Yearlong: Phase VI
By Cameron McGarr, C.S.C.S.
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Losing fat is a double-edged sword. You love seeing all the muscles you’ve been training finally pop, but you can’t help but get paranoid that you’re losing size and strength as you watch the number on the scale go down. In Phases IV and V, you’ve dieted hard, and we’ll bet you’ve already been asking your lady if your arms look smaller.
In Phase VI, you’re allowed to eat and lift heavy again, because we’re training you for strength. You’ll soon make up for any you may have lost during the cutting phase, and you’ll add new mass and power. But as you’ve come to expect from MF, we’re going about it a little differently than you might think. We want your strength gains to be as functional as possible, so you’re not just strong on conventional gym exercises, but athletically strong as well. It’s one thing to be a behemoth who can move a