DAVEM'S DORM ROOM

“How much can you bench?” I get that question more than a lot people, I guess. It used to annoy me, but it doesn’t bother me anymore. Most people’s workout knowledge ended in the high school weight room, where your reputation hinged on how many plates you had on the bar, so I guess since I have some thickness, I should be able to throw around a lot of weight. To be honest, I don’t even know how much I bench, nor do I care. I’m not a power lifter, and I don’t remember the last time I began I chest workout with flat bench press. When I hit my most muscular onstage, I’ve never had a judge ask me “So, what’s your max? Now that I think of it, my chest is one of my weaker body parts, and it has been a long time since I’ve loaded a bar with more than 250lbs. It has been a long time since I consciously fretted over the amount of weight I was lifting. As long as I’m working out with good form and seeing positive results, I couldn’t care less.

I think that’s something many people need to do in the gym. Stop for a second and think about if you’re working your muscles or just moving weight. There’s a big difference. And, if you’re a bodybuilder, it’s even less about the weight and more about how your muscles are reacting. Ask yourself if you’re using good form; really good form. And if you’re not, lower your weight and do it correctly! Curls are for your biceps, not your back. Military press is for your shoulders, not your chest. I’m not bashing those who don’t know better, but c’mon guys, once you’ve spent more than a few workouts in any gym, you should be able to use experience and common sense to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong. That being said, back to what I do for my workouts.
In the off-season, I usually follow a 5-4-3 week training routine. If you do the math, that adds up to four 12-week routines per year with four more weeks left over. These are my vacation weeks or weeks when I’m out of town for work and can’t make it into the gym regularly. Therefore, I can roughly do four rotations per year. Here’s how it breaks down. For five weeks, I go big. Every rep, every day. I follow the usual plan – biggest lifts first, larger muscle groups before smaller ones. The bread-and-butter mass-and-strength-building lifts. These are the first five weeks after a contest or the first five weeks of pre-contest. After five weeks, I start to lose a lot of the DOMS and I notice my intensity begins to drop a bit. For the next four weeks, I’ll switch it up a bit, but not much. I don’t go quite as heavy, but I’ll start throwing in a bunch of forced reps, drop sets, super sets and rest/pause sets. I find that this sparks a better pump and breaks whatever plateau I’m hitting at the moment. The final three weeks of my split are the three weeks leading into a show or the three weeks leading into the pre-contest, and although I’m no longer going heavy, these three weeks are torture. Here’s where I hit a lot of pre-exhaustion, concentration movements and negative reps. Long, drawn-out burning. Higher reps to pull out the last bit of definition and help burn some tough-to-get-to fat under the skin. That’s the way I do it. I don’t go extremely high on the reps. I’m always trying to put on quality muscle or keep the muscle I have, and a high-rep routing is detrimental to muscle retention. I also keep my cardio to a max of three 25-minute sessions a week during the off-season and eight 25-minute sessions a week during the last six weeks of contest prep. I regulate my diet to ensure my body fat keeps coming down, but that’s just what works for me.

The Cheat Day:
As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to take a second to talk about the cheat day.
The human body has a really bad habit of adapting. It’s part of our survival mechanism. What has been programmed by millions of years of evolution is what makes it so damn difficult for us to achieve maximum results – especially those of us who are natural. When we work out, we tear down muscle tissue. The body adapts by adding new muscle and strength, causing the need for us to change our workout to keep progressing. When we consume too much sodium, our body compensates by retaining water to keep us from drying up inside. We’re forced to make changes to trick our body into reacting differently. The same is true about dieting.
When we eat two or three meals a day, our body reacts by slowing its metabolism and retaining nutrients since it knows it will be a while until its next feeding. When we eat many smaller meals, our metabolism speeds up because our body knows more nutrients will always be coming soon. Pre-contest dieting has a similar effect. Our bodies love fat; really love fat. So, when we remove all the fat from our diet like we do before a contest, our body reacts one way at first, and we lose fat relatively quickly. However, after extended periods of low fat intake, our bodies begin to store fat so as to no lose too much. Then our progress slows. The cheat day is a great way for us to shock our body into releasing fat (and also keeps us from going crazy while we’re dieting. When we suck down a Quarter Pounder with Cheese after two straight weeks of strict dieting, our bodies are tricked into thinking there’s more fat on the way, so it releases some of its stored fat. By the time your body realizes this was a one time thing – ha ha – it’s too late. You’ve already convinced it to release more fat that you’ve given it.

Now, I guess it should be called a cheat meal and not a cheat day. When you cheat, cheat correctly, don’t make it an all-day beer and pizza fest (I know that’s tough with football season getting started). But, don’t feel guilty after you’ve stuffed your hole with a dozen Buffalo wings either. You’re probably doing yourself some good.

In my next post, I’ll take you through my week, workout by workout. Set by set. Rep by rep.
The ends justify the means…

Dave