The second interpretation is that you’re mentally and physically strong, prepared for anything life throws at you. You’re “built” to endure the stress, pressures and difficulties that come your way throughout your time on this planet. Almost like you’ve created a bulletproof mental and physical fortress, capable to deflect any negatives, that attitude-altering artillery shot at all of us every day.

Correct weight training can give you both of those—and opposite to popular belief, it doesn’t take joint-busting, spine-crushing poundage to make it happen.

Actually, exercise with max weights can be a negative, especially as you get older. Sure, if you’re a young ego-driven dude searching for a monster bench press, heavy training  is the way. Low reps and lots of sets will build your strength to the extreme (but not necessarily lots of muscle) just be careful. There’s a accumulative cost. Some people still dealing with injuries sustained during early powerlifting years.

I’m not expressing powerlifting or power bodybuilding are bad training models. Just that throwing around heavy weights is NOT necessary for you to build an impressive bodybuilder-type physique, a body so muscular that people comment on the size of your arms or the width of your back or the vascularity streaking down your forearms. You can get a muscular look for life, and it doesn’t take soft-tissue damage or as much work as you may think (if you train smart).

Whether you’re 18 and just starting the muscle-building journey, or a 50-something trainee who’s been lifting for decades, lifting smart means exercise in the most efficient, safest and fastest ways to build muscle and burn fat.

I my opinion, Old School New Body is a no-B.S. program. I believe its goal is you to have all the ammunition you need to own a physique that turns heads and raises eyebrows and one that supports your health and wellbeing.

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Actually, there are no studies connecting muscle soreness to hypertrophy. But don’t stop reading yet. You will get some good stuff from being a little sore (and you’ll probably even desire it). But first, you need to know what provoke muscle soreness.

It’s believed that the pain is produced by microtrauma in muscle fibers, and it’s mainly triggered by the negative or eccentric stroke of an exercise (like when you lower a bench press, squat or curl rep).

Once your body repairs those microtears, it follows that the muscle should grow stronger; however, that trauma is in the myofibrils, the force-generating actin and myosin strands in the fiber. Those strands grab onto and pull across one another to cause muscular contraction. When you control the negative stroke of a rep, there is friction as those strands drag across each other in an attempt to slow movement speed to prevent injury—and that dragging, it’s believed, is what inflicts the microtrauma.

That’s a simple way to explain it, but you get the idea. So it looks that some growth can happen after muscle soreness is repaired, but it’s in the myofibrils. More and more research is beginning to reveal that those force-generating strands do not help the majority of muscle size; serious mass comes via sarcoplasmic expansion. That’s the “energy fluid” in the fibers that’s filled with glycogen (from carbs), ATP, calcium, noncontractile proteins, etc.

So, if soreness is a signal of only small amounts of muscle growth, why look for it? Well, even small amounts of growth contribute to overall mass. Most of us want every fraction we can rasp up. But the real goal to seek some soreness is to burn more fat.

When the myofibrils are damaged by focusing the eccentric, the body tries to repair them as quickly as possible. That repair process takes energy, a lot of which comes from body fat. The process generally takes many days, so your metabolism is stoked to a higher level for 48 hours or more, helping you get leaner faster (Note: High-intensity interval training, like sprints alternated with slow jogs, damages muscle fibers during the intense intervals, the sprints, which is why HIIT burns more fat in the long run than steady-state cardio where no muscle damage take place).

Do you need heavy negative-only sets to obtain that extra bit of size and metabolic momentum? That’s one way, but negative-accentuated, or X-centric, sets may be a better, safer way.

For an X-centric set, you take somewhat lighter poundage than your 10RM (repetition maximum) and raise the weight in one second and lower it in six. That one-second-positive/six-second-negative cadence does some great things, starting with myofibrillar trauma for some soreness. While you’re dealing with that extra post-workout muscle pain, remember that it can build the myofibrils and that it’s stoking your metabolism for the time of the repair process for more fat burning.

The second big advantage is sarcoplasmic expansion. At seven seconds per rep and eight reps per set, you obtain almost an entire minute of tension time (seven times eight is 56 seconds). A TUT (time under tension) of 50 to 60 seconds is something most bodybuilders never attain, which is a shame because that’s optimal stress for an anabolic cascade and this is the ideal way to train as you age.

If you’re into moderate-poundage, high-fatigue mass building, then the F4X method featured in the Old School New Body method is for you. You can use X-centric as the last set of the sequence. Reduce the weight and do a one-up-six-down cadence. You’ll get sore, build some extra size and—bonus—burn for fat. How great is that?

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And I’m not talking about interval cardio, although the weight-training method I mention here (at the end) has an HIIT feel to it. That’s the F4X method, (featured in Old School New Body) which is moderate-weight, high-fatigue training with short rests between sets. It burns more fat and pumps up your muscles a lot too. Here’s the workout:

You take a weight with which you can get 15 reps, but only do 10; rest 30 seconds, then do it again—and so on for four sets. On the fourth set, you go to failure, and if you get 10 reps, you increase the weight on the exercise at your next workout. Observe how those sets are like intervals with short breaks between—you can even step between sets to burn extra calories, but there’s more.

1. While that training style does great things for muscle growth, via myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic expansion, you also get loads of muscle burn. That lactic acid pooling has a spiking effect on your growth hormone output—and GH is a potent fat burner. Fire up muscle burning to get your GH churning (GH also amplifies other anabolic hormones, so it affects both muscle and rippedness).

2. If you do the reps correctly on each set, you’ll also get myofibrillar trauma. The myofibrils are the force-generating strands in muscle fibers. By “damaging” them with slower, controlled negative hits, you force the need for extra energy during recovery. That is, your body runs hotter while you’re out of the gym as it revs to repair the microtears.

To achieve that additional fat-burning trauma, utilize one-second to lift and three-second to lower on all 10 reps of all four sets. On a bench press that’s one second up and three seconds down. It’s the slow lowering that will generate the metabolic momentum after your training (That rep speed will also offer you 40 seconds of tension time on every set, an ideal hypertrophic TUT.)

3. Now if you really desire to get some blubber-busting microtrauma, try your last set of a F4X sequence in X-centric style. That’s one-second to lift and six-second to lower. You may have to decrease the weight, but it will be worth it. Try for eight of those, 56 seconds of tension time, and you should feel the effects the next day. Your muscles will be soring, but it’s a good indication that fat is baking.

F4X for a GH surge, slower negatives for fat-burning micro trauma and X-centric for even more time under tension and fat reduction. It all adds up to faster leanness with less stinginess—because you’ll need less cardio.

Not familiarized with the F4X method? Click Here to get more information about it.

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