fact, for the past 4 decades, if not longer, aspiring bodybuilders and muscleheads have been told to do the opposite.
That’s why most ofthe lifters you see in gyms, and a lot of the people reading this book, believe that the best way to build muscle is with moderate weights used in high-volume workouts involving lots of sets and reps of lots of different exercises. (Chapter 3 gives the full story of why so many people are so confused about the best way to build muscle.)
On one level, what I’d told readers was ridiculously simple, and I could have retired right then, knowing I’d left my fellow muscle- heads with enough information to make real improvements.
But on another level, I knew there was more for me to learn, and more to share. That’s where the neurophysiology comes in. The more I learned about the way the nervous system works, and how it recovers from the work it does, the more I realized that this was some of the most important information a musclehead should have.
Specifically, I started thinking beyond the relationship between the amount of weight you lift and the size of the muscles you build. I focused on the speed at which you lift, and how it affects the parts of the nervous system that control your favorite muscles. The more I looked into it, the more I began to suspect that maybe we had this whole thing backward: Instead of thinking mainly in terms of the weight on the bar, maybe we should redirect our attention to how fast we can move it. After all, the weights are tools for building muscle, no more, no less. It’s how we use the tools that determines the results we get from our work- outs. And the basic science seemed pretty clear that the best way to use the tools was at the fastest speed possible.
I talked to others in my field- people who, like me, were muscleheads first but lived double lives as scientists or performance specialists. They agreed that the idea made sense. So I wrote an article for T-Nation called “Everything Is About to Change.”
In retrospect, the title was a bit overenthusiastic. As many helpful Internet experts pointed out, my argument about the importance of lifting speed is not new to power athletes. Weightlifters, discus throwers, sprinters, and many others whose performance depends on a high-speed application of strength have known for decades that they have to train fast to get fast. A guy who aspires to Olympic gold in the shot put would never waste his time lifting weights at slow speeds, just as an elite sprinter wouldn’t be caught dead jogging. To get fast you have to train fast. You also have to avoid training slow. These guys have magnificent physiques- hell, the women in those pursuits are more muscular than most guys you see in gyms- so, clearly, they were way ahead of me on this one.
The problem, as I explained earlier, is that the coaches and athletes who understand the muscle-building benefits of fast lifts don’t talk shop with bodybuilders. They don’t hang out in Gold’s Gym offering free advice. And frankly, it’s hard to imagine the average musclehead taking them seriously if they did.
So a better title for that article might have been “Your Concept ofthe Ideal Lifting Speed as It Applies to the Size of Your Muscles Is About to Change.” It wouldn’t have been catchy, but I’d have gotten more points for accuracy.