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Bill DeSimon Interview

Doug McGuff's interview with Bill De Simone, the author of the book Moment Arm Exercise.

Dr. Doug McGuff, Fitness Expert and Body by Science Author

DM: Tell us about your current personal training routine. What are you doing?

BS: I have literally gone back to ten exercises. One set – not to failure – in circuit fashion with as little rest as possible in between. At the moment in time, I’m using Cybex equipment because that is what they have in the wellness center that I do some work in. They allowed me to reorganize the equipment. But literally, it is old-fashioned high intensity. The only difference is doing lower body and upper body: leg press, chest press, leg extension, row.

DM: And I am assuming this is incorporating your principles of Moment Arm Exercise in terms of…

BS: Right

DM: And tell us what that is.

BS: Well, to make a long story short, I applied biomechanics to movements. And the most relevant thing to HIT was probably…I think I explained why a less extreme range of motion is appropriate for joint health and more efficient muscle work. I think that is the big difference between what I am doing now and twenty years ago.

DM: Right now, knowing what you know, do you think that there is a best protocol for hypertrophy that can be applied on a broad basis? Do you have a sense of how you would define that?

BS: Do I think there’s a best protocol? No, I think if you have a genetic freak, nothing is going to work. But it is hard to ignore the fact that the people who pick up the largest human real estate do something beyond a single set of whole body workout two or three times a week. If I had a client, or even myself when I was doing body-building competitions, I did more than one set. I worked out more than three times a week. What the mechanism is that the excessive work brings out? I don’t know.

DM: Having said that, do you think that there is a key stimulus for muscle growth? Do you think one thing is paramount or the most important thing in terms of this stimulus?

BS: No, I think it is a combination of load and probably, for lack of a better description, duration of the set. Really, I think it is load for the fast switch motor unit improvement, and there has to be some duration of the set to accumulate some by-products of contraction. Whether it’s multiple sets, forced reps, or some other set-extender, that is what seems to be the way body-building routines differ from the standard HIT protocol health benefits.

DM: On the whole spectrum of…There is a lot of controversy about standardized routines versus routine variation versus routine variation deliberately sought out to alter the stimulus for a better response. Do you stand anywhere on that spectrum at all, or does it matter to you?

BS: It matters to me in that if my clients get bored and don’t want to come, I’m willing to vary their routine somewhat. But I am leaning more toward…any variety I do might be in the rep-count or the rest between exercises – not so much in terms of the exercises themselves. I probably lean toward less variety though than a different work-out every time, for instance. I really think if you change routine and exercise too much then you are putting the person too far back on the learning curve. The only thing that came out of biomechanics is that when it comes to recruiting muscle, when you first do a task, your body doesn’t know the most efficient way to do the task which is why you have a lot of shaking, a lot of unnecessary muscles contracting. The more you do it, the more efficient the body gets, and you can concentrate on just pushing with the pectorals, for instance. So the people who change routines everyday, or even every week, are constantly setting themselves back on the learning curve. I think it would work better if they stuck to one routine per week.

DM: Do you get the feeling that if you stuck with a routine for too long beyond weeks that you kind of pan that out, and you’re into another realm of neuromotor learning where improvements then are from really fine-tuning motor unit recruitment summation and firing rates and things of that nature?

BS: Well, I really don’t know if there is a physical difference. If I did the same routine for the last twenty years, I don’t think my results would have been different. I think it was more of a mental novelty.

DM: Okay. On the whole volume-frequency issue, in the continuum that has gone all the way from consolidation higher up the volume scale and then coming back down; it has swung back and forth as to what is popular. Where do you find yourself on that continuum right now?

BS: It gets to the question of why the person training. If the person is physically very active outside of formal exercise at the gym, I think a very short and consolidated routine works fine. By physically active, I mean that they do dance, yoga, martial arts, or manual labor. If the person is training for health benefits vs. hypertrophy and they do nothing outside the formal gym, then they have to be a little more frequent. I’ve gone to being very individualized and seeing what else the person is doing outside the gym in the course of their week.

