Question: Mr. Ronny, I have read a lot of articles about increasing muscle mass, but not many articles about sculpting muscle shape. I eat a lot of tuna, mackerel and whey protein supplements. What else should I eat? What kind of training program (reps, sets, and weight) should I use to make me look stronger?
Kuhlman: From the beginning, you should consider what exactly you want to have? For example, you want to be "strong" rather than muscular. If you focus on increasing muscle circumference, you will more or less lose some of the finesse of the muscles; if you focus on shaping the muscle shape, then the increase in muscle circumference will be somewhat affected. . You want to maintain a balance between the two as much as possible, but be mentally prepared to gain one at the expense of the other.
Pinning your hopes on a special kind of training is futile. First, being obsessed with reps, sets, and weights can make you forget the importance of diet. Secondly, those training numbers don’t mean anything in terms of adding muscle mass or sculpting muscle shape, and if your primary concern is losing fat through reps, then those reps will certainly undermine steady muscle growth. Even being able to lift heavy weights quickly has its drawbacks, because it forces you to give up using reasonable strength for proper muscle sculpting.
Every day I see some thick and even bloated people in the gym who don’t think about anything else other than exercising with super heavy weights. The heavy weights I consider are different from them. I won't make myself look too thick or even bulky.
What I have is looking "strong". I am strong not because of my vast knowledge of diet or my ability to calculate the perfect number of exercises such as sets, reps, and weights, but because of the depth of training I have. That is, I want to feel that an exercise not only works on the target muscle, but also works on other muscles to help and support the target muscle. Do you know why I do a lot of dumbbell movements with particularly heavy weights? Through such exercises, I suddenly stimulate a large number of muscle fibers, allowing the muscles to repair and grow rapidly.
How do I get these exercises to stimulate me so deeply? Frequent isotonic movements and using light weights will not accomplish this task, because it is like using a big rivet when building a railroad. A pin, you can only hammer the pin into the surface of the sleeper. Of course, low speed won't work, it can only hammer the head of the rivet in half. I mustered up all my strength and passion to hit each movement fiercely. Although the rivet was always resisted by the sleeper, I beat it again and again with great intensity of movement until all the nails were driven into the sleeper. But its shock waveIt spread throughout my body from start to finish, such was the depth of the training.
Combinations of movements, heavy weights, and brutal reps are all needed to build a strong physique, which translates into the following workouts: You'll need at least one bell exercise and one dumbbell for each body part. Exercise, no matter which weight or size, limit you to 10 reps, then 12 reps, then 14 reps. Make sure the weight is heavy enough to fully engage your muscles the first time you do the movement. According to this method, when you do it for the 12th time, you should be able to feel the burning and stretching of each muscle. In addition, reverse stretching will help the trained body part to defend itself against injury.
I never give up during exercises. In the next exercises, I use almost brutal reps from different directions to make the muscles more fully burned. Maybe use super sets, giant sets, and use a higher number than the first exercise. Use heavier strength exercises to complete the movement, or some other crazy exercises.
I train alone because I don’t have a training partner who can always train with me, but this also means that only I can stand at the top of the Olympia alone. Of course, this must be accompanied by "hardship".