How I Transformed My Physique In Under A Year!

by Peter Chown

 

While I was competing at the 2006 BNBF British I heard so many comments about how much size I had put on in only a few months. I also heard a few comments that was music to my ears and that was how balanced my physique was! No longer did I hear that my legs over power my upper body. I have been trying to achieve this balance for years and have finally done it!

So what are my secrets? Well, for years I was doing the same type of training, each body part once a week, low sets and heavy weight. My size had pretty much stayed the same for years, maybe the odd pound or two of muscle was added. I started to feel frustrated, surely I haven’t reached my size limit? I wanted to be bigger, better and no way was I going to accept the size I was. So I decided to go back to the drawing  board, and what I decided to do was go against everything that I believed in.

After the 2005 BNBF British I had a week off from the gym, then once back, hitting the weights hard. I started a 12 week strength training phase basing my workouts around the bench press, deadlift and squat. The sets were high and the reps were low, around six sets never going higher than 5 reps usually down to 2-3 reps. My strength increased dramatically, just what I wanted so once I enter my hypertrophy phase I would be able to do higher reps with a lot more weight than before which would equal more muscle mass.

This phase continued into a personal training course I was studying in Cyprus  and once my strength training was over I ended up having six weeks off from training so I  could concentrate on my studies and enjoy my time there. I did feel a bit guilty about the long layoff but my studies were very important to me and it ended up being a blessing.

On my return from Cyprus I was so fired up and couldn’t wait to hit the gym and start adding the size I desperately wanted to improve my physique. A big change I made to my training was to increase my training from 3-4 times a week to 6 times, training each body part twice a week. But training each body part twice a week surely I would over train? You’ll be surprised. Once you increase your frequency and volume of your workouts the body will adapt and recover a lot quicker which means training body parts more often resulting in more muscle gains and we all want that right?

I split my body over 3 days, the first 3 days I trained heavy, keeping the reps in the 6-8 range. I then repeated my body split the following 3 days but training lighter and upping the reps to 20 and my rest down to 30-60 seconds.

I started this training in April 2006 and by July I had put on 7lbs of lean muscle. I was shocked. I hadn’t made that much progress since I first started training and here I was 17 years into my training and making gains like I was a beginner!

So I challenge you to radically change your training around and see what happens.

Good luck! 

Peter