Heavy Duty Bodybuilding Principles Explained

30 March 2009 | Heavy Duty Bodybuilding | Tags: ,

I’ve been using the heavy duty training principles that were pioneered by Mike Mentzer back in the 1970’s for the last six weeks or so, and as such have decided to write up a quick guide to what I’m talking about in my regular training journal posts.

To summarise quickly, heavy duty training principles centre around doing your exercises in a much more controlled fashion than many weight trainers or bodybuilders do them. For example, I’m sure you’ve all seen people in the gym lifting big dumbbells when doing bicep curls, but swinging the weights up, using their upper bodies to create momentum in the dumbbell in order to get the weight to the top of the curl. This is a complete waste of time in certain respects, because it means you are using a weight that is too heavy.

With heavy duty, the idea is to use a weight that you can lift with complete control, but to really emphasize each rep, and thus take much longer over each rep than is really needed. For example, you could probably do a bicep curl rep in 2 seconds, but with heavy duty, the ideal would be 12 seconds. So for one rep, it’s taken the same amount of time as 6 reps done quickly. You can see that this would place far greater stress on the muscles than doing the reps quickly, which is wherein the theory states the gains will come from.

In addition, the heavy duty principles dictate that you should be aware that each rep has three distinct parts to it, the positive (or concentric), the static (holding the weight at the top) and the negative (or eccentric). The heavy duty principles focus on each of these three parts of the rep, aiming to spend around four seconds on each part of the rep, giving a total of twelve.

In addition to spending much longer on each rep, heavy duty focuses on isolation exercises first to pre-fatigue the muscles before a compound exercise. So for instance, a chest workout would start with a pec-deck workout, followed by a bench press. By doing this, the pectorals are already fatigued by the pec deck workout, and then by doing bench press afterwards, the triceps will help the chest to achieve failure again, as it’s usually the triceps that fail on bench before the pectorals.

Lastly, with heavy duty training, the use of forced or assisted reps is used to ensure failure at the end of a set. The reason assisted reps are used is because as Mike Mentzer explains in this video, the positive contraction of a muscle is not as strong as the negative contraction or the static, so if you get help on the last few reps with the positive part of the rep, you are still working the muscle by holding the static and then relaxing the muscle with the negative part of the rep.

So in a nutshell, that is my understanding of heavy duty training, as pioneered by Mike Mentzer. Please read his site for more information or watch many of the great video’s on YouTube of Mike training bodybuilders out in Los Angeles.

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