Gordon Lavelle on HIT: This article is about a highly effective and efficient system for building muscle. It’s a method that has been used by people who won national bodybuilding championships, world bodybuilding championships, and even Mr. Olympia titles. I personally used it to win NPC national-qualifying contests, and I continue to use it to this day. Dozens of books have been written about this system of training. Countless articles have described it. Yet despite all this, the odds are good that you’ve never even heard of it. The odds are overwhelming that you’ve never used it, or even tried it. And unfortunately, even after reading this article, some of you never will. There’s nothing terribly unusual about the method. It calls for no exotic equipment or unusual exercises; nor does it require a special setting. To make effective use of the system, all you need is access to basic weight-training equipment, a strong desire to build muscle, and an open mind. Almost everyone reading this article will satisfy the first two requirements, no problem. The third one is the big stumbling block. If you’re a close-minded person, read no further. If you’re certain you already know the absolute best way to build muscle, stop reading now. This article is not for you. So go. Now. Yes, you. If you’re still reading, this means that you’re interested in building muscle, and you have an open mind. You’re willing to look objectively at your existing notions about bodybuilding training, and you’re willing to consider new ideas. So let’s begin. This style of training mainly resembles a normal bodybuilding workout. It makes use of the same types of exercises, and it’s broken down into sets and reps. But here’s what makes it different from your current routine: this system is based on the age-old adage that quality is more important than quantity. More specifically, it’s based on the notion that for muscle growth, the quality of your best set is far more important than the quantity of all your sets combined. Scientific research has shown that your body will, in fact, determine how much muscle it will add based only on whichever set you perform best. Your body doesn’t grow when you’re working out. Your body grows afterward. It’s during the workout that your muscles send the message that your body needs to add muscle. In order to send this message however, your muscles had to be put to hard work. But this message was not sent because you did a lot of sets. That’s not the type of hard work I’m talking about. The message was sent because one of your sets was very intense—more specifically, because the muscles you were training experienced very intense contractions. This is all that is needed to stimulate growth. All the other sets you did amount to little more than calorie-burning exercise. They will not factor into your growth. You can do 20 sets for each bodypart without adding an ounce of muscle. Your muscles can also grow significantly larger if you perform a bare minimum of sets, as long as those sets are done properly. Unfortunately, a huge number of bodybuilders do the former. They make the mistake of performing lots and lots of mediocre sets. They think that merely banging out x number of sets is the key to muscle growth. They should instead be concentrating their efforts on performing a small number of productive ones. The people who have used this system most effectively based their training entirely on performing a very small number of highly productive, all-out sets. In fact, to the get the best possible results, after warming-up, they perform only a single set per exercise. Yes, you read that right. Only one set.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:28:36 +0000