Forced Reps - An Exciting Variation On An Old Principle

It's called the Touch System of Forced Reps training, and it provides some interesting extra dimensions in the quest for muscular development.

The terrific surge in muscle development in the past 15 years has practically exhausted the effects of the known training principles. It seems that every conceivable variation has been applied to Supersets. Tri-Sets, Mass-Density, Iso-Tension Concentration, Flushing and all the other Weider Principles. Not the least exploited has been the Forced Reps method of training.

Anybody who's been in this game any length of the remembers how fellows like Marvin Eder, Reg Park and Clancy Ross first used their private variations of the Weider Forced Reps Principle. I created it, the Weider Research Clinic popularized it, and the concept was heralded by the Olympians as a real break through in training for muscle strength and size.

The Forced Reps Principle, as any advanced bodybuilder knows, is based on partner assistance, although the same effect can be produced to some degree by different kinds of body English or cheating.

Today's trend toward higher reps and fast-paced Quality Training for bringing out definition has practical precluded the Forced Reps way of dong things. But as the search continues for ways of build ling bigger and better muscles, bodybuilding has to revert to a kind of "back-to-nature" movement.

More and more the systems for training have become "personalized" through the use of the Weider Instinctive Training Principle. One by one, the individual methods of the superstars have been divulged in training articles. You can see how the champs use every known device -- and some unknown -- to excite their muscles. Some transcend the mundane. Fellows like Frank Zane have unified mind and body to make training almost ethereal. Mike Mentzer takes blowtorch workouts, the repetitions and weight being applied with such intensity he almost seems to mold his muscles to suit his purpose. Arnold would saturation bomb for three hours a day, using the Weider Double-Split. Each in his own way has probed the unknown.

Although this system isn't devised for the beginner, it would behoove him to familiarize himself with it. He may be ready for it sooner than he thinks.

What follows really concerns the guy who has already conquered many other sticking points but desperately needs something new to break through to championship muscularity.

Basically, the Forced Reps, methods amounts to you, your exercise movement and an able assistant or two. Let's suppose you are working on your biceps and are using the regular Barbell Curl with .......

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How Many Reps?

bet you a thousand to one that you have thought about training for strength alone because you know that come the day you can curl and press over 200 pounds. or squat and bench over 400 lbs., you would have some pretty hefty development to go along with the strength. Seeing men like Paul Anderson, Larry Pacifico, Alexeev, Kazmeier, etc, and understanding that they belong to an elite group of the world's most powerful men, and further understanding that they all have enormous body size, one could be forgiven for thinking that the best way to get big is to train with very low reps (for strength) and the size will come automatically.

The truth is that almost any type of weight training, if practiced for just a couple of reps, or with twenty reps (as long s it gets progressively more difficult each week or so), will bring about muscular gain.

Okay! I hear you ..."But what is the best system for maximum gains? How many reps will tell you something different. You hear dogmatic statements from whomever you care to talk to. Go to any gym and ask around...some will tell you three reps per set is best. Others will insist on ten or even twenty. Chances are, you'll get a different answer from each person you ask. Who the heck is right?

Well, let's look at the record. Who did what? Jack Delinger, Mr. Universe 1956, did sets .......

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Pec Up the Pace - Build Big Pecs / Chest

To build a champion's chest, every season must be a growing season.

Contrary to what we like to believe, progress is really an evolution toward greater simplicity rather than complexity, and this has been especially evident in bodybuilding during the past few years.

Not too long ago, we were obsessed with details, with off season vs. pre contest training, with precision training regimens, with keeping computerized records so detailed that we collapsed into bed at night exhausted more from mental than physical fatigue. Lately, however, we've discovered that such detail work does more to stifle our growth than enhance it. Quite simply, by obeying all those rules, we are not giving ourselves room to stretch our physical boundaries.

I got in on the tail end of that complicated style of bodybuilding and gradually but modestly improved. As soon as I started training the way I really wanted to, however, I seemed to grow visibly by the day. It was as if I had been set free.

NO SUCH THING AS OFF-SEASON

Perhaps the best example of these liberating changes can be seen in my chest training. In the past, I never would have thought of letting my off-season training creep over into my pre-contest period by even one day. There was off-sea on and the was pre-contest, and never did the two meet.

Now, there is no such thing as off-season and pre contest chest training for me. There's only chest training, and that means lifting as heavy as I can every time I enter the gym. I train this way right up to a show. During pre-contest, the only difference I make is adding a couple more cable movements in the hope that they will accelerate my definition. Still, my philosophy is: Where there was once a season for growing and a season for getting cut, there is no only one season that lasts for 12 months, and that season is for growth. Period.

