I used to be a scrawny guy. After form 5, I was 1.75 metres tall but weighed only 57kgs. 3 years later, I picked up my first set of weights. It was just a pair of 5 kgs plates attached to a bar, and I struggled like hell with it.

The best mistake I made was not to read any muscle mag and stick with fixed routines like those "10 reps x 4 sets" stuff. I was lifting that bar every single moment of free time I had. I was doing curls, triceps extensions, overhead presses.. any motion that felt natural, that didn't put my joints in an awkward position. I incorporated pressing routines into my squats as a compound movement out of intuition and the urge to experiment.

In three months, I gained 5 kgs of lean muscle mass and was ripped like hell. My college mate couldn't believe what he was seeing when I took my shirt off. In the next 3 months, I gained another 3 kgs.

This was achieved without any supplements, without any fixed regiments. I just continued increasing the weights on the bar, and bought dumbbells so that I can do a larger variety of stuff. But basically, all I did was dinosaur training.

I didn't bother counting the reps.. I just continued doing it on and on till I can't do it anymore. I didn't bother counting the sets. I did lifting anytime I had some free time on my hands.

When I started working back in 2000, I joined Fitness Network in Centrepoint Bandar Utama and continued my dinosaur training style.. intuitively doing drop sets to keep the intensity up. I'll be doing high-volume high-intensity stuff, moving from one set to another with less than 1 minute's rest in between. In some cases, like supersetting between biceps curls and triceps pressdowns, I do them back to back to failure with no rest in between, while dropping weights (dropped sets) for every subsequent sets.

I got plenty of results pretty fast. From 65kgs, I went up to 72kgs in just a year. Most other people who have been swinging those bars in the gym for 2 or 3 years didn't even get this sort of result mainly because they didn't incorporate the necessary intensity, and limited themselves with those "10 reps x 4 sets" nonsense.

What I learned down the years is that in order to gain power, strength and speed, we have to put our body in the longest duration of tension possible. Whether you're doing a static isometric routine, or doing repeated isotonic routines back to back, it doesn't matter. It is far better for gaining strength and increase the efficiency of your muscles (innervation efficiency) if we use plenty of compound movements, and force the body to undergo an extended period of elevated muscular tension.

If we're lifting weights right, we should be sweating, huffing and puffing as if we just ran 10km! Whey protein and creatine supplements go a long way towards helping the beginner, and is really good for helping the intermediate ones break past the plateaus.. especially creatine.

Eat smart, supplement smart, and do plenty of compound movements as if we're cavemen crossing a terrain on a mammoth hunt. Do it old-school, do it rigorously, and workout like an animal whose body operate as a single unit. That will give you plenty of functional strength and not just "show muscles". Incorporate lots of chinning, pushups and stretching if possible, being functionally athletic is far better in terms of health and everyday life than having a bulky body that looks clumsy and, well, bulky.

That's mostly correct but not quite. It works perfectly for ectomorphs. In fact, I suspect that these high-tension routines contribute towards satellite cell differentiation and not just hypertrophy of the myosin sheath around the actin fibers (i.e. the usual method of muscle volume increase).

Not that it didn't work after 3 months, mind you. The gains slowed down after 1 year.

However, I'm a hard-gainer. I have tried all that stuff from low-volume HIT to rest-pause to regular muscle-mag recommendations of 10 rep x 4 sets. No luck. The results don't stay for long, especially not those 10 reps x 4 sets crap. What I "gained" with those low-intensity stuff is just a "pump" that I carry on to the next workout. hence it's a false gain.

Furthermore, it was a priority for me to maintain my ability to do splits and all sorts of kicks. My cardio consisted of plenty of bagwork and compound stuff like clean & press, and I incorporated a lot of stretching.. even weighted stretches. That was due to me doing martial arts.

High-volume high-intensity training is the only stuff that has worked for me down the years. From times when I've gotten out of shape and needed to get back in shape 2 months before a company trip, or times when I needed to whip up my endurance for a half-marathon the following month, high-intensity high-volume training has worked wonders.

The lean mass that I've gained isn't the "false gain" from water retention that most supplements give. I can stop working out for a few months (like what's been happening lately ever since I started dating full-time) and gain some fat here and there, but my lean mass doesn't go away (unlike those false gains from L-arginine and creatine, which is mainly water retention). Also, I can just go back into the gym anytime and return to my old poundages within a week or two.

As for overtraining, I admit that it has the possibility to dampen recovery rates, but again this is a conventional wisdom of most muscle mags. Recovery will still be okay if your nutrition and diet is kept in check. If you juice up on whey protein at least 3 to 4 times a day (in doses smaller than the recommended serving), you'll be surprised at how high your energy levels are throughout the day and how fast your recovery rates are. The other stuff is creatine - it really really helps with recovery because it somehow minimizes lactic acid damage during workout in the first place.

Check out stuff from Pavel Tsatsouline and Frederick Hatfield for proper scientific approach towards resistance training. Also check out this PDF over here: http://www.asep.org/files/OttoV4.pdf

The most important thing is that we'll have to workout with plenty of intensity and keep raising the bar for ourselves in order to reach further.

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Added on January 14, 2008, 11:20 pmOh yeah, full body workouts are great!! Each of my gym session consist of compound workout for the entire body.. I don't practice those "arms day", "chest day", "legs day" stuff. It works for some people but it doesn't work for me. Also, compound movement workouts have been the best method for me to increase the power behind my punches and kicks, and they help me maintain my overall flexibility. Explosive compound movements like squats with dumbbell raises, or barbell clean-and-press, etc. are excellent as fast-working cardio exercises too. They seem to work far, far better than jogging or pedaling on the stationary bike.

This post has been edited by jswong: Jan 14 2008, 11:20 PM

Just keep some whey protein in shaker bottles in your car, or in your knapsack. Back when I wanted to pile on more mass, instead of eating all round the clock, I just drink whey protein during tea time instead of taking in empty calories like roti canai and teh tarik.

In addition to the usual 3 meals a day (which wasn't always regular back then, while I was a project engineer), I had one protein shake before workout, and one after workout.. one protein shake during tea time (around 3 to 4 pm, between lunch and gym time) and one more at night, around 1 hour before bedtime.

Whacking protein shakes all round the clock like that had its benefits - I found it easier to pack on mass. But it has disadvantages too - my stomach got a bit gassy at times, and my stool is always loose because of the liquid diet. I was using Myoplex, and that stuff is a little denser compared to the regular protein shakes, so it feels quite filling.