Getting Massive

When a woman gets in touch with me, its 90% of the time because she wants to slim down with the boys it is a little more varied, probably about 30%. The huge majority wanna know how to get massive. That’s pretty much a quote too. “Ste, how can I get massive?”

There has been some serious amount of text wrote about this and an enormous amount of gums bumped in gyms and bars and workplaces across the country. Everyone claiming to know the secret. To know the foolproof way of getting MASSIVE!

What I am not going to do is say this is the secret, that would be silly of me and make me look like every other joker who hasn’t a clue. What I will do is tell you a little bit of how the body works and a little bit about something that I have been doing for a couple of months and the results I have seen.
You can make the decision whether you wish to take it up.

Ok, the human body is a fabulous piece of kit, it adapts. It adapts so well that there are literally hundreds of body types and shapes. You can force your body into growing muscle by forcing it to deal with heavy weights on a regular basis, your body will develop muscles to cope with the added stresses of the regular weight sessions. This is also true in the opposite, if you only do cardio-vascular training you will become leaner and slimmer as this is the desired bodyshape of a runner. You body will reduce your mass so it doesn’t have to cope with heavy muscles pounding the joints when running.

We use this knowledge when weight training to target specific groups of muscles and stimulate them into growth. Here is the standard muscle growth pattern of training;

5 sets of 8-10 repetitions using approx 80% of your 1RM (one rep max, how much you can do, once)

This has been a staple of people training for decades. I will not tell you that this is wrong. It is how I have trained for years, it is probably how you train. My typical gym session takes two hours per muscle group. This is very time consuming and tiring, meaning I then get a reduced time to do cardio, stretch and do the other things needed to be done in a day.

Around Christmas time my training partner was telling me about a method of training which isn’t new, just new to us. It was developed by a gent in the 70’s, called Mike Mentzer, if you are serious about weights I suggest you read up on it, and it is called High Intensity.

Now High Intensity is not something a beginner should attempt, this will almost certainly result in injury. It is also something that cannot be performed alone. The instructors at Boot Camp Sport and Fitness have been training with this method since December and writing down EVERYTHING about it while we do. We plan to produce our own, updated take on Mike Mentzers theory. He never took it further as he died (unrelated) a long time ago. He was a fantastic bodybuilder in the same era as Arnold Schwarzenegger.

High Intensity sessions last about 15 minutes, a far cry from spending 2 hours doing the same thing. It never sat right with me hearing about it. It actually doesn’t sit right while and once I have done it either, but once you get stuck into it the results are phenomenal. The main theory behind HI is that you work your muscles to failure, and then some. This sparks of rapid growth as your body believes it has been “breached” if you like and performs panic repairs on your muscles, engorging them with blood and building solid and strong muscles, that just never seemed to happen in the old ways. In FIFTEEN minutes! It doesn’t make sense to those of us with experience in this industry. But it works.

An example sessions looks like this. We pre-exhaust the main muscle group that we plan to work, in this case we are doing chest, so we use the pec-dec to isolate and exhaust the muscles of the chest. We begin with a weight we could do 5 or 6 times and do it 20 times. Your partner or instructor helps. They take small % of the weight and force you to keep performing, when you are incapable. If you are doing this right you will be thrashing about swearing, grunting, shaking and generally getting stared at in the gym. Once your instructor sees you are truly finished its time to get a compound exercise done. We do incline machine bench press, its safer. If you can perform one repetition thats a bonus, you probably wont be able to do any unassisted, so your partner takes the weight, and you resist it. This is called negative reps, slowly resist the weight as it comes down, and your partner pulls it right back to the top again. It is relentless. You will be kicking about alot now. We are using 100kgs which is heavy. Doing static holds and slow resists until you cannot even raise your arms. Think your done? Not quite yet, we now head right over to cable cross over pulleys, use a very very low weight, and define those muscles with crossing the cables over in front of your chest, nice and slowly, for 20 or so reps. This will really finish you off. Time for a shower.

Its madness, it works, and it should not be done without supervision, or without a qualified professional to help you through it.

High Intensity works because of the complete overload experienced by your muscles. If fuelled correctly once you leave the gym, this will encourage fantastic growth. It also works because you body gets used to the exercises and even order that you perform your training in, and this is such a different way of training if forces your body to adapt and to grow.

Thats all Im saying about it for now. Go to YouTube and type in High Intensity Mike Mentzer, you’ll see what I mean.

For any help, or questions about structuring your own programs, or to get massive, contact me at info@bootcampacademy.com I’m always happy to help.

Thanks for reading


Stephen Howson