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Great Cycles For Advanced Lifters (Part 3)

By: Mick Hart. By now you should be in your second week and wanting to back off the 80% x 6 x 2 light session cause you just can't fact it any more. You feel your only option is to go and get the latest copy of Men's Health magazine cause you can't be a real man. At this point I will give you some real self-confidence cause I know you can be a strong man. You know, feeling tired out is something you are just going to have to live with and it certainly isn't an excuse to have time out and lay in bed all day playing with your todger. You can only make any judgement on your efforts if you are finishing your lifts and if you are you on your way to getting the expected results.

The remainder of your exercises can be split across the week at whatever set and rep scheme you choose. Say for example you are specialising in the overhead press you might wish to squat + press on Monday, chin + press on Wednesday and bench + press on Friday. I find it best to keep poundages for the other lifts at about 80 - 90% of maximums for whatever rep range I am using.

Should you be able to bench 100Kg for 12 reps, you would have to be able to sets of 80-90Kg for 10-12 reps in the bench. Another important tip is to rotate the days you use for assistance work so that you never perform similar assistance to your main lift on a "heavy" day.

Let's say that your specialisation lift were the overhead press, well then make your bench press so that it always falls on one of the 6 x 2 days, and not on a more intense day. This way your heavy overhead pressing allows benching to be possible. It would be exactly the same as if squats happened to be your main lift and you should then do deadlifting as assistance work. That means that you just couldn't squat heavy and deadlift on the same day as you just wouldn't get anything out of your deadlift. The only way forward for other lifts is by maintenance only.

Once the six week period is over you will have to go onto your next specialisation lift and begin all over. You may even like to consider going back to a more traditional bodybuilding routine so you can get your new strength working on making more and bigger muscles, so you should increase the rep range a bit. It is so sad to say though and to my horror, that so many bodybuilders just disregard their newly formulated strength and go back to doing leg extensions once per month as training my way is just "too tough".

I hope you don't take it the wrong way or anything, but it's true. Great training methods are turned down just on the grounds that it gets uncomfortable. It may have gone unnoticed but not everyone around us has got big muscles and that's because it takes dedication and resistance.

People often ask me just what sort of results are we talking about when it comes to strength gains in a routine like this. Well I can boast 7.5 - 10% on a lift for each session of suffering and big increases on repetition work post program.

I shall also like to reveal some interesting proven results from this very program with a deadlift going from 200Kg to 220Kg and reps with 180kg from 6 to an easy 11 at a bodyweight of 93Kg. It's excellent for a six week program and I actually plan to shoot for 180Kg x 20 reps by the end of this year and achieve this by increasing my limit strength repetition so the lifting increases automatically.

We all have our differences and I'm not quite Mr Universe, but I can assure you that there are a great number of bodybuilders in the world who could better my results. You really just have to kick yourself and get doing new routines and ones that hurt. If you come across any good one just e-mail them to me, Mick Hart. Check out the MickHartBlog which is there for those who like suffering.