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Old 07-19-2005, 04:21 PM
Darkhorse Darkhorse is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Viscious
One more thing to add...

Given a sufficient bulking diet, most beginning-to-intermediate natural trainees can gain 17lbs in 5 months. The real question, then, is how much of it will be water, fat, and lean muscle. HD was particularly bad about this. Most who gained a lot of weight on HD in a short time also gained a lot of fat, usually around 1:1 muscle to fat. Those who did better than that, would store the excess calories in glycogen stores and gain a lot of water weight. Easily 4-6lbs can be gained from water weight alone over this way in a short time, but only by people who either have below-average glycogen stores or highly conditioned muscles by which more of excess carbs can be shuttled into the stores. It happens that athletes and high-volume trainees fit that bill. They can partially deflect the bulking diet by storing it in water, which would create higher LBM gains.

But, that in turn suffers due to the relatively light frequency. A person is caught in a double-dang situation with the HD schedule. If you are sedentary between each metabolically iffy session, you start to lose your aerobic conditioning, your water weight wll drop, your metabolism will drop, and in turn your ability to partition nutrients optimally drops. But if you remain active and vigorous, you hurt your potential for real-world gains session to session. The only "safe" alternative to mantain that weight is to eat a proper bulking diet everyday; bu without the exercise, you'll get fat. LBM gains taper off rapidly.

Therefore, a person who gained 17lbs in 5 months on HD may only gain 5-10lbs in fat, 7-12lbs in LBM, and 3-4lbs of that is in glycogen/water storage. That in itself is not a bad, but it tempers the rapid results from said program.

And it levies why HDers find it difficult to continue gaining signficantly on the program. The HDer is basically left with two choices if they stick with the program. They can eat significantly all the time and risk a lot of fat gain. Or they can eat smaller meals, accepting that a 10-15lbs gain (for the beginner/intermediate) is a very good year as long as they feel very strong. The combination of their strength gains and their belief in their mediocre genetics or ectomorph metabolism soothes their doubts over whether another routine could produce better results. If you were a trainee with normal-to-average metabolism, pretty strong conditioning from previous training experience, and a desire to eat calorically significant meals, you could veer toward true bulking with less worry of fat. Those who don't, will stick to their lower calorie diets and reinforce their prophecy that "significant strength gains before real size gains." When the strength numbers stagnate, they lower frequency, which gets them stronger, but lowers their upside in LBM rate. .

At WantingMuscle-> This was his usual routine.. Not WarriorTT, I don't know what he does, but this was Mentzer as far as I know. TT can correct me if I'm wrong...
Usually, Mentzer used a 3-way split spread over 7-14 days. The layout was chest/back, legs, and arms, each day was separated by 2-4 days or so. I *think* the arms day included dips but I don't remember.

This meant that, after your chest day, you would rest 8 days before going for arms. But, you would only rest 4 days going from arms to chest. Big, big disrepancy here.

There was two problems with this. First, because you took 8 days off, the arms day had the potential to create a lot of DOMS. In addition to this, because you were training to failure with peak contraction movements (and since we're talking about Heavy Duty, we're talking real failure here, plus a static hold), you also fried your CNS. And remember, you're not doing enough exercise anyway to improve your functional performance, so glycogen storage and replenishment can be an issue too. Triple jeapardy in terms of strength loss. Now, you have 4 days to not only recover your previous arm strength but be in the surplus.
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Last edited by Darkhorse; 09-11-2007 at 07:50 PM.
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