REVscene Automotive Forum - bulk up-how and get muscle

Here's something interesting from my favorite book.
Hopefully you will find it helpful.

Quote:

Now let’s try an experiment. Let’s take the average urban male, age 20 to 25, and send him to
a lumber camp in the North Woods. We’ll make it a particularly old-fashioned sort of lumber
camp - one where they don’t use trucks. chain saws or any sort of diesel or gasoline powered
engines. Everything they do will be with simple, old fashioned tools—axes, saws. and peavey
hooks. We’ll also assume that our urban animal is forced to work outside with me biggest and
strongest of the lumberjacks and that he is told he will be shot if he tries to quit or give up. He
also is told he will be shot unless he stays at the camp for one full year.

What happens?

Our urbanite almost dies after the first ten or fifteen minutes of hard work at the lumber camp.
By the end of me first hour he is convinced that he WILL die before the day is over.

However, he somehow manages to make it through the entire workday. He is so tired he can
barely stand. He almost crawls into his bunk bed.

The next morning he is so stiff and sore he can hardly move. The only thing that gets him up
and out the door is the thought of the mean looking foreman with the extremely large hunting
knife and the equally menacing sidearm. The thought of death is a tremendous motivator.
He goes out and takes up where he left off the day before- He chops, saws, lifts, pulls, pushes
and digs. And he does this day after day. The weeks stretch into months. The months stretch
into the entire year of his contract.

At that point, stand our man on the scales. What will you find? He will be anywhere from 20
to 40 pounds heavier than when he came to the lumber camp—all of it good, hard, solid
muscle. His measurements will have increased enormously. He will have grown into and out
of a couple of clothing sizes. And his strength will have increased by four to five times over
what it was when he arrived in the North Woods.

What happened?

What happened is simple. The man’s body responded to the incredible demands of his
lumberjack work by growing larger and stronger as quickly as possible. The body did NOT
like the way our hero felt after the end of his first hour of work- And it HATED the way he
fell the next morning. It went into a panic. It realized that there were two choices available to
it: (1) grow larger and stronger immediately, or (2) die.

That’s when the survival instinct came into play. As I said, the thought of death is a
tremendous motivator. The man’s body had no choice other than to grow big and strong as
quickly as possible. So it did. THAT’S an example of over-compensation.

You can achieve the same sort of transformation without going to the North Woods. You do it
by working HARD when you train. You work so hard that your body perceives the situation
as nothing less than a matter of life or death. You work so hard that you FOOL the body into
believing that it MUST grow bigger and stronger or else it will die.

If you can curl 60 pounds for ten reps and that is ALL you ever try to do, you will not trigger
the “alarm bell” that causes the body to grow bigger and stronger. Doing something you
already can do is not enough to trigger growth. You must attempt the impossible. Shoot for
TWELVE reps with 60 pounds. Or go for ten reps with 65 pounds. Do SOMETHING that is
more difficult—more challenging and more demanding - than what you did the last time you
did curls. Instead of settling for a comfortable set of ten reps with 60 pounds, do a set that
comes close to killing you. Push the set until the bar literally falls out of your hands. Your
goal is to grab the body’s growth mechanism by the throat and shake it up and down. Do
whatever is necessary to trigger the survival mechanism.

Apply the same principle to each and every exercise you do. Never rest on your laurels. Never
be content with what you already have done. Push the limits of your performance. Surpass
yourself. Constantly strive to improve your performance. Why? Because by doing so, you
will insure that you are working hard - hard enough to trigger the internal alarm mechanism
that causes growth.