TRY THE SATURATION PRINCIPAL FOR STUBBORN MUSCLE:
By Leroy Colbert

Do your muscles just refuse to grow? Have you tried new angles, more repetitions, to no avail? Don’t give up because there is one more system you should try and if it doesn’t give you results, then I guess you have reached the pinnacle.

How do these champions do it? Is it a special diet? Secrets only they possess or are they just gifted men destined to be great in any case? None of these reasons is the answer. Scientific application of the saturation:

Saturation is usually associated with a liquid. If a sponge is put into water it absorbs water until all of its fibers can take no more. When a sponge reaches this condition continued soaking is fruitless. A sponge can be soaked for a short while and fail to absorb its maximum of water thereby not being fully utilized. The same principal applies to the body. Over train and your time is ill spent. Under train and you will not reach your potential. Too many aspiring bodybuilders dive head on into heavy prolonged workouts without any rudimentary preparation. These fellows are doomed to failure. The untrained muscles of the body must be coaxed along not forced. Too severe training in the early stages tends to toughen the muscles, constricting their growth. When you force a muscle, the body compensates as best it can by toughening the muscle. When you coax it, the muscles grow at a steady pace utilizing your efforts.

The question is how do you know when the muscles are trained properly and not hastily? Once you are past the beginners stage, experimentation is the only way you can know your body’s physical capacity. We all have different capacities for work.

Some champions train as much as 20 hours a week. They are rewarded with massive muscular physiques, their bodies thrive on long hard workouts. On the other hand, some champions believe in more moderate workouts.

There is a time when most all of the greats seem to be working out at the same pace. The time is now. Harder and more intently than ever before the champions are training extra hard for a number of reasons. Some to make a comeback, others to get into top shape fast, and they are all using the same method – saturation. To saturate a muscle with scientific work so it is forced to grow is a complicated process made easy for you. Most of us who are past the beginner’s stage have experienced sticking points when our muscles just refuse to grow another inch. We change our programs; we increase the poundage, the repetition, all to no avail.

Then suddenly our muscles began to grow again. Most of us, who do not delve deeper, shrug our shoulders and pass it off as just another quirk of the body. But the phenomenon of the sticking point goes much deeper than a quirk of the human body. The sticking point means simply that the muscles have reached the saturation point for the severity of training. For example, if you do curls with 30 pounds, your muscles will grow only large enough to handle 30 pounds and not an inch larger. You may increase the reps and sets and your reward will be a stringing, small arm. In other words, you have reached the saturation point of muscular growth for 30 pounds.

So, on up the ladder, you must continue to increase the weight and severity of your exercises for continuous gains. In time we reach a leveling off point where we cannot feasibly increase the weight or the severity. Now is the time to utilize the saturation principal and jolt the muscles into growing and growing again. After we reach the so – called sticking point, a jolt and not a lay-off will make you grow again. Intermittent use of the saturation principal will supply the jolt necessary for uninterrupted growth.

I believe Marvin Eder was the first man to popularize the saturation principal for rapid muscular gains. Marvin’s routine consisted of his regular workout but he would pick one muscle and saturate that muscle to exhaustion. But he would do at least 15 to 20 sets of that exercise. For instance, for the chest you may find Marvin doing 20 sets of bench presses in one workout. These presses would constitute his chest routine. He would not train that hard for the rest of body at that session. Now the science in this routine is basically the reason why we grow muscles at all. The breaking down of muscle tissue followed by sufficient rest, and we have muscle growth. But to build a steady growth pattern jolting of the muscle is a must. When you saturate a muscle with work, you completely exhaust for a time the ability of the muscle to do any more work. This cannot be done in a diversified routine because the different angles of training muscles prevent its complete exhaustion. For example, if you perform 10 sets of bench presses with 200 pounds, you will find that the first set is easy, the second little harder, until the tenth set is almost sheer torture to complete. You have reached complete muscle exhaustion. You have worked the muscle to its limit forcing and gorging it with growth inducing blood.

You will also find that you have pumped up more than you ever thought possible. The continuous set after set of the same exercise keeps the blood concentrated in one part, not allowing it to escape.

If your muscles do not pump up during a workout, you are not going to grow. I will never forget the sight of Marvin Eder after a bout of bench presses. His pectorals looked like swollen melons. You could see the tautness of his skin, as though it was straining to contain his massive blood gorged pectorals. Marvin was the personification of the tremendous development value of saturation training.

Give the saturation principal a try. I am sure you will be overwhelmed at the tremendous size you will gain from applying it periodically in your training.