It seems unbelievable now, but I gained nearly 100 pounds (1 pound ≈ 0.45 kilograms) of muscle in the first four years of training, and this result could only fit in a seaside town of 5,000 people in northern Norway. Two beds available in the "gym".
In 1990, when I was 16 years old, I weighed over 130 pounds. After training with my brother in that simple gym for 4 years with the simplest equipment, my weight increased to 225 pounds. I have always believed that as long as we have a scientific and reasonable training plan and can persist in hard and tenacious training for a long time, our muscles will grow rapidly.
1. Hard training
I was a football and ski jumping enthusiast before I was 16 years old. After starting bodybuilding training, I gained 25 pounds in the first year. Maybe my body is suitable for bodybuilding, so I can easily grow muscles even if my movements are irregular. Over the next three years, I developed a "Quick Muscle Building Plan" and strictly followed the principle of complete recovery from hard training to achieve muscle gain. I gained another 70 pounds of muscle.
The reason why I can gain muscle quickly is firstly attributed to the lot of fitness knowledge I accumulated from various bodybuilding magazines, and also attributed to my idol Arnold Schwarzenegger and his movie "Pump Iron".
Although I live in a small town in a remote area of Norway, I often try to apply the techniques, methods and principles taught by bodybuilding experts and celebrities in magazines in my training. I often like to train with heavier weights because I grow faster than my peers and have become stronger. Since the gym is small, I can only use two benches as barbell supports for squats and nothing else. I didn't have a "barbell" until I saw Arnold doing barbell squats in the movie "Mercury." The climate in Norway is cold, so I warm up for 10 minutes before each training session to ensure that my neuromuscular muscles are fully mobilized. In addition, I have to do my parents’ work while training, because they don’t support me in bodybuilding. Those who think that they cannot practice bodybuilding without a good environment and equipment need not worry. I think the conditions and equipment you have must be much better than mine.
2. Use the "pyramid" training method
In the first four years of bodybuilding training, I mainly wanted to make myself stronger as soon as possible, and to have muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger as soon as possible. At the same time, I also took into account the proportional development of muscles in various parts of the body.
Because I am young, I did my movements quickly in the early days. Now I am more willing to use a slower speed. At that time, I helpedForce rep training is great for increasing muscle size, and now it's not what I use to build quality muscle. I think that the assist rep training should be controlled. It should not be used in the last few times of each set, but should be tried to do a few more times at the end of each set. The focus should be more on putting pressure on the muscles and avoiding Injury on.
At that time, in addition to muscle shaping exercises (such as chest presses and concentrated curls, etc.), I mainly used Wade's pyramid training method to gradually increase muscle stimulation and achieve rapid muscle growth, which means that the weight should be gradually increased. The sets increase and the reps gradually decrease. Using this method of training, I first use lighter weight and higher reps to warm up the muscles at the beginning of each exercise, and then increase the weight group by group until the maximum weight is reached, and then decrease it. In the "spire group" I Can be done 4-6 times safely. I think higher reps (12-15) combined with lower reps (4-6) build quality and stronger muscles. I started using the pyramid training method when I was 16 years old, and I use it frequently now.
3. Norwegian intensity
I especially like what Arnold said: "If you want to become a champion, you must suffer pain and break through the obstacles on the way forward." With his encouragement, I will adopt it no matter how bad the conditions are. Train with high intensity. I do a lot of forced reps, working with drop sets, and occasionally super high intensity to really shock the muscles.
If you like, you can also try doing crazy shock training, just do it occasionally (once every 2 months for each body part) and allow sufficient recovery time (1 week). For shock training for my back, I can do 30 sets of pull-ups with different grips or deadlifts with very heavy weights. On double-arm training day, in order to shock the muscles, I can do 20 sets of barbell curls, sometimes even without counting the number of sets, until muscle failure. I believe that shock training, although difficult to recover from, is more rapid and effective in building muscle.
To take advantage of high-intensity training, you must have a training partner who can stay consistent with you through hard training. When I was doing high-intensity leg training, my training partner would come up with some excuse to not train with us out of fear of pain, like a knee injury or something. Later I thought that the reason he didn't want to train with me was because I was better at it than he was, or that I could tolerate pain and pain better than him. Thanks to the "love" of pain and pain, my strong will and quality enable me to always overcome the obstacles of pain and pain, thus becoming an excellent bodybuilder.