Hello and welcome to day two of the second week of Season V: 73524752. I know you guys are sore, but we are only getting started. What are you feeling in the gym? Are you starting to feel that rush, the feeling that you are building something special. Have you had the moment where the lights turn off for you and you are standing alone in the room, god like, ready to destroy. Don’t worry, your bodies will catch up.

I want to remind you guys of a few things. First of all, water. Seriously, get your 2 gallons a day in. No fucking around. You want to be fully hydrated. This is hard work we are doing, not for the faint at heart. I hear the complaints. It’s hard. Water is boring. I have to pee so much. Stop sounding like a bunch of little sissies. You move like 10k pounds of weight a day, your heart rate gets pumping to insane levels daily — don’t tell me you can’t drink fucking water. Just stop being a baby and do it.

The next thing I want to talk to you about is food. I haven’t published the Season V diet yet because I have been struggling with a few salient points. It will be out very soon and I think you will like it. In the meantime, keep this in mind: hungry is good. When you are done with each meal you should still be a little hungry. You should go to bed a little hungry. You should wake up a little hungry. We are still soft from the time off. The cardio we have been doing the last few months has helped, I can see, but we aren’t there yet. That is why this first 10 week part of phase one is a ramp up. You guys thinking this is rough now, just wait. This is intro to getting your ass kicked. Wait until advanced ass kicking starts. I am not saying to starve yourself. You need food to grow muscle and growing muscle is the key to losing fat but you should never eat so much that you feel stuffed. You should never eat so much that at least some small part of your brain isn’t thinking “i could have a little more.”

A more detailed diet is forthcoming and other than being hungry and crushing your water, as a general rule of thumb do the things you know you should. Avoid booze, sugar, fast food, processed food etc. Within a week I will have a recommended diet that will be perfect for this plan.

Moving on to mindset….

I can’t stress how important mindset is. It is really the entire ballgame. It is only

Death closes all; but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done not unbecoming men that strove with gods
Alfred Lord Tennyson

with the proper mindset that the gains will come. I have often compared bodybuilding to driving a motorcycle. You do not steer a motorcycle. When you are driving if you want to go someplace, another lane, off an exit, etc….you look and lean. You focus your eyes on where you want to go and move your body….the bike follows your gaze. So too with bodybuilding. You need to constantly be visualizing your goals. Your body will not get to where you want it to be if you are not locked in mentally.

We have work to do gentlemen. This is work you came to me and asked me to do with you. It is time to focus hard. You will notice some new ideas in the program that haven’t been in my programs before and are not often, or ever, seen in other programs. For instance, I have changed the concept of HIIT. To me, the ideal HIIT has always been 20 seconds on absolutely 100% and 40 seconds off for 20 minutes. This means ramping a treadmill up to the fastest speed you can run 20 seconds without actually being thrown from it and doing your 20 seconds then retracting your feet to the sides for 30 seconds and then getting back on. And yes, this does work. You will loose fat and fast…but also muscle mass. I wanted to take all the positive benefits of HIIT cardio and reapply them to bodybuilding maximizing those benefits while also bringing some lifting specific benefits to the party. So instead of a couple of seconds on and off we are now doing a couple of minutes (between 5-20 depending on the situation) of intense cardio interspersed between sets, supersets and giant sets of lifting.

I argue that this is still HIIT because the basic goal of resting the cardio system for some time after ramping it up before ramping it up again is still there. However, there is an added benefit of having your heart pumping for your lifts. This will do you absolutely no good for the numbers on the bar. But we are not weightlifters (right Kai?) we are bodybuilders. We care about the exertion of strength, the contraction of the muscles….the growth of the body and how much weight we use to get there is inconsequential. How much weight? As long as it is enough.

It also does something for this locked in mindset. I got this idea from the German sport of chess boxing. Chess boxing, just as the name implies, is a mix

Finding these matches on youtube really informed a good part of the path WBF took.

of chess and boxing. you have alternating 3 minute rounds of chess and boxing. The winner either scores a KO or a Checkmate. Moving from one competition to the other is a jarring proposition. Deciding how to properly execute a chess gambit after just being hit with a left hook while sweating and with a heart rate near 160 is tough. Further, after focusing as hard as you can on chess, getting back into the lonely sport of boxing and executing on that physical level is also jarring.

With workout split HIIT I believe that getting back to the weights after a 15 minute high intensity cardio will cause you to really lock your focus in. Like lifting against a pre exhausted secondary muscle group will help isolate a primary muscle group in a lift, lifting after high intensity cardio will force you to focus in a way that you may not over the course of a long lifting session without being dragged to it.

As WB Fitness has evolved, a key lesson I have learned and attempted to incorporate into the workouts is how to force someone to work harder. As I will explain in my upcoming article on my DOMino theory, it all begins for me with understanding the matrix of Chest/Tricep supersets. When you do chest dominant pushing lifting the triceps kick in to support the chest. For a powerlifter this means you want fresh triceps for your lift because you want to push maximum weight so you want the triceps to shoulder as much of the weight burden as they can. For us, this is not our goal. We want maximum isolation of the pectoral muscle. This is why we blow our triceps out with a ton of kickbacks or triceps extensions. When you put the weight on the bench press those triceps are pre-exhausted and can’t help which will mean the weight will push directly into the target muscle.

This made me start thinking about other ways in which I could force a body to act in the way that I wanted it to….WBF Blinders. So first, of course, there are all the secondary muscle groups for pre-exhaustion just like chest/tri. Finding all those other muscle groups and working them together in supersets is standard body building practice and something we do frequently here. This is very basic, golden age, Wieder/Arnold stuff. You will see that I have begun working with DOMS like this. Knowing that you will be sore in a particular part of your body on Wednesday because of your workout on Monday informs how I design Wednesday’s workout. If I know your shoulders are going to be sore and in pain I will find lifts for you to do where the shoulders attempt to help the primary target goal knowing that since they are sore you will not activate them in the same way.

Likewise with this intraworkout HIIT. I know first hand what it feels like to get off a stairclimber after effectively running upstairs non stop for 15 minutes. I am trying to break parts of you down so that they wont work properly or need extra assistance in very particular ways. One of the many ways that this intraworkout HIIT helps us is that when you are out of breath, sweating, heart pounding from your cardio you can’t just casually sit on a bench and, say, start pressing dumbbells for reps. You really have to concentrate. I am sick of telling people to concentrate and hoping for the best. I believe I have created a system here where I am tricking your body into doing it.

Since the very first season I have told you all that I will make Gods or Corpses out of you even if I have to drag you to the finish line. Gods or Corpses. This was the very first slogan of WBF. We are getting more sophisticated over the years though. I refuse to have any corpses anymore, only gods. They probably just mark you down as dying from covid and I wouldn’t even get credit for killing you.

So get into these programs, do them as prescribed, and remember gentleman, like Tennyson says there is still work of noble note to be done. He also says “my strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.” This isn’t just a workout gentleman. This isn’t just a fitness program. This isn’t just to get looks on the beach this summer, get healthy, be in shape or have fun. The world is changing and it is time to become strong, become wild …… become gods.