The 30 Day Mass Plan
Got One Month? Got a Pair?
Then Get Ready for Some New Muscle Mass!
by Chad Waterbury

You Big Enough Yet? Raise your hand if you don't want more muscle mass. Anybody? Yeah, that's what I thought. So
it's high time that I lay out the ultimate mass building training plan
based on my latest research. You'll get bigger, you'll get leaner, and
it's easy to follow. You can't beat that!

The Bare Bones There are three essential factors you must consider for building muscle as fast as possible:
1. Get plenty of training
2. Get plenty of rest
3. Get plenty of nutrients Now,
before you think this is another "squat and eat everything that isn't
nailed down" article, think again. The truth is that no one has really
uncovered the ultimate keys to building muscle. What you've tried in
the past probably didn't enhance your physique all that much. I'm here to tell you how to really add lean body mass as fast as possible. The reason you've failed in the past is because:
1. You didn't train with a high enough frequency
2. You didn't appreciate the relationship between training and recovery
3. You didn't consume the right nutrients at the right time I'm going to clear a path to your ultimate physique with my latest mass-building system!

The Latest Tricks My first new discovery isn't that new in my world, but it's new to the masses — or should I say mass-less? To build muscle fast you must train as often as possible. How often? Three times per week? Four times per week? Nope,
I'm talking every day! Care should be taken, however, to not train
every day for more than ten days. (I'll discuss those nuances later in
this article.) My second discovery is properly planned rest
periods. I'm not talking about rest between workouts or sets. I'm
talking about planned rest intervals after a period of intense,
frequent training. My current philosophy is based on training the
muscles every day for a specific period of time before undergoing an
extended recovery.

10 Days On, 5 Days Off Every day for 10 straight days you'll train variations of the following movements:
Dumbbell floor press or push-up
One-arm dumbbell row
One-arm dumbbell shoulder press or pull-up/pulldown
Single leg deadlift
Single leg squat or lunge
5 free minutes (e.g. biceps curl, triceps extension, calf raise, etc.) Why
the seemingly limited list of movements? First off, I believe you can
train each of those movements every day without inducing any excessive
joint strain. The only movement that's a little tricky is the shoulder
press. That's why you'll be alternating between a shoulder movement
(vertical push) and a vertical pulling movement for subsequent
workouts. Second, I want to make this plan as easy as
possible since you'll be training every day. As such, I chose movements
you can do at home with minimal equipment. Third, virtually everyone
knows how to do the recommended movements. Finally, the list of
movements targets every muscle group in the body. The fact that
most of the movements are single-limb variations is key. You see, a
single arm or leg movement is less taxing on recovery. Plus, single
limb movements recruit additional muscle groups much better than their
double-limb counterparts. For example, a single leg squat can
be more effective than a barbell squat because the former is better at
recruiting your hip adductors and gluteus medius. Finally, single limb
movements do an excellent job of recruiting the deep core muscles
around your midsection. I'm not, however, limiting your
overall plan. I'm giving you five free minutes at each session to train
whatever you feel is lagging. (I credit this "free time to train"
concept to Alwyn Cosgrove.) Maybe you need some external
rotation work. Maybe you need to train your hip abductors. Maybe you
want to train your biceps, triceps, or calves. The choices are endless,
and up to you. If you think five minutes is too brief, don't forget
you'll be training every day. So there will be plenty of time to hit
all of your weaknesses throughout the week.

