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Since childhood it was my dream to be a bodybuilder. I was hugely inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger and the rocky movies. At the age of sixteen I started working out which was nothing but doing 2 sets of pushups before going to school. My diet was consuming two raw eggs before going to school. I’ll be frank I was just copying rocky. I used to dream, visualize, breathe bodybuilding.

I have started building muscle with self learning. I follow ‘High Intensity by Mike Mentzer’. It is an amazing book that takes a different approach to bodybuilding. It says that one doesn’t need to do marathon workouts of 3-4 hours to be a top bodybuilder. Instead only 20-25 minutes twice a week is enough if one does the exercise correctly.

Mike here talks about high intensity training which means one has to select a weight of which he can do approx. 10 reps and perform one set to momentary muscular failure.

A set must be performed until you can no longer physically contract the muscle. When that happens the muscle sends signal to brain for growth to occur.

Any set performed beyond that is unnecessary and in fact highly counter productive because the more you exercise the greater body’s deep reserves have to be utilised to perform the task. When your workout completes your body’s first priority is not to build muscle but replenish the energy reserves that were used up during workout. Once that is done only then body build muscle as a form of compensation and protect it self from further attacks.

After one session a rest of 3-5 days is recommended for body to fully recover.

So the duration of workout and number of number of reps are irrelevant. One must take his/her workout to muscular failure which can occur at 10th rep or 11th rep or 15th rep. If you could do 12 reps or thirteen reps but just did 10 then you wasted your time and energy because you could have gone further.

– Aditya Deshmukh