In the two decades I’ve been communicating with strength trainers I’ve picked up a lot of anecdotal information. It’s natural in any field to notice trends and phenomenon that keep repeating but haven’t necessarily been proven by rigorous study.

One of the things that occurs frequently are variations of this: “I started training again and was making great progress but I got sick with a cold or flu and had to quit for awhile.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that. It’s hundreds, I’m sure.

Right now we are in what pharmaceutical marketers call ‘cough and cold season’ and the above phrase is making the rounds again. I have a hypothesis on this and it might help you this year. When we lift weights we seriously tax our bodies and they have to recover from the depletion. If we train too often we can dig a pretty deep hole and one of the things that is compromised is our immune system.

Let’s say our immune system is normally at a level of ten on a scale of one to ten. By overtraining we drive it down to a six. There are always germs around that we successfully fight off, but at a level six immunity we are more susceptible and a cold or flu can take hold of us.

Hey, I know it’s called cough and cold season because so many people are sick, not because so many people are in the gym – but it also stands to reason that fatiguing your body’s ability to fight back would explain why so many trainees report it after beginning training. Has it happened to you? I know I’ve done it more than once over the years.

My point is I think we should pay very close attention to cold symptoms and at the first sign of a tickle in the throat or a stuffy nose we should stop training and make sure our immune systems have the opportunity to fully recover and fight with everything they have. At the least it could mean the difference between a minor cold or developing full-blown cold.

I received an email from a customer who quickly progressed using Static Contraction to the point of using over half a ton on his upright rows. I always like to hear success stories but it also grieves me to see people have to load machines to over-capacity just to get a decent workout. Some day the world will look back at our exercise machines and never stop laughing at how puny they were. Most people have no idea how strong they can get – if – they challenge their assumptions and presuppositions. Jason did. Here’s his story.

I started doing Static Contraction Training in January 2010 while I was stationed at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo Japan after seeing you on a DVD with Tony Robbins and witnessing your program in action.  I purchased your E-book on Static Contraction Training and thought that New Years would be a great time to start.  In my initial phase using the program, I made ridiculously significant gains that saw me at a level on most of the Hammer-Strength that would not allow me to add any more weight due to the limitations of the equipment.

I continued on my track from January to July 2010, and moved back to the US at that time.  Upon my return I wasn’t able to continue my work due to the gym that I joined not having enough weight, or large enough equipment to conduct/continue this training on my own; I don’t really trust anyone to spot me with this much weight.

However, I move to a new location and found a gym that allowed me to resume my training, and I have been blasting off ever since.  I began Static Contraction Training again in late July 2011.

I am 40yrs old as of August 2011 and I tell everyone that meet about Static Contraction Training, why I do it and prefer it to a lesser intensity workout, and the benefits that I have received (shorter workouts, WAY STRONGER, and just as much muscular endurance as my old routine of 3 sets/8-10 reps on everything I did).  I also encourage them to look-up what I’m saying and to try it for themselves!

I have attached a picture of my latest effort and triumph. In the picture, I am using the Hammer-Strength Upright-Row. I have 950lbs of weight on the bars and the person standing on the weight weighs 90+lbs; for a grand total of 1045lbs.

I will endeavor to continue my pursuit of dominance, and I just wanted to thank you for providing us all with the means, insight, and dare to be the best that we can be!!!

When you reach the top of the mountain, Never stop climbing; right!?!?!

Very Respectfully,

Jason B. M. Flennoy USCG

Jason B. M. Flennoy USCG

If you want to challenge the assumptions of conventional training, try Static Contraction Training for the next 30 days and maybe you’ll lift a half ton like Jason does.

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These three upper body muscle groups are all a high priority for guys who want a more athletic, muscular look. Broad shoulders, a powerful chest and ‘bigger guns’ define the look of male fitness and athleticism.

I’m going to assume that you’re already doing the Static Contraction workout in Train Smart which means you are using the #1 ranked exercises for each of these muscle groups. But here are some ways to get a bit more out of them.

