Strength and Physique

Q: I am sure you have probably covered this before, but I would appreciate it if you could give me some advice as how to adapt a well rounded three and four day routine for some of our female trainees.  We are having great success with your comprehensive Neo-Classical program for the guys and was wondering how you would adapt it to suit women, specifically for those that can only train for three or four days. They want the same benefits regarding density and decompression but with a longer mesocycle that does not need changing too often. One of the reasons is that the guys don't want to keep on changing the program, as every time you pass through the different phases it feels like a first time challenge all from the start! Thank you for your time, P. Swart My Answer: In Tactics and Strategies I have a chapter on training for women. But if you want to adapt the Neo-Classical workout for women, then all you have to do is to assess the body types of the female traine...

Q:  I've only recently found your blog, and may I say it has excellent information. However, I am currently going through a dilemma and I was hoping you can help me out of it. I am 20 years old, have been working out for 2 years now (extremely slow progress, perhaps due to not eating enough) and currently weigh 145lbs at 5'9" with the bodyfat of around 15-18%. I am now more focused on bulking and building size, and worrying less about the bodyfat (will deal with that later). This whole time, I have been using split workouts, and it worked out alright. But not satisfactory. I only gained 10lbs of muscle over the past two years, and another 10lbs of fat in the past 3 months (ate like crazy trying to bulk). However, I have recently decided to try out the HST program. Thus I went to find out my 15RM, 10RM and 5RMs but alas, I found out that people give pretty bad reviews regarding this "Bryan Haycock masterpiece". I understand that nutrition and s...

Now that I'm training at a commercial gym again, I'm starting to remember all the crazy behavior I've seen before in other gyms.  Luckily these behaviours don't hurt people, but it is funny to see some of this stuff go on: The Partial Lifter- This guy doesn't ever do full reps.  He just does half reps no matter what the exercise: bench press, leg press, squat.  This guy is more worried about the pounds on the bar instead of a full range of motion.  He thinks he's strong, because he's pushing a lot of weight just a few inches.  The Weight Dropper- This guys likes to drop his weights with a loud thud so that the entire gym can hear how much weight he's pushing, even if it is just a few inches. The Interloper- If you're doing dips, pull-ups or some other exercise, then this guy will jump in between your sets and try to do more reps than you.  Or he'll try to do some fancy, more complicated version of the exercise your doing just to better y...