DM: That already kind of answers the question that I was going to ask next. Are there any parameters that you look to indicate an ideal volume and frequency for an individual client. You kind of already answered that question, but I guess a way to refine that question more would be, is there ever anything you see about a particular client that you are training early in the game that makes you realize that this person is going to respond to more volume or less volume or what have you. Other than your activity level, is there anything about the way they behave when they are training or the way they respond to the exercise that makes you make an adjustment early in the game?

BS: My answer to that would be different if my population was different. I tend to have a lot of people forty years old and over – with them, it is either they get regular exercise or they don’t. They are not really fine-tuning their physique at this point. People often ask me, “How often should I work out?” Then is it a question of what they have the time for and what they are motivated to do. If I were to tell someone, “You have to work out four days a week for an hour” and they couldn’t fit it in, that’s it. They are done. I think that has a lot to do with the kind of client you’re working with – unfortunately.

DM: Let’s answer that question for geeks like us though.

BS: I would say that if you dread the workouts, and if things hurt between workouts, you over trained. If your joints ache when you get out of bed in the morning; if you are not mentally up for your workout, that’s a pretty good sign that something is going to have to get cut back on…in frequency or intensity.

DM: And you have been there?

BS: Oh yeah, I have been doing this for about 35 years

DM: And doing everything right and with the protocol that was supposed to limit the risk for injury, you got injured.

BS: I ruptured my right bicep.

DM: On the tendon, right?

BS: I was doing a slow curl. And then, yeah, I noticed your margin for error gets much shorter as you get older. The mistakes I made when I was twenty cost me when I was forty, but the mistakes I make now catch up with me tomorrow.

DM: Right.

BS: And by mistake, I mean just a little extreme range of motion or just a little heave just out of motivation,even though I intellectually know better. Sometimes a tendency on a pulldown or on a squat to get that little bounce out of the bottom for another rep, and I know right away now.

DM: So you kind of alluded to this earlier, but where do you stand on the intensity issue: subfailure, failure, intensity extenders? What do you feel about all of that?

BS: I think if you start with, for lack of a better term, Darden’s Basic Protocol with eight to twelve reps. I even start earlier than that with a new trainee. I hold them back from failure to start so they learn the exercise. If one set of reps maximum holding back a little bit from failure gives the person what they are looking for, then I see no reason to add to it. But I really think all of those techniques have a place in a continuum. It’s sort of like a progression from protocols. So the person who is particularly motivated, you are not actually going to know if you have a genetic freak unless you try set exetenders or pre-exhaustion or other advanced techniques.

DM: Speaking of advanced techniques, I will ask you about several of them, and you can give me your opinion of them: deep inroad.

BS: Probably okay if the person is motivated enough. If by that you mean positive failure and then you continue to push for ten to thirty seconds afterward, then I would say it is probably okay especially if you are at the end of a minute.

DM: Okay. Rest-Pause?

BS: Good. Either after doing a set to failure then adding rest pause reps or you progressively raise the weights over weeks of workouts. You would have a good idea of what your one rep max would be and you could do one repetition. Good technique.

DM: Why? What do you like about it?

BS: Well because fast-twitch fiber improvement, the ones that have the capacity to grow and exert force is dependent on load. So if you have gone to tens reps to failure or six reps to failure and at some point you want to go further than that, you have to use heavier weights. Rest-pause seems to be a pretty safe way to do it.

DM: Breakdown for drop sets?

BS: A different mechanism than rest-pause that works more on adding more by-products of contraction which might work more on the hormonal front. And again, probably good. I think some of the explanations for it are a little off. Like I don’t buy that “you are recruiting slow switch fibers and that is why they work.” It seems like slow twitch fibers are involved in prolonged endurance situations and don’t have the capacity to grow large. So I don’t think it is a fiber recruitment issue.

DM: Hyper-training?

BS: Might be a little over the top. May not be necessary. By that I mean a one rep max followed by an added negative.

DM: Right and then breaking down the weight? It is kind of a combination of drop-set maximal negatives until you are not really able to move the movement arm at all, but you are still doing a very heavy negative.

BS: Probably the last in the line of progressions. So if you do it appropriately, it is probably the next place to go.

DM: Time static contraction?

BS: If moving the joints is a problem – good. If not, I think there is something to circulation and moving your joints for joint health purposes as far as keeping the circulation going.