• Take three deep breaths before any of these lifts. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Really fill your lungs on every breath. And as you exhale on the third breath force the weight up as you exhale.

• If possible, give a loud yell or grunt as you lift as this has been shown to generate 12% more strength in static contraction test subjects.

• On the bench press for chest (not for triceps) try to squeeze your pecs when you are holding the weight. If you do it right the bar will move up a fraction of an inch. Hold it in that position.

• If you have an aptitude for distance running, cycling, martial arts or other endurance sports, try doing the Power Factor: Power, Endurance and Size workout using sets of each exercise and see if your numbers improve faster. (I know martial arts isn’t really an endurance sport but many serious practitioners have told me the Beta workouts using more volume are better for them.)

• Get a pair of Alan Trombetta’s hand pads. On these pushing exercises people just don’t realize how hand pain is limiting the weights they use. The day they use hand pads every weight goes up. Often way up. Alan sells these things for next to nothing. If a nutritional supplement delivered these kinds of weight increases on day one it would be constantly sold out and featured on the cover of every magazine. Using hand pads is what I call training with your brain.

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Lee over at Ordinary Joe Bodybuilding asked me a few questions for an article at his blog.

1. Hi, Pete. It is estimated over 200,000 trainees have used your training methods – how did your Static Contraction story start?

It started in a commercial gym in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley in 1992. My friend and I started training together. He was a lifetime fitness advocate and I was a busy guy who didn’t like being in the gym and wanted every minute I was in there to give me maximum bang for the buck.

I wrote down every exercise, weight, rep and set that I did and I timed all of it on my wristwatch. After every workout I transferred all the information onto my laptop while we ate hamburgers and yakked about life in general at a nearby restaurant.  We both knew Mike Mentzer and respected his emphasis on ‘high intensity training.’ I studied math and physics and when the talk turned to intensity I wanted to know how it was measured and quantified. Nobody knew. There literally was no measurement being used. (Almost 20 years later, except for my training, there still isn’t a measurement. The mind boggles.)

Anyway, I used a simple measurement of the total weight lifted divided by how much time it took to lift it. Long story short, I called that measurement the Power Factor. Having meaningful numbers led to finding ways to increase the intensity of every exercise and that eventually led to Static Contraction. When you lift under ideal circumstances the absolute maximum weight you can hold for five seconds but no longer, it represents the highest intensity any muscle can generate. Do that on a progressive basis and great things happen.

2. Who has been your biggest training influence, and how did they help you?

My biggest training influences have been, as I mentioned, Mike Mentzer for pointing out the role of high intensity and Isaac Newton and James Watt.

Newton created the new world where people look to science and math for answers to mysteries and Watt pioneered the study and measurement of power. I’m serious about those influences. Newton has probably done more to improve my life (and everyone else’s) than any single person I can name.

Once science and experiment established that lifting heavy things builds muscles in humans, the rest is just the laws of mechanics. For me, that cuts right through 99% of the BS heard in gyms. If someone claims A is a better biceps exercise than B, I want to see measurements that prove it.

3. If you were to select the number one training mistake, what would it be? 

People train too often. You can’t grow new muscle until you fully recover from your last workout. Then you wait for new muscle to grow while you are asleep one night. When you go back to the gym you are a stronger man (or woman) and you should be able to lift more weight. When you lift more, you stimulate new muscle growth again. Piece of cake.

But people screw that up by going back to the gym too soon. They aren’t any stronger so they do some dumb workout that hasn’t a prayer of building new muscle. It’s busywork.

This is what happens to people who believe the ‘Monday, Wednesday, Friday’ nonsense. Who on earth can get stronger every 48 hours for months at a time? Maybe a young male jacking himself full of two grand a month in pharmaceutical help could do it. Nobody else can. But guess what days are always busiest at the gym? Sad and avoidable.

4. In the same way you might choose an ideal dinner guest, who would be your ideal training partner and why?

My ideal training partner would be any person who has seriously studied engineering. An engineer has the right training and mindset. He knows you have to have a defined goal and you have to have objective and actionable data points on the path to that goal.

