Consolidating Your Muscle Gains: Advanced Program

After sticking with the intermediate’s program for the last 1-2 years, you have surely experienced noticeable muscle gains. However, lately your progress seems to slow down, or even halt. You keep training hard and your nutrition and rest are adequate, but you have hardly gained any muscle during the last months. Facing this situation denotes that you have to go one step further in your training and enter into the advanced level. This post provides the basic guidelines for designing an advanced program.

Surely you remember how easy was gaining mass during your first months in bodybuilding. Unfortunately, being an advanced bodybuilder, you have to work hard for gaining each additional pound of muscle. As we commented in previous posts, this occurs because your muscles evolve to work more efficiently, and for this reason, you require to increase intensity for further progress. As a consequence of this, the primary goal in an advanced program should be achieving constant muscle stimulation and maximum intensity. As you know, the key to constantly stimulate your muscles is introducing periodization in your training, switching regularly between heavy cycles (mainly compound exercises and low rep range) and light cycles (isolation exercises and high rep range). In addition, it is also mandatory to vary your workouts every 4-6 weeks by altering one or more factors (i.e. number of reps, sets, tempo, exercise selection, etc.). In this sense, it is important to avoid doing always the same exercises, or performing the same number of sets or reps, since the muscles adapt to this workload and then stop growing. For instance, you can alternate the 3-day split introduced in the intermediate’s program, with a 4-day or even a 5-day split.

Intensity can be achieved by staying focused, reducing the rest between sets and giving the maximum in all your sets and using the maximum weight that allows you to maintain strict form. In addition, you can also include in your workouts high-intensity techniques such as supersets, pre/post-exhaustion, descending sets, negative reps or forced reps (I’ll go in detail on each one in later posts). These techniques are great for increasing the intensity of your workouts and stimulate in this way muscle growth. However, they should be carefully used, since they are very demanding on the muscle and can contribute to overtraining, which is always threatening natural bodybuilders when training to the limit. For this reason, watch carefully for overtraining signs (I’ll also go deeper on this in the future), and use adequately high-intensity techniques.

With respect to nutrition and rest, you are probably on the right way, since the same principles provided with the intermediate’s program rule here. Stick eating several small meals throughout the day (every 2.5-3 hours) including enough protein (1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight per day), drinking plenty of water and sleeping at least 8 hours per night. Be also careful of regularly monitoring your metabolism in order to adequate your caloric intake if needed. You have to take into account that muscles are active tissues that continuously burn calories. For this reason, if you gain muscle, your metabolism will go up, thus you have to adjust your daily caloric intake upwards to meet the demand. Finally, this is probably the right moment for considering supplementation in your program. The basis should consist of a multivitamin/mineral stack and some protein supplement. Then you can experiment with other supplements such as creatine, glutamine, and BCAAs and see what works better for you.

These and other guidelines for developing your advanced program can be found in the article “Advanced Bodybuilding Program” by Matt Danielsson and also in the article “Progression of Training” included in the I.C.E. Training Program developed by Big Cat.

How to Deal with Injuries for Safe Muscle Development

Making progress in bodybuilding requires intense and consistent training. Unfortunately, pushing yourself to the limit day after day increases your chance of getting injured. Typically, an injury can turn you away from the gym a few days or weeks, but if neglected, it could even end your days in bodybuilding. As you can see, this is a critical issue and deserves special attention. Learn with this post how to deal with injuries, and some safety tips for preventing them.

Of course, nobody wants to get injured. However, this happens to almost everybody at some point in their training career, and for this reason it is convenient to learn how to deal with injuries. If you get injured, you have to stop training immediately. By continuing with your workout you are only making the injury worse, probably prolonging the recovery time by weeks.

For most injuries, you will be fine again if you just give yourself the time to heal properly, thus rest is the key. Additionally, you can try to accelerate recuperation applying ice to the painful area for approximately 15 minutes every two hours following an injury, compressing the area with a bandage and elevating it, and applying heat for 10 to 15 minutes several times a day four or five days after the injury.

You have to avoid any kind of training on your injured part until you notice definite improvement. At this point, you can probably start with very light training but avoid heavy training until you are completely recovered. However, that does not mean that you have to stay out of the gym until being almost recovered. In fact, you can still train all body-parts which are not related to the injured body-part. For instance, having an elbow-injury, you can still do legs, abdominals, and lower back. Use the time to work on your weaknesses, keep going to the gym regularly, stay active and stick to your diet.

When coming back from an injury, spend some time on reviewing your training routine. In order to prevent future injuries, it is important to determine what caused the injury so you can avoid it. During this review process, you have to pay special attention to the following issues:

Are you thoroughly warming up before weight training? This refers both to general warm-up for raising your body temperature, and generally preparing the body for activity, and to specific warm-up for the muscle you are about to train, for adapting it to the weights you will use. Refer to previous post “Proper Warm-up for Gaining Muscle while Preventing Injury” for details.

Do you consider some stretching in your program? Stretching reduces soreness, increases flexibility, and strengthens your joints. You should do some stretching after warming up and between each set, and you have to stretch thoroughly after working a muscle. Refer to previous post “Stretching for Safe and Successful Muscle Development” for details.

Are you always using proper form in your exercises? Poor form is a primary cause of injury. For this reason, use always textbook form, maintain the control on the weight over the whole movement, and avoid cheating, jerking or using momentum. In this sense, it is convenient to stay focused and avoid distractions which contribute to poor form. Related to this, it is also convenient to avoid dangerous exercises (such as behind-the-neck pull-down, behind-the-neck shoulder press, and upright row) that put your joints in a position that is prone to injury.

Are you evenly training all your body-parts? Having an unbalanced body can increase the chance of having an injury. In this sense, it is important to have a strong midsection (abdominals and lower back), since this acts as a stabilizer in a great amount of exercises.

You can find further details about how to deal with injuries in the article “Injuries: How To Prevent & Treat Them” by Matt Danielsson and the article “A Bodybuilder's Guide To Injury Prevention” by Jon Huston.