DM: How about the active lengthening and stretching of the muscle being a component of the growth stimulus. Do you feel like that is lacking in time static contraction for any reason?

BS: Well, the problem with time static contraction is what if you pick the wrong point in the length tension or the torque curve. Now, if you pick the weak point like in John Little’s static contraction stuff where he is doing a one second or six second hold. Some of the positions that he picks are not ways that muscle can express the most torque. So I am not sure what purpose that is serving because you are putting the muscle at a weak joint angle. So it’s diligent, and it’s hard, and you are achieving some by-products.

DM: Does it strike you as being like having a car in neutral and making a lot of exhaust fumes?

BS: Exactly.

DM: And last but not least, the newest, hottest thing, J Reps? Have a feeling?

BS: I guess Canadian physiology must be different from American physiology. I think the explanation really contradicts or is outside of conventional biomechanics. Having said that, there could be another angle on the various techniques. All the advanced techniques, in their place, there is a change the pace or you could add extra weights or extra by-products to the routine. But I think what happens is whatever we get used to, the next routine you do is the best one you ever did. You have this rush of being pumped and of being wiped out, and you think “this is it. I’ve found the magic routine.” Then you do it for a few weeks and you go fail on that one, and you change the routine again, and now that’s the magic routine. And I think that is part of what is happening with the J-reps phenomenon at the moment.

DM: I was intrigued by the concept of a greater number of contractions within a small number of sets.

BS: Part of My problem with these advanced techniques is that what we should be concentrating on is clients, and none of these advanced techniques speak to those people. These advanced techniques are completely irrelevant to them. The basic HIT framework of brief workouts and effort rather than time spent could fit into a lot of people’s lives who don’t already work out. And none of these advanced techniques speak to those people. I’m more interested in tweaking the basic protocol so that more people who don’t already exercise, will.

DM: To you hold to any particular dietary philosophy?

BS: No. But I don’t underestimate the sheer volume of food most people eat. I get clients who say “I’m not paying attention to diet right now”. Well, if your goal is weight loss, you have to. I did some work with Sears (of the Zone diet) a few years ago. What got lost in all the hype was that he said everyone probably has a breakdown of the macronutrients that works best for them, but it was the 40-30-30 thing that caught on. But in the fine print he thought that everyone probably had a particular breakdown that worked. Overall, I think not overeating is the key.

DM: What about supplements?

BS: Basically, I view supplements as a means of covering the bases. I’ve experimented with creatine a few times. A couple of times it produced a noticeable difference, a couple of times it made me sick as a dog. In general, I would never recommend any supplements to anybody.

DM: Any final, best advice that you can give or have received?

BS: Even my stuff (Moment Arm Exercise) does not speak to the larger population out there that does not exercise, and those are the people that those of us who provide this service should be focused on. We don’t need to be addressing the aficionados and bodybuilders who are already working out no matter what we say. We should be focused on making what we do not intimidating to civilians. We should focus on providing something that they can do and then get back to their lives. That was the whole beauty of Nautilus 30 years ago; you had a 30 minute workout and then you could get back to practice or whatever your thing was.

DM: So how do you envision us doing that now, other than setting up our facilities and opening the door?

BS: Most of what we write now is just us talking to ourselves. When we write our advertising or when we write articles it is clear that we are writing to other HIT people. Even the way we name our places, we are talking to other HIT people. The message boards on our websites are talking to other HIT people. We are not talking to the mom, or the executive, or the senior citizen, or the pudgy teenager who is looking for information on how to get in shape. So we need to re-phrase what we are doing without getting negative or getting into any of the sectarian stuff…just to make it more appealing. There is a HUGE population of people who would benefit from getting regular exercise, who will not set foot in a commercial gym, and they are not being served.

DM: In closing we will go back to speaking to ourselves. I think one of the most important things we can know is how not to hurt our clients, and one of the best resources for gaining this knowledge is your book. How can we obtain a copy of Moment Arm Exercise?

BS: Thanks. I use an Ebay store. The address is stores.ebay.com/moment arm exercise.
The next thing I put out will be geared more towards the general public. But MAE is for guys like us.

DM: Let us know when your new book is out and we will link it to the website so anyone who wants to purchase it will know where to find it.

BS: Thanks.

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