Engineers understand objective measurement. They know that when you deviate away from your goal you have to make adjustments in your tactics.

When people train with Static Contraction or Power Factor they are writing down their performance. Power Factor uses spreadsheets to create graphs so you can see success and failure. Engineers get that.

5. If you could travel back in time, what training advice would you give your teenage self?

I heard every dumb thing we all hear in gyms. ‘Heavy weights for mass, light weights for definition’ and ‘today’s my light day, tomorrow’s my heavy day.’ I’m embarrassed to say I used to repeat it to my friends, trying to be helpful.

I didn’t get smart until my early thirties. Like most people, my visits to the gym didn’t do a thing to transform me. It was only after 1992 when I started measuring everything that I got really strong.

I was amazed at what I could lift. I once lifted a total of one million pounds in just over two hours. It worked out to something like three and a half TONS every minute for over two hours. And I was a guy with an office job who visited the gym maybe three times a month.

6. And finally, in your book Train Smart, you say the day is coming when people achieve their optimum muscularity by doing 30 seconds of exercise per month. How do you see Static Contraction Training developing in the future? 

That’s already happening for many people who post comments on my blog. They train about once a month by doing five exercises with intensity that is off the charts compared to most people. Guys who are 60 or 70 are benching over 500 lbs and leg pressing close to a ton. They only do it for five seconds. But when they come back next month they are stronger and can do more. (Technically it’s two months later for the same exercises, since they are on a split routine.)

The big future for static contraction will come when a proper static contraction home machine is available. Having a simple machine that uses no weight plates or stacks yet offers literally tons of resistance, records digital measurements of 10 or 20 strength parameters will revolutionize strength training. That can’t come soon enough for me.

Nearly every gym today uses machines that could have been build with 1850′s technology. I’m serious about that. Take a look at the next machine you use for an exercise and ask yourself what component of it was not available at the time of the steam engine. It’s sad how primitive strength training is in this century. And shameful how many people want to keep it that way for their own financial benefit at the expense of other’s health and wealth.

Thanks for interviewing me, Lee.

Train Smart,

Pete Sisco

Thank you for your time, Pete. Our readers at Ordinary Joe Muscle Building wish you every success!

I see this kind of stuff all the time but I can’t resist talking about this example because it has so many elements of the half-science that underpins most of the nutritional supplement world. This link will take you to an article in the British newspaper, Daily Mail, that talks about how an ingredient in mustard (homobrassinolide) was discovered to build muscle.

The headline says fitness “fanatics” should “reach for the mustard and not spinach” if they want to look like Popeye (i.e. muscular). The article talks about how the homobrassinolide was given to the rats and that it resulted in higher protein synthesis and increased muscle mass compared to the control rats.

The popular conclusion might well be that slapping some extra mustard on your sandwich will help you pack on some extra muscle.

Now take look at this article published by Britain’s National Health Service, a government agency, which takes a slightly drier and more penetrating look at the specifics of the study. Key points include:
a) the study never tested mustard, it tested homobrassinolide found in mustard seeds
b) the concentration of homobrassinolide in mustard is nowhere near what it is in seeds
c) there is no evidence the rat’s protein synthesis or muscle gain would also occur in humans
d) nobody knows the long term effects and safety of humans ingesting concentrated homobrassinolide

What are you left with? A meaningless bit of information about rats and seeds, insofar as you and your health are concerned. And since the study was partially funded by the nutritional supplement industry, can it be long before we see “Bodybuilder’s Mustard” hawked in magazines and online? If you take this one example and multiply it by 1,000 you approach the reality of the maze of false claims and semi-science that permeates health and fitness marketing.

Neither article mentioned the most important fact; muscle only grows when it is stimulated to grow by working the muscle at or near it’s highest output.

Want to build more muscle than the rats did? It’s easy – lift a really, really heavy weight in the gym. Rest, so your muscles have time to grow and make you a bit stronger. Then go back to the gym and lift a slightly heavier weight. Rinse and repeat. That’s not as easy as eating a nice ham sandwich with a dollop of mustard – but it’s been working for over a million years.

