By now you should be in your second week and wanting to back off the 80% x 6 x 2 light session cause you just can't fact it any more. You feel your only option is to go and get the latest copy of Men's Health magazine cause you can't be a real man. At this point I will give you some real self-confidence cause I know you can be a strong man. You know, feeling tired out is something you are just going to have to live with and it certainly isn't an excuse to have time out and lay in bed all day playing with your todger. You can only make any judgement on your efforts if you are finishing your lifts and if you are you on your way to getting the expected results.



The remainder of your exercises can be split across the week at whatever set and rep scheme you choose. Say for example you are specialising in the overhead press you might wish to squat + press on Monday, chin + press on Wednesday and bench + press on Friday. I find it best to keep poundages for the other lifts at about 80 - 90% of maximums for whatever rep range I am using.

In the case you can bench 100Kg for 12 reps, then you would have to do sets of 80-90Kg for 10-12 reps in the bench. You should also consider rotating your days used for your assistance work to avoid performing similar assistance to your main lift on a "heavy" day.

Let's assume that the overhead press were your specialisation lift, then you need to make your bench press fall on one of the 6 x 2 days, and certainly not on a more intense day. By doing it this way you can actually do bench pressing while doing heavy overhead pressing. You could even compare this to doing deadlifting as assistance work while doing squats as your main lift. The outcome being that you just can't progress on deadlift when doing heavy squats and deadlift on the same day. There is no doubt in my mind that you can only go forward by maintenance only on other lifts.

Once the six week period is over you will have to go onto your next specialisation lift and begin all over. You may even like to consider going back to a more traditional bodybuilding routine so you can get your new strength working on making more and bigger muscles, so you should increase the rep range a bit. It is so sad to say though and to my horror, that so many bodybuilders just disregard their newly formulated strength and go back to doing leg extensions once per month as training my way is just "too tough".

I hope you don't take it the wrong way or anything, but it's true. Great training methods are turned down just on the grounds that it gets uncomfortable. It may have gone unnoticed but not everyone around us has got big muscles and that's because it takes dedication and resistance.

People often ask me just what sort of results are we talking about when it comes to strength gains in a routine like this. Well I can boast 7.5 - 10% on a lift for each session of suffering and big increases on repetition work post program.

I can actually share with you past results for this very program with a deadlift going from 200Kg to 220Kg and reps with 180kg from 6 to an easy 11 at a bodyweight of 93Kg. Pretty good for a six week training program, I'd say. I am actually looking at shooting for 180Kg x 20 reps by the end of this year and to do that by increasing my limit strength repetition the lifting will increase automatically.

We all have our differences and I'm not quite Mr Universe, but I can assure you that there are a great number of bodybuilders in the world who could better my results. You really just have to kick yourself and get doing new routines and ones that hurt. If you come across any good one just e-mail them to me, Mick Hart. Check out the MickHartBlog which is there for those who like suffering.