It has been an interesting fun-packed 5 weeks, but I have finished phase 1 of the Get Big workouts. So naturally the first question most people will have is “Did you get big?” Well yes and no. I didn’t get huge, but I did get bigger, I would say the most noticable effect was the increase in my overall strength. By the end of the first phase I was doing 75lb. dumbbell incline bench press. My deadlifts have reached 230+ and many other exercises have gone through the roof. This workout plan seems to being coming along great and I am looking forward to some more strange workouts in Phase 2!

So I have completed the “get used to my routine” part of the Huge in a Hurry book and have begun with the first real set of routines. The plan is called “Get Big” and once again involves full body workouts but increases us from 3 exercise to 4. The actual exercises change as well. The exercises take a bit of getting used to, and keeping track of all of those reps can be very difficult so I have been using an app on my iPhone called Gym Buddy and is great for tracking exercises, reps, sets, rest time, gains, and tons more stuff. The best part about this app is the fact that you can create your own routines and put notes in them about how many reps you are supposed to do. You can also set 3 different rest timers which works great for the routines in the book. If you haven’t checked out this book yet follow the link on the right to amazon to get a good look at it.

After my first week of Huge in a Hurry’s Get Ready workout, I am feeling the pain. In case you don’t know, Huge in a Hurry is a book about new fitness techniques for building mass and strength. The book follows it’s ideas with scientific evidence and great examples of why this new approach to fitness is sure to beat out any other. At first I was very skeptical, I mean from my experience I have seen great gains using traditional 3×10 workouts, with split body parts each week. This book flips that idea, don’t focus on sets, focus on reps. The book wants us to focus on a set number of reps, say 25, now that doesn’t mean you do just one set. The book wants you to use different weight ranges, for example, Light weights which are 20-22 rep max weights. Medium which is 10-12. Heavy which is 4-6. Super heavy which is 2-3. Now each workout includes only 3 exercises; upper body pulling, upper body pushing, and legs. The reasoning is simple, all of the workouts we will be doing are compound full body workouts 3 days a week. It is recommended to do workouts on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday’s to allow adequate rest.The biggest change in our workout will be speed, you have to perform all exercises at the fastest speed you can  (while maintaining perfect form and control). The author says that by working your muscles with different weights, but more speed our muscles are recruiting the largest fibers to help with the lift instead of just our smallest motors. This recruitment of large fibers is what provides us with superb strength and muscle growth.

Get Ready

So the first routine we have to follow is the Get Ready routine. Which is meant to get us adjusted to the way we will be working out. There are three workouts, Workout A, B, C all following the upper body pull, push, legs template. The problem I had initially was that I didn’t read the whole book and just jumped to the workout, wrote it down, went to the gym and finished in 20 minutes. I felt betrayed, and worst of all I felt like I had done something wrong. So I went back and read the rest of the book realizing that I needed to begin every workout with 5-10 minutes of mobility exercises, then my workout with warm up sets for each exercise, then stretching. Workout B was phenomenal. I want there, did my mobility exercises which really got the blood pumping, then did my warm up sets to figure out what weight I needed to use for my Medium weight workout. Once I got settled I began the workouts the way I was supposed to. I started with my underhand lat pull down, found my weight, and did 6 reps at full speed, on the 6th set I slowed down so I stopped and rested for 60 seconds. My first set (sets don’t matter) was 6 reps, I needed to hit 35 reps before I was done. So I continued my next set with another 5 reps. The book says to stop after a rep that is slower than the others or is causes you to use bad form. After I hit my 35 reps (my last set was only 2 reps) I went on to my next workout. Standing Dumbbell Shoulder Press, this is a workout I have never tried before and felt great, your core and legs are helping to keep you stable while you hold the weights above your head. This was an awesome workout which really helped me feel the full body workout effect. My final exercise was the Deadlift, a workout I have missed and have not done in many years. This was one of my very workouts back in the day, the only problem was when I finished my last set I think I pulled something in my back, which has been tight and locked up ever since.

Tomorrow I will be doing my third workout (Workout C) before work, and will update on how well it works. Workout B was by far the best, probably because I did this workout correctly. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone looking to get into great shape, the book can be found to the right in the side bar. This book gives an interesting mix of science and braun and is actually quite a good read.