Frequency and Recovery Recovery
is probably the least understood training concept, and that's no
surprise. Recovery is ambiguous because no one has really nailed down
what physiological adaptations are necessary before a muscle can be
trained again. If a muscle is still sore, can it be recovered
and subsequently trained? What if a muscle group isn't sore but your
performance is less than your last workout? And what happens if you
simply train a body part every day? Intuitively, it seems that
once soreness is gone, the muscle has recovered. And if a workout
doesn't cause soreness, then recovery is often thought of as the time
your performance is enhanced. For example, if your 3RM for the bench
press is 315 pounds, and if you can perform three reps with 318 pounds
five days later, then your muscles are recovered, right? The
first issue I must address is this: what's your primary goal? Are you
trying to increase maximal strength, hypertrophy, or muscular
endurance? I ask this question because recovery can be defined
differently, depending on what your optimal goal is. Without getting too far off track, I'll say that if your goal is hypertrophy, then you should train a muscle group before
it's recovered, thus thumbing your nose at the following dogmatic
definition of recovery: "A muscle is recovered once soreness subsides
and performance is enhanced." I agree, for the most part, with that definition if
we're talking about athletes who train for maximal strength and power.
But I don't believe that definition is correct if your goal is to build
your muscles as fast as possible. I'm keen on understanding
the Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demand (SAID) physiological
principle. In a nutshell, the SAID principle tells us that the body
will respond to the demand that's placed on it. The question, however,
is when will the body respond to the demand? For instance,
many people who've followed my high frequency training concepts didn't
understand the power of the system until they took a brief hiatus. Once
they gave the muscles a few days of rest, their muscles got bigger. This
is an important "overshoot" based on the SAID principle: the high
frequency of training didn't allow growth to take place during the most
intense phases, but once they introduced a four to five day break,
their muscles grew like weeds. I like to make my point about
training frequency by posing this question: What if I told you that I'd
give you a million dollars if you increased your upper arm girth by one
inch in one month? What would you do? Think about that for a minute. I'd
be willing to bet that you'd be training with a very high frequency for
that month. Am I right? If you hired me to train you for the challenge,
that's exactly what I'd recommend. But what you probably don't know is
that you wouldn't be training for the last five days of the month. Why?
Because the muscles need time to respond to the demand. The SAID
principle, if you will. There's no doubt in my mind that if
you're training for hypertrophy you can and should train through
soreness. You probably know where I'm going with this. Since you'll be
training every day, you'll be sore virtually all the time. You'll need
to train through soreness, and relish in it. I've found that
if you train through soreness, even if your performance is lower than
the last session, it'll lead to the greatest rebound of muscle growth.
But this must be properly planned and organized with the right volume,
loading, and subsequent rest period.

Heavy, Medium, and Light In
the past I've been hell bent on prescribing specific percentages of a
repetition maximum (RM) for each training session. For example, I'll
recommend that you perform eight sets of three repetitions with 85% of
your 1RM. There are a lot of people, however, that are anything but
ecstatic about this approach.
How do I calculate 85% of my 1RM?
What if I fail before the recommended reps and sets with 85% of 1RM?
What if I train with kettlebells? These
are just a few of the questions I get on a weekly basis. And you know
what? They have a damn good point. Unless your income depends on
lifting a precise load, it doesn't matter if you can perfectly
calculate a certain percentage of your 1RM. So I've realized
that simply recommending heavy, medium, and light loads is pretty
slick, easy, and effective. That's important for this plan because
you'll be training a lot. And the last thing you'll want to do is mess
around for a half hour in search of the perfect training load. There is
no perfect training load anyway, so why sweat it? Here's how
I define the three training loads. Keep in mind that I'm not advocating
failure. You should be able to complete a set within the following rep
range while stopping one rep short of failure:
Heavy: 2-5 reps per set
Medium: 9-12 reps per set
Light: 20-25 reps per set I
took great care in devising the rep ranges for heavy, medium, and light
because each represents a load range that's optimal for the intended
goal. It's easy to guesstimate what load to use if I give you a rep
range because most of us have done enough training to know that we
could do somewhere between 2-5 reps with a 90 pound dumbbell for the
one-arm row, for example. But it's not so easy if I tell you that you
must only be able to perform, say, four reps before reaching a point
where you're only one rep short of failure. Make sense? And
guess what? Even if you choose a load that allows for more, or less,
than the recommended rep ranges, you'll still get results. That's the
beauty of High Frequency Training: the high frequency trumps any
loading miscalculations. In the end, a high frequency plan will build
muscle, regardless of the reps or loading. Now that's powerful!

The Plan
DAY 1: Heavy Dumbbell floor press (elbows tucked) One-arm dumbbell row (elbow close to side) Pull-up or pulldown (palms up) Single leg deadlift (hold dumbbell in each hand) Single leg squat 5 free minutes

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