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Strength Training – Welcome to My World

This audio recording might help you see past some of the bad advice that circulates in every gym. Basically, this is the way I talk when friends ask me about the world of weightlifting – so it’s sort of like sitting around with me and laughing about some of the crazy stuff out there and how it keeps people confused year after year.

“Your logic is impeccable and irrefutable. I have been benefiting from your wisdom for years. I love the audio, the humor of the fitness industry is amazing. Truly snake oil.”
-William S.

“Next time warn me that I need to wear an oxygen mask to keep me from going into purple apoplexy from laughing so hard. After listening to that you don’t need to do abs!”
-John S.

Here is a short preview you can hear immediately.

Here is the link to download the complete 28-minute mp3 audio file which is about 13 megs in size. Right-click on it and select “save link as” or “save target as” or “save file as” – whatever term your browser uses for downloading a file.

My World Audio file

[audio:http://www.staticcontraction.com/audio/my-world-audio.mp3]

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There is an interesting paradox in strength training. You never know how high “up” really is. You don’t know the maximum you can bench press today, you don’t know the maximum you can expect to deadlift in three months, and you don’t know how much muscle you can gain before you hit an absolute limit.

So how many plates do you put on the bar today? How often can you train in the next three months? And is the muscle you’ve gained so far the best you could hope for or is it pathetic compared to what you could have gained? What makes all of this worse is the way most people train – utterly devoid of any measurement or precision. They not only do not know how high ‘up’ is, they don’t really know where they are today compared to where they were three workouts ago.

This is why it’s so damaging to listen to advice about how you can “feel” what your body is capable of, or that you can train by “instinct.” You can feel exhausted by a set of exercise and, because of underlying stress or recovery issues, the exercise was sub-maximal and did nothing to stimulate new muscle growth. There is no reason to go by “feel” and “instinct” when simple, meaningful measurements are very easy to make. (BTW, it’s obvious that if you “feel” like crap you should not do a workout, but it’s ridiculous to expect to “feel” the difference in the effect of 2 sets of 20 with 185 lbs versus 3 sets of 14 with 195 lbs.)

What To Do

You can’t begin to wrap your arms around all this mystery until you takes some real measurements.

1. At a minimum, write down the weight you used and the reps you performed on each exercise.

2. If you absolutely hate making any calculations, at least total up the weight you lifted on each exercise. (Eg. If you benched 150 lbs for 10 reps, call it 1,500 lbs of total weight.)

3. Knowing the above, look for improvement on every exercise every time you do it. The whole point of strength building exercises is to make your muscles bigger and stronger so when you return to the gym you should always be able to lift more than the last time. Always. Without exception. If you can’t do that it means something is not working and you need to search for causes.

Want to Do More Than The Minimum?

4. Measure the intensity of your exercises by knowing the elapsed time the lifting takes. That is a foolproof way to know whether or not your “high intensity” exercise was really high intensity – particularly compared to what you did on your previous workout.

5. Stop lifting in your weakest range of motion. Most people never learn how strong they really are and really could be because they limit weights to what they can lift in their weakest range. Use a power rack or Smith machine to limit exercises to only your strongest range – you’ll be blown away at how much you can hoist and what it does to your intensity numbers.

6. Wake up to the FACT that you cannot train productively on a fixed schedule from beginner to advanced level. Once you make measurements you’ll see in black and white that you can not follow a maximum lift on Monday with a better lift on Wednesday and an even better lift on Friday and a still better lift the next Monday. Instead, make every workout count and stop doing regressive training.

7. Use a defined training method. Don’t use happenstance that depends on what equipment is not being used at the moment you want to work your biceps. (Of course I want you to try Static Contraction or Power Factor, (See which is better for you) but whatever you use, follow the above points. But good luck finding a training method that uses exact measurement, most trainers don’t want you knowing in black and white how much of your time they are wasting.)

You have a lot to gain. If you’re like most people you’ll be shocked at what you have to gain. All you have to do is train with your brain.

