Well, Pellius, ignore the comprehension limited fellows here. I didn't talk with Dr Walczak much but he was on holiday in Vancouver in the summer of 1970. I was still looking good after winning my title at the end of May. He told me if I came to LA and went under his supervision with Decadurabolin that I could be Mr Universe in 6 months. No thanks to that as those titles and trophies weren't more important than my health. Besides, Arnold and Sergio had arrived and pushed bodybuilding to a whole new level. I mean, no matter what most of us did we were never going to be as big as those two giants.
I did come up with something new re training. As long as I can remember the idea of training was to break down the tissue and then wait until the body adapted by growing bigger and stronger muscles. We followed Dr Hans Selye's stress model. What evolved was to train bodyparts twice a week. We used to train upper body MWF and legs TThSa. So we had split routines that did this. When Arthur Jones arrived around 1969 the whole scene changed and we all tried to be more efficient by doing less sets. I still clung to the idea put forward by Larry Scott. He said if you could pump your arms bigger than ever you would grow muscle. So what I did was try to see how few sets I could do to reach the maximum pump. It was about 7 sets. I totally missed what I had to do and my arms never did measure 18 inches cold.
In 1999 I thought I would have a go at seeing how big I could get my arms. No drugs, of course. That stopped in 1975 and only 2 Dianabol tablets were used. What I discovered was that when I did something that made my arms larger they were sore for several days. Ah, ha, I thought, what if I kept them sore?! Up until then just about everyone believed you grew after the soreness went. In other words, we were supposed to let the muscle recover then retrain them. The problem with doing that is we have to overcome the repeated bout effect and it takes much more of whatever you were doing to generate more hypertrophy. I concluded that DOMS could be used to guage when hypertrophy was occurring. If a workout didn't generate significant DOMS then I wasn't going to grow. I would stay the same which is what 90% of what bodybuilders do every time they train. Few keep growing.
For a month I kept both arms and calves sore. I was growing 1/10 inch per workout and in one month put an inch on my arms and over an inch on my calves. Unfortunately for me I got sore elbows from having my elbows on the pads. Since then I never let my elbows touch any pads. I injured my Achilles tendons from doing too many ballistic movements with 700 pounds on the calf machine. Gosh, I really got strong quickly. However, sooner or later you enter the danger zone where injuries can happen. I trained every 3rd day to give the connective tissue a chance to heal. The muscles seemed fine.
I think what is often missed, ignore or not considered by bbers is that when the body adapts to resistance training this doesn't necessarily mean that adaptive response is muscle hypertrophy. Arnold mentioned in his first bio how they went up into the mountains and did 60 sets of squats. Benny Podda said that he and Ray Mentzer would have "squat parties" in which they would literally squat for hours on end through the night.
I imgine they would have adapted in the sense that they could endure such training better than when they first started. But did this translate into an increase in muscle size? Though I personally thought Arnold had great quads in his prime, it was often considered a weak point and I imgaine if 60 sets were productive he would have continued to use this protocol.
Again I look at Coleman's training. He did nothing special but push himself. Just basic exercises using questionable form yet he built more quality muscle mass than any human being thus far. I looked at Jay's training. Same monotous routine that seem to rarely change with a more "going through the motions" mentality than Coleman yet was a multiple Mr. O.
As Thomas Sowell from Stanford University once remarked, "So much of a person's fate is determine on the day he is born."
Where you are born? With what you are born with? To whom you are born from?.... The list is endless.