While before I carefully mapped out high-and low-repetition cycles, now I think only in terms of low reps. Those are the only ones that do any good, so summer, winter autumn, whoever, I keep my .......

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The Squat ...For Everything?

I want to dwell on a topic which I feel is of great importance of every reader of this article, whether his interest be in big muscles, great strength or superb condition and health. We want to dwell more at length on the latter though we wish to emphasize the others as well.

We have often called the squat the "King of Exercises." We call it this because we truly believe that this is so. Many, many years ago, back in the late thirties and early forties, the squat first came into prominence when Mark Berry promoted it extensively, first in the old "Strength' magazine then his "Strong Man" magazine, and later in this "Physical Training Simplified." During this time, also back in 1936, Iron Man began publication and its primary object for many years was the promotion of the squat as a superior exercise. If you have old issues of .......

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The Way to Massive, Peaked Biceps

The shape and muscularity of a muscle group should be foremost and size secondary. This is particularly true when developing the peaked biceps, for if they are trained sullenly, in the conventional manner, even using heavy weights, you will attain great size but will lack the beauty and symmetrical contour which would make them appear as your outstanding physical attribute.

To achieve the ultimate in size, shape and definition you must practice isolation contraction movements in your biceps curls. No other method of curling will put that finished look to them.

The biceps will ball up only to the degree that it is forced. The more complete contraction you subject it to, the more it will be able to project, as it were. Try this simple test and discover how the muscle will increase in its contractile intensity as it moves through a greater range of movement.

Hold your arm out to the side at shoulder level. Now flex the arm and curl the biceps tensely and bring the fist to the shoulder. At this point the biceps feel very tight and tense. Now, raise the elbow until it is overhead and behind the neck. Now contract the biceps more and you will feel it ache and really ball up more than at any time before; this is muscular contraction at its greatest.
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When Pigs Fly!

In an article in the September '95 Flex ("A Case of Mystic Delirium"), Mike Mentzer mystically ignores my concerns raised over his one valid training theory behind bodybuilding success when, shades of Charles Atlas, he suggests I order his courses.

While he admits growing tired of answering his critics, Mike erroneously accuses me of attacking him personally. As I pointed out in an article I wrote for another magazine, I gain nothing by demeaning Mike Mentzer, nor would I want to demean him, nor could I, for that matter. I like and respect Mike for standing up for what he believes. Not too many people do that today.

I do feel Mike overreached in his response to my article, accusing me of vile impertinence and impeachment of his character (check out the quote in another issue of Flex wherein Mike refers to Franco Columbu as "Arnold's weak-willed namby-pamby lackey"). Mike's response reminds me of the saying, "If you can't convince someone of something, then try to confuse him."

Mike argues that unlike his and Arthur Jones' bodybuilding teachings -- which are the only rational, scientific and valid theoretical-based teachings in his opinion -- the rest of bodybuilding is predicated on what he calls pseudo science, a hopeless batch of erroneous assumptions strewn together haplessly, in no particular way, and this is why so many bodybuilders fail to make the grade.

Sounds convincing, I can agree with Mike that bodybuilding is at best a pseudo science, but where we differ is that I believe bodybuilding doesn't really need to be anything more than that, and I don't think it ever can be. Unlike an exact science like geometry, universal dogma has little place in bodybuilding. Sometime it makes little sense to apply scientific principles to art, too.

As I alluded to, the one-valid-theory premise -- in relation to intensity, volume, adaptation and training -- doesn't explain the results an methods of many successful bodybuilders .......

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Preacher Curl Bench/The Best Way to Train Biceps

first started lifting weights in 1972 (yeah, I have been around the iron game for a very long time) and I saw the above picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a muscle magazine during the summer of 1973. No one knew who Arnold was yet outside of a few hardcore bodybuilding fans but I sure did. As a 17 year old kid, I was so awed and inspired by this picture that I had to cut it out of the magazine, hang it on my basement wall, and immediately start doing Preacher Curls (confident of course that I would one day become Mr. Olympia too!). Back in those days, bodybuilding equipment made for a home gym hardly existed and I had to improvise by doing my curls over the back of an incline bench with a single dumbbell at a time. While that version of the exercise was crude and very uncomfortable, I immediately realized that this was the strictest and most productive version of a curl that I could ever do. To this day, I train my biceps exclusively on a Preacher Curl Bench in my own gym. Because my front delts became so strong from bench pressing, I have trouble isolating my biceps with almost any other type of curl. Doing standing dumbbell or barbell curls, or even incline dumbbell curls,.......

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