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Personal progress provides its own motivation. Few things in the gym provide more positive feedback and personal motivation than setting a record on a favorite exercise. That’s why you see so many guys with T-shirts proudly proclaiming “Bench Press 300 lbs.” usually accompanied by a caricature of a huge guy hoisting a seriously bent barbell. While most of us prefer to be more introverted about our achievements, we all feel the glow of satisfaction in being able to improve ourselves with such a measured degree of certainty.

The First Step

Paradoxically, the first step in setting a new personal record is very easy, and yet many people find it the most difficult to actually do: Rest.

If you’ve been training for more than a couple of weeks, chances are you’ve already stimulated some new muscle growth that never has a chance to manifest because your body is never fully recovered. This is why so many people train three days per week but never see any real improvement in their physique and can’t get beyond old personal records in most of their exercises.

Here is a general guide. If you’ve been training for less than four weeks, take seven full days off training. You can do light aerobics and stretching but don’t lift any weights whatsoever. If you’ve been training for one to three months, take ten days off of weightlifting. If you’ve been training more than three months you should rest and recover for a full two weeks. No, you won’t lose muscle. I work with advanced trainees who rest six or more weeks between workouts and they see improvement on every exercise on every workout.

Recovery is the most forgotten element of a successful, productive training system. It allows your body to replenish itself in ways that exercise and diet can never do. Recovery is absolutely indispensable to progress.

Train Smart

When you return to the gym to start working towards your personal record you need a plan. Let’s suppose your personal record on the bench press is 275 pounds and you want to break that record by shooting for a 300 pound bench press.

I’ve helped thousands of athletes lift weights they thought were impossible by showing them the benefits of lifting in their strongest range of motion. Strong range lifts have the advantages of being safer because the weight is prevented from entering the weak range of motion where nearly all injuries occur. Also, by limiting the range of motion you are able to work with much heavier weights and that stimulates new growth not only in the target muscles but also in the ligaments, tendons and joints that support those muscles. If you’ve never used this technique, you’re in for a very big surprise.

Virtually any common exercise can be performed exclusively in the strong range of motion with the use of a power rack or Smith machine.

Continuing with the bench press as an example, after performing your normal warm-up, place the supports of a power rack so the bar rests in the top quarter-range of your reach. When you lie on the bench and reach up to grasp the bar your arms should be within about four inches of full extension.

Load the bar with the same weight that is your current personal record. When you lift this weight in your strongest range you’ll be amazed how easy it is. Next add 10% more weight and perform five reps. Keep adding 10% and performing five reps until you can only do 2 reps with a weight that will likely be 30% to 100% more than you’ve ever lifted before. Make a note of that weight.

Now take three days off from all weightlifting.

When you return to the gym set up the bench press in the rack the same way and perform your normal warm-up. Load the above noted weight on the bar and try to perform two reps. If you can perform the two reps you know you rested long enough to return to your previous level of strength. Here’s the hard part: if you can’t do the two reps, leave the gym.. Your body needs more recovery time. The proof is the fact you are not as strong as you were three days earlier. Remember, recovery builds muscle. Go home and build muscle on the sofa.

If you’re fully recovered you’ll most likely hoist the weight with ease. If so, add 5% more weight and perform five reps. Keep working the weight up until you can only perform two reps. Make a note of that new maximum weight.

Once again, take three days off all weightlifting.

The Big Day

When you return to the gym you will now be able to set a new personal record in the bench press. Perform your normal warm-up then do your attempt. Don’t be surprised if you can lift 20 to 50 pounds more. On leg exercises, increases of 50 to 200 pounds have been reported.

The techniques I describe here can be used to set a personal record on virtually any exercise. Athletes who train with my system have discovered the advantages of never lifting in their weak range of motion. They get fewer injuries, less frequent training means less wear and tear on their body and they reach levels of strength impossible with weak range training. When you understand that you might give up weak range training altogether.

Try the above just once and soon you’ll be setting personal records on all your exercises…and that is the ultimate motivation.