Heavy Duty CBL

I read an article the other day called the Ultimate Bulking Guide. What I hate about these guides, aside from their lack of scientific basis and poor grammar, is how they promise quality mass gains but only provide the normal rules of train more, eat more. The diet portion, obviously, requires more attention than they give, but they at least provide something, even if only half-assed. Seldom do we get a hard prescription for training, and most of the time, nothing. 

Maybe I’m guilty of doing the same, leaving, as some accuse, too much to chance by not prescribing a training routine to accompany Carb Back-Loading. But CBL works with such a wide array of methodologies that, from the stupid-simple point of view, I found it easier to describe what not to do and why, rather than trying to force everyone into a single plan.

I underestimated the zeal of CBL adherents and not only did several people read the restrictions on training, they read-into the restrictions on training, specifically: if purely eccentric training, à la Mike Mentzer’s Heavy Duty or Dorian Yates’ Blood And Guts is unacceptable, then maybe concentric-only loading turbocharges CBL results. It’s a fair hypothesis, but a short-sighted one.

Eccentric-only loading fails to stimulate glucose transporter translocation[1-7]. In layman’s terms, Heavy Duty won’t create the cellular magic necessary to make CBL work. That’s why it’s unacceptable. There’s no reason to assume the contrapositive, however, that concentric-only training performs better than standard rep performance.

There’s one problem here: eccentric loading causes muscle growth, not the contractive portion of the movement[8-26].

You may think I’m splitting hairs here because concentric training takes effort to set up in a standard gym. But this is DangerouslyHardcore.com and lots of readers don’t train in a standard gym and have access to things like a sled. In that case, it’s pretty easy to come up with an upper-body, concentric-only training routine, as in pulling the sled toward you with a rope.

If you’re using CBL, whether for Strength Accumulation or Density Bulking, the primary goal is to trigger hypertrophy. This is why Modulated Tissue Response (MTR) packs the power that it does and is what CBL leverages. Send the maximum growth signal to one tissue and the maximum shrinkage signal to the other. Build the muscle, burn the fat.

 Even when leaning out, if you give muscles every possible signal to grow, the body will not cannibalize them for energy, it’ll go to the next best source, fat. With CBL, to achieve maximum hypertrophy in skeletal muscle takes both the concentric movement to translocate GLUT, and the eccentric portion to trigger the genetic factors that spark growth.

The moral of the story: the repetition is like everything else in the world. For every yin, a yang exists; for every electron, a positron; and for every Twinkie, there’s a piece of tofu. The key: the world works best when in balance (okay, maybe we’d be better off without tofu).

 Now that I’ve dissuaded you from doing either a pure-Heavy-Duty routine or a pure-concentric routine, I’m now going to tell you that Heavy Duty training is, by far, one of the most powerful training methodologies I’ve ever used and eccentric overload may amplify the hypertrophic response of training[27-29] and strength and power gains[30, 31].

It doesn’t take much modification to create a routine that provides all the goodness of non-insulin mediated GLUT translocation (a key ingredient for CBL) combined with the growth acceleration of a true Heavy Duty program. I even went to the trouble to make a downloadable PDF of the training split. You can get it below.

The program uses some concepts from the Shockwave Protocols, specifically adding volume without over-taxing the nervous system. Even though massive training volume is unnecessary, it is an important factor for hypertrophy[32-34]. If you’re unfamiliar with PSR or ELECT (or even what those abbreviations mean), you better download a copy of the free Shockwave ebook here.

You’ll notice (after you download the workout) a “Perf” column, which is short for performance, as in, how to perform the exercise. The Shockwave Protocol describes what PSR and ELECT mean. The list below explains the other abbreviations that occur in the performance column.

• STD—No, it’s not a reference to sexually-transmitted diseases—it means, simply, standard, as in, lower the weight in controlled fashion and lift with adequate force. It’s probably how you already workout, so don’t stress about it.
• DROP—This refers to a drop set, i.e. each successive set gets lighter, you drop weight with each set. With this in mind, you’ll want to start the exercise with a pretty heavy load.
• NEG—Here we come to the quintessential eccentric part of the training. NEG stands for negative. You’ll notice that the repetition prescription for each of these goes something like 10+3. The 10 represents the number of reps to do in standard fashion before hitting positive failure—your 10-rep max for that exercise. 
  The +3 signifies the number of negative repetitions. After hitting positive failure, have your spotter—yes, you will absolutely need a spotter for this type of training—lift the weight for you (or from you) and once you’re set, have them let go. Start lowering the weight. The lowering phase should take between one and three seconds. Do this for the prescribed number of negative repetitions, which is almost always 3.
• N/A—Seriously, you had to ask? It means, not applicable.

For everything else, the legend at the bottom of the PDF should cover it.

 

 

Warning: CBL users, eccentric loading interferes with glycogen resynthesis[1, 35], so don’t splurge quite so much. Cut out a turnover or two. 

 

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