One of the many reasons that I am an advocate of short cycles as opposed to long ones is because I firmly believe that if training properly, one cannot sustain maximal effort for more than 8 weeks at a time and in reality usually no more than 6 weeks at a time.

Let's quickly define maximal effort of a mass building program so we are all on the same page

It should include:

Intense training to past the point of failure spending no more than 45minutes of actually weight training 4 days per week

Eating 5-6 meals a day every 2 hours

Consuming 2 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight and getting 1 gram of that from ULTRA-PRO 5

Consuming 3 grams of carbohydrates per pound of bodyweight

Consuming ? of a gram of fat per pound of bodyweight

Getting 10 hours of sleep a day

Keeping all stress to a minimum

Following your cycle to the letter

I firmly believe that for all of these factors to be done maximally, one must limit their duration to 6 weeks. If you give 1000% you should not be able to do any more and if you can you are either Superman or you are not giving it your all.

So let's assume that you followed a 6-week course at maximal effort and did everything described above. You now come to the end of the 6th week and your body feels like it had been in a war. You are exhausted and thankful that the cycle is over because you have nothing left to give. You are extremely happy with your strength increase and muscle mass increase, but at the same time you need a rest. The problem is you do not want to lose all the gains you made from all you ass-bustin effort.

What then do you do? You have 3 weeks clean before starting another course, and you want to make sure you are refreshed for the start of another 6-week battle. One might think the thing to do is back off training for a week or two and relax as this is what your body wants and needs.

However, I am going to suggest that now is the perfect time to prepare yourself for even bigger gains during your next course and to do that we are going to utilize Protein Starving and Controlled Overtraining!

Protein starving is basically self-explanatory, but let's explain briefly about how it works.

The human body (and most all mammals) are quite amazing creations. The body learns to anticipate your next move and make adjustments along the way so it can operate at maximum efficiency. It will slow down or speed up the metabolism, pull blood from or draw blood to a specific area, slow down or speed up the heart rate…. the list goes on and on and nine times out of ten you have no idea that the body is doing all of these things.

Now with nutrition, the body does some real interesting things. It has long been suggested that the body can only assimilate a certain amount of protein at any one time. Now this has been shown to be false, as High Level athletes have the need and the ability to utilize a lot more protein than your average Joe and common sense and a brief look at mammalian physiology will show you that the old way of thinking in terms of how protein is assimilated is not the case.

In nature, meat eaters do not eat every day. Why? Because they have to hunt down and catch their prey first and this is a hell of a lot harder than it might appear. You see when running for you life as opposed to running for you dinner, you will always run faster if you life depends on it! The number of predatory animals that starve because it is difficult to find and catch prey is quite large. Nature understands this fact which is why there are so many more prey animals than predators in the food chain. Nature also understands that once a predator catches and kills it's prey it has to seize the opportunity to make the most out of the meal since it probably will not eat for another 4 or 5 days sometimes longer.

Now to the extent of how much the body will make out of that meal is largely dependent on how long the animal has gone without food….the longer without food, the more the meal will get utilized and since we are talking about flesh, we are speaking about protein.

Using our example of a predatory mammal, one has to take into consideration that it is amazingly stressful on the animals system to go without food for 10 days and all the while be using every last bit of strength and energy actively trying to end its hunger through hunting. Lot's of "almosts" during this time make the predator very tired and worn out and this further adds to the extent the food is utilized by the system once it has been caught.

Now let's apply this to bodybuilding and adding muscle mass. The encephalization of Homo-sapiens brain over the past 4 million years means that we no longer have to actively hunt…when we want food we go to the store and it is there and we do not even have to walk to the store we can hop in a car. So what we want to do is attempt to mimic the conditions of early man and predatory mammals, as it would be in the wild. The way we duplicate the tremendous stress and fatigue experienced by a hungry predatory that has been unsuccessful attempting to bring down a prey animal for 10 days is to put the body through a short period of OVERTRAINING and the way we emulate the lack of prey is to remove protein from the diet for a short time period. It is this combination of OVERTRAINING and PROTEIN STARVATION that will set our systems up for massive overcompensation of protein and nutrients during you next 6 week course. The body, ever fearful that it will experience another protein drought and overstress on the system will take in extra amounts and allow extra amounts of muscle tissue to be built because it thinks that this might happen again and it wants to be ready. The most important thing to know about the human body is that it is concerned with self-preservation above everything else!!

Let's put this knowledge into the constraints of the 3 week break taken after you six week course of maximal effort:

Your body is still shot from the six-week blitz you just put it through and it will want to relax but it is important that you do not let it. Since you are already burning out a bit (if you are not you have not trained properly during the previous six weeks) you really don't have to do all that much in terms of training except to continue at the same pace and effort that you were doing during the six weeks prior. If you find you cannot keep up that effort that is great!! It means you are truly overtrained, but try to keep the same pace and routine, stopping only when you cannot continue.

You will follow this training structure for the first 2 weeks of your "OFF TIME"

During this first 2 weeks slowly pull out protein each day so by the end of the second week you are consuming around ? gram of protein per pound of bodyweight per day….now we do not want you to drop a lot of weight, so you will increase your carbohydrates to compensate for the protein. Make sure you get the same caloric level in as you were getting when you were on your 6 week cycle….just pull out the protein and replace it with carbs….mostly complex ones: potatoes, rice, whole grain breads, juices, vegetables and fruits

At the start of the third week you should be a bag of shit and have no desire to train, no appetite and cannot physically train at all. This is where you want to be! Immediately stop all training! At this point you will COMPLETELY CUT OUT ALL PROTEIN AND I MEAN ALL OF IT YOU CANNOT HAVE MORE THAN 10 GRAMS OF PROTEIN PER DAY DURING THIS LAST PHASE. Do this for 5 days and be sure to keep the calorie level the same as where it was during the 6-week course. You should also be doing hardly anything at all. Rest as much as possible; do not exert yourself at all. If you can, get extra rest (at least 10 hours per day total) and try and get a massage and sit in a sauna and Jacuzzi. This brings us to the last 2 days before the start of you next mass course. Continue with the rest and relaxation except slowly introduce a more NORMALIZED diet back to your system taking in about ? of a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight per day for these last 2 days.

Now it is time to start you next six-week course. You should be well rested from your 7 day break and ready to go, but the body is still protein starved so we have to take advantage of this.

You will follow the same principles as before except with one difference:

For the first 7 days of your new six week course you will take in 3 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight getting 2 grams from ULTRA-PRO 5 everything else will remain the same.

The body will overcompensate like there is no tomorrow and you will experience a growth spurt like you never did before.

If you want to grow differently than everyone else you have to change things around and keep the body on it's toes…never allow it to get complacent and never allow yourself to either.