FIVE DAYS OF DORIAN
BodyBuilding.com is posting an article series titled, 5 Days of Dorian which will provide readers with depth interviews and training Q&A straight from The Shadow himself, 6 time MR OLYMPIA – Dorian Yates.
Here are some note worthy excerpts from the series:
The PUMP is just extra blood flow to the muscle. Just because you pump it, it doesn’t mean you are going to create any growth. I can increase blood flow to the area with a 20-pound dumbbell but it’s not going to make me grow
I always trained like that (High Intensity with its emphasis on few sets and maximal effort) so there wasn’t a huge difference. I just cut back a little bit from ’92 onwards. Generally, before that I was doing two sets to failure. A lot of people get confused because it has been put out in the magazines that Dorian does one-set training. I never did one set per exercise: what I did was one set to failure.
I did the warm up sets before that and how many I did would depend on the exercise and where it was in the routine. The idea was to warm up and prepare that muscle for the maximum set because that was the one that counted, where you are overloading it and you are putting stress on your body that it is not used to and it is going to react by growing slightly bigger and stronger: that’s the idea. Prior to ’92 I was doing two sets to failure, so I would do maybe a couple of warm-up sets and then one set to failure, then probably drop down the weight probably five to ten percent for the next set to failure. Obviously, if I’ve been to failure with 100 pounds and I have six to eight reps, then if I did 100 pounds on the next set I wouldn’t get those six to eight reps because of the fatigue, so I would have had to drop down.
But actually you can do more training and more volume as a beginner because you are not generating that much intensity. Let’s say that you are just starting bodybuilding and you do three sets of squats to failure with 100-pounds. That’s going to place a certain degree of stress on your body.
Moving forward, you have been training for six years and you are doing 400-pound squats. That is four times the weight and a lot more stress on the body, but your nervous and immune systems, your recovery systems, haven’t changed from day one. So as you get bigger and stronger and more advanced you are able to generate a lot more intensity and stress, but the ability of your body to recover from it – unless you bring anabolic steroids into the equation – hasn’t changed.
So one set of squats with 400-pounds is probably more stressful then three with 100-pounds. Therefore as you get more advanced you should be doing less volume, provided the intensity is high.
I would always pre-exhaust before I got onto the compound exercises, but I did leg press, and hack squatting, or squatting on a Smith machine instead of going to squats. And I found I got much better development from these exercises than from just heavy squatting. It depends a lot on your structure, but it (the squat) didn’t suit me. So hack squats, leg presses and pre-exhaustion with leg extensions.
For calves I did standing calves raises and seated calve raises, very heavy with full range of motion, controlled.
[ Q ] Clearly nutrition and training are the most important bodybuilding aspects one needs to consider. If a young bodybuilding aspirant asked you whether he should add steroids to this mix, what would you say?
- I would say no because at the beginning you are going to grow anyway, as you have a lot of potential there. The body is not used to exercise. You need to learn what effects your diet has on your body and how to train properly. You won’t learn these things as well if you are taking something that will do the job for you.
And if you are overtraining it will mask this. So you are going to get some results anyway and you need to learn how to train and eat properly and get the most from these things. And you will grow anyway over the first couple of years.
Actually, it also seems that steroids work better on someone who has been training over a longer period, maybe because they are able to generate more intensity.
- It gets to a point where it’s hard to recover, so for a beginner I definitely wouldn’t recommend them. I don’t recommend them to anyone but for someone who is just starting it would be especially detrimental. It wouldn’t be doing them any favors.