ok, for those of you that have done the gg program, what was your split like for other upper body parts? ian says he reccommends the average person train the rest of the body in maintanance fashion (high intensity, low volume) because the program is so taxing on your body. i will be taking Surge though and i believe my recovery ability is allready a little better than average. do you think it would work in this situation for me to still do some chest/shoulder/back hypertrophy work if i keep the volume reasonable? i plan on doing the A workouts on monday and B on friday so i figured weds would be the best time to do rest of upper body. should i incorporate pullups or chinups at all during this workout or will that not allow my biceps enough recovery? also, since i am trying to get my arms bigger would i need to be in a builking cycle as far as diet is concerned since it is just my arms. i want to keep my abs for the summer. that is actually why i’m doing this program now because i need something to hold me over until fall when i plan on gaining some serious mass. i am in a similar situation to timbo and after seeing how he was torn a new asshole in the last post i realize that i need to do the same thing as him. i would just rather wait until fall to start though. sorry for the long post.
Nasty Nic…Timbo here, talkin’ out of his other asshole, actually:-) Just playin’…I guess I can’t really comment or help you out a whole lot, seeing that I haven’t done Ian’s Great Guns. However, I do think that you could add a little size to your arms using the program and not following a bulking diet, but I would think that you would see better and more size gains with a diet that corresponded with the goals of the program. The reason I do think some size could be added is because the nature of the training is to tax the ATP/CP pathway thru short Rest Intervals and extended TUT. This method of training subjects you to sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. So I would think that if you’re at around maintenance, you might experience some size gains. As far as your other question about training the rest of your upper body, I can’t say for certain, but I know that Ian recommends volume no greater than what you’re doing for your soon-to-be Great guns. Hope that helps a little
I’ve done the Great Guns program and got good results. As for the other body parts, I just followed the rep guidelines of the limping series and the 12 weeks to Super strength programs. I just reduced the numbers of sets and kinda merged the two programs so that I was doing chest and quads in one day and back and hams on another. I followed the same periodization schedule. I figured, if those two programs are good for putting on mass, they should be just as good for maintaining, if the volume was lower. I actually put on five pounds on the bench at the end of the whole deal, so I think worked pretty well.