The man in the mirror is a giant. This mirror is one that tends to make a person look a little more on the tall and lean side than he really is. This time, though, the mirror doesn't exaggerate. The man really is a giant. He's wearing a posing suit, cut high on the thigh and snug across his legs. His feet are fixed, his heels turned in slightly and his pelvis is angled forward just a bit.
One hand, his left hand, is on his hip. His right arm is angled in front of his body, fist clenched.
Gary Strydom is practicing a most-muscular pose, the way he likes to do it. Ripples of muscular sinew snake out and down across his massive chest. His strong jaw clenches, his eyes are transfixed forward. Beads of sweat appear on Strydom's brow, his chest heaves up and down as his lungs begin to cry out for oxygen. The muscles in his midsection tighten up, striations of powerful fiber flex out from his thighs. His body is shapely, symmetrical, powerful. He radiates strength and brute force. He is, in fact, the epitome of everything heavy bodybuilding can produce, perhaps the finest collection of hard muscles ever assembled in human form.
Hard muscle. Yes, it's what most of the youngsters reading this article want more than anything else in the world. It's what competitive bodybuilders hand out as their calling card. It's what most men who have hit 40 would really like to augment their battle for good health and extended years, even though they might try to pretend it isn't so.
Hard muscle is the be-all and end-all for most men who pick up a barbell. Give 'em that old hard muscle and they'll be your friend forever. It is this quest for hard muscle that has taken steroids beyond the realm of the competitive athlete, and inflicted them upon the movie star, the casual fitness buff, the teenage boy hoping for the girl of his dreams. But there is a safer way to hard muscle mass - if you listen to Gary Strydom.
To be sure, Gary is not your average bodybuilder. He isn't even your average professional bodybuilder or professional winner. He lives by his own rules and he's not prone to believing something or ascribing to something just because it has been so written or because everyone else has done it that way. No, Strydom is bodybuilding's Thoreau, he who marches to the beat of a different drum. Our Equalizer, the man who brought Matt Mendenhall to his knees back in 1986, the man who gave a new meaning to ultraripped glutes and thighs, the man who sent Michael Ashley packing in the Night of the Champions contest, the man who says he will eventually topple the supreme one, Lee Haney from his Olympia perch, plays by his own rules.
Now, for sure, our bodybuilding world is confusing, especially to someone who picks up a magazine for the first time and endeavors to learn the ways of the bodybuilding world. The neophyte soon discovers that the easy, fast, step-by-step way to the body of his fantasies is fraught with the perils of confusion and conflicting direction. Minds boggle and discipline wanes.
Take the case of developing hard muscle size.
You'll hear all kinds of advice. That you should do low reps with heavy weights and add forced reps whenever you can. That you should do only 1-3 sets and concentrate on the negative part of the lifts. That, no, you should do a lot of sets and the reps must be at least 8 and all the way up to 15. That you should use the pyramid overload. That you should warm up, go to your maximum and use a descending weight overload. You'll read about rest pause, extended sets, push-pull training for mass. You'll learn that you must overload on protein. No so, say others; you should eat little protein and mostly carbohydrates.
It's a wonder that anyone develops hard muscle mass at all! And then there are the steroid pushers, who will tell you it's impossible to develop any quantity of hard muscle mass without injecting androidal androgens into your behind, the Ashleys and Jean-Guillames of the world be damned.
So what does Gary Strydom, all 6 feet, 275 pounds of him, have to say about all these rantings?
"Hogwash," says Gary. "Most of what you read or what this or that bodybuilder says is misinformation, in my opinion. I don't mean that other bodybuilders are stupid or trying to mislead you. It's more like they automatically assume that just because they made gains off some exercises or some specific program, that everyone else will too. Such is not the case and it has never been."
As someone who certainly looks like he knows what he's talking about, the huge man from Marina del Rey, California, gets my full attention. "I think the biggest mistake kids make," says Gary, "and I made it too when I started, is that they get it fixed in their minds that something has to be one way because Mr. So-And-So says it has to be. This approach is wrong and you end up wasting a lot of time because of it.
"I'll give you an example. It's a given that every beginning bodybuilder should do bench presses for his chest, that heavy bench presses are the best way to build up your chest. Now, that might be true for Jeff Everson or Gary Strydom, but someone else might find that dumbbell incline flyes, decline presses or cable work builds up his chest a lot quicker. You usually do presses on an incline with either a barbell or heavy dumbbells to build up the upper chest right here [Gary points to the line of fibers known as the clavicular chest fibers]. Okay? But I've watched Tom Platz train his upper chest and I think he's got one of the best upper chests in bodybuilding, and Tom didn't do either of these exercises. Instead, he positioned himself in the in the Smith rack machine and did what I thought was a very strange movement, sort of a half press or lock-out press with the bar with his elbows directed out. I watched Tom do about 10 sets of these little, bitty quarter movements and that's all, I mean all he did for his upper chest. But you know what? When he was done, he was pumped bigger than a house.
"So, if you're looking to get the biggest and hardest you can, the fastest way you can, you have to find out what exercises, sets and reps work best for you. It's not a cop-out to say this. It really is the way bodybuilding works. It's a very individualized thing.
"I can give you another example," Gary continues. "Everyone does leg extensions to cut up and separate the quadriceps right on top of the knee joint. That's the way it's supposed to work anyway. Well, I haven't done a leg extension for three years! My knee area is well developed and is separated as well as anyone's in bodybuilding. I do squats and a special cable exercise for my low quads. I put a cuff around my ankle and do leg kickouts and this develops my hard size and separation there better than anything. That tells me that there are no rules."
I agree with Gary that bodybuilding is confusing to beginners and is made harder than it should be because so many role models think that their training is something unique and special or that it is the only way to get where you want to go. But at the same time I suggest to Gary that there are some commonalities, some basic physiological rules for developing the body.
To which Gary replies, "Or course that's true. You have to exercise and you have to exercise hard. Not only that, but you have to eat right. It's not easy by any means and what I've done is develop the workout and eating system that I've found has benefited me the most in gaining hard muscle mass."
I think the methods Gary's worked out are as god as any for developing quality mass. That's why I wanted to share them with all the bodybuilders out there who perhaps haven't had as much success as they would have liked with some of the methods they're tried so far. Here's what big Gary does.
Gary works out on an interesting combination system, a methodology he claims incorporates aspects of many training theories to maximize hardness, muscle quality and size, all attributes Strydom is known for.
Rather than letting you get bogged down with details on how Gary groups bodyparts, it's more important that I tell you about the philosophy underlying the training. Gary has a three-tiered system consisting of a heavy day, a medium-light day, and a high-intensity day. Do not immediately assume high intensity means heavy weights and low reps with forced reps and negatives, because that's not how Gary interprets high intensity.
On his heavy day, regardless of which particular bodypart or parts he's training on this day, Gary does 12-15 sets per bodypart and keeps his repetitions between 5-8. He trains slowly, without exhausting speed, and he uses as much weight as he can for each of the sets on all exercises.
On his medium-light day, Gary will reverse himself. Now he'll do a whopping 20-30 sets (usually he is training one bodypart, sometimes two, but never two major ones), and keeps his reps between 12-15. He doesn't push on this day, in terms of where his reps are supposed to be (I'll explain that in a bit). On this day, Gary is training at a good clip and is very intent on squeezing his reps at the finish to peak out his muscles and to help build muscle maturity and detail.
On his high-intensity day, Gary may do just one, two, or three exercises for each bodypart. Does he do this out of whim or for some scientific reason? Neither. He does it this way because he couldn't take any more! Gary's definition of high intensity is doing fairly high repetition (12-15) but with really heavy weights.
An example of his high-intensity training would be leg presses, but he'll use such a heavy weight that he can barely get 10 standard reps. Since his program calls for 15, he has to find a way to get 15. Gary uses rest pause here to accomplish that goal. He does 10, rests in the locked-out position just long enough to gain momentary recovery so that he can squeeze out another rep. He proceeds to do these very short rest periods as he gets the next rep, and the next, until he's made all 15.
This training day is exceedingly difficult. That's why Gary calls it high intensity. High intensity to him doesn't have to do with the total weight lifted, it has to do with total effort. By the time he's done this 3-5 set torture, he's pretty well spent. In fact, on some high-intensity days he may do only one exercise, especially if it's one that involves big muscle groups. like the leg press or squat.
Gary has used this three-tier training pattern since he progresses past the beginners stage of bodybuilding, no matter how he grouped his bodyparts. The fact that Gary is varying his sets, exercises and especially his repetitions shows he's attuned to a form of 'holistic' training.
With training, Gary has always stressed consistency and heavy weights (the other day he did 315 for 18 reps in the bench press, and felt he could have done a couple more, but didn't want to risk re-injuring his shoulder. He also stresses a rotational system of training as described; emphasis on the squeezing of the muscle contraction at the end of each motion; a lot of posing for harder muscularity; and a regimented eating and supplement program designed specifically for hard mass.
Gary's nutritional plan was designed in part by his wife Alyse, who has had a lot of experience and training in nutrition. The program is expensive - I believe Gary once told me they spend $2,000 a month on food alone! That's believable. Read on.
Gary eats every three hours like clockwork. Even if he and Alyse are traveling, they follow this rigid schedule (she cooks food ahead of time to bring along). The only time they don't is during sleep, but early in his bodybuilding life Gary interrupted his sleep to follow this every-three-hour feeding schedule. If it sounds like a program you'd put cattle on, Gary is as big as a bull.
Every three hours Gary feasts on the following: 3-5 chicken breasts or a pound of lean beef or 8-10 egg whites with two yolks worked in, a small helping of vegetables (broccoli, asparagus, green beans), a little fruit and an ample supply complex carbs, usually rice, baked potatoes or couscous. Occasionally he drinks a little nonfat milk.
Gary's dietary plan is solid as a rock, and for many years he did not use food supplements at all. However, he now uses an occasional protein powder mixed with strawberries, water or apple juice for a once or twice a day snack.
I agree with Gary. There is no guaranteed method for getting hard muscle mass for everyone. But Gary's system has worked very well for him, and you might give it an unbiased try. Over the next year or two you may be pleasantly surprised!
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