The whole point of the Maximize Your Muscle program is to blast right past adaptation before your progress has a chance to pla- teau. The program is carefully designed so that you spend four weeks in a phase that specifically targets one particular method or result and then move into something completely different before your body has a chance to adapt to the work you're de- manding of it.
I've emphasized over and over again for years that in order to continue getting great results, you must continuously change up at least one of the variables, whether it's volume, intensity, load, frequency or something else, in order to avoid a plateau that will frustrate you and slow your progress.
The downside of having to do that is that many guys aren't sure what they should change next in order to achieve this, so they take the approach of throwing things up against the wall and seeing what sticks. They increase load for a week or two and when that doesn't do it, they switch from splits to a full body routine and so on. This random approach not only takes a huge amount of time and energy, it also wastes the potential of the methods that are being tried.
The great thing about Maximize Your Muscle is that you don't have to try to figure out what to change next. All of that work is already done for you and it's done strategi- cally. Each phase is carefully designed to play off of what you have been doing and also play into the phase that's coming next. It takes advantage of what you did last month and are about to do next month with your metabolism, your muscles and your Central Nervous System. There's nothing random about it.
Each phase is carefully designed to play off of what you have been doing and also play into the phase that's coming next.
In this phase of the program, the purpose is to retrain your Central Nervous System and speed up recovery. We do this through high-frequency training.
An Overview of High Frequency Training
High-frequency is one of the most underutilized protocols in bodybuilding. We're so condi- tioned to believe that lifting heavy and taking several days to recover is the best way to see serious results; that low-weightlhigh-rep programs are a waste of time. Traditional thinking also says that training the same body part too many times in a given week hampers recovery and results in overtraining.
However, when done correctly, high-frequency training has been proven to get excellent results, without overtraining, and to improve your performance when you go back to heavy, less-frequent lifting.
The Research on High·Frequency Training
In 20l0, Burd, et al found that lifting lighter weights actually resulted in better protein synthe- sis. They evaluated two groups of lifters; one group doing four sets to failure at 30% of lRM and the other group doing four sets to failure at 90% lRM. The group lifting less showed bet- ter protein synthesis overall.
Another study, published in the Journal of Physiology in 2003, showed that muscle stem cells are replenished by Mechano-growth factor or MGF. Each time you sufficiently stimulate your muscles, a shot of MGF is released to repair and grow those muscle cells. It just makes sense that stimulating those muscle fibers more frequently results in more MGF being re-