Too heavy? think again!

[Joshua Naterman]

The biochemical mechanisms are still fairly poorly understood, but the basics are that when a muscle gets bigger it has to make structural protein. If you are primarily stimulating your body to make lots of space for glycogen (like a bodybuilder does) then the protein synthesis is essentially mostly for structural proteins. If you are primarily stimulating your body to get stronger then protein synthesis is going to be split more between contractile protein synthesis and structural protein synthesis. You have to make room before you pack in more contractile proteins! It still takes a relatively long time to get super strong even if you are predisposed to such things. Even extraordinary individuals like Robbie Robinson took 4-5 years of lifting to get to where they were, and that was with a lot of consistency and dedication.

Anyhow, my point was and is simply that if you are specifically trying to get bigger you will want to alternate between mass-gaining cycles where your heavy lifting is restricted to once a week or less and used purely to maintain strength levels and strength-gaining cycles where your high volume training is restricted in a similar fashion. It is easy to keep what you have, that's homeostasis... it's what we are designed for. You will always do some of each.

I still prefer the WOD cycle for most purposes, because there is literally nothing stopping any of us from simply altering the rep ranges for the WODs each day to suit our own general purposes, and the WODs utilize so many different movements that it is difficult to build up CNS fatigue, which to my mind is a massive advantage. As they are prescribed, the WODs do a great job of offering a moderate level of improvement across pretty much all categories, which is a very impressive thing to be able to do. With perfect nutrition no one here should have any trouble gaining at least 1-2 lbs of muscle a month if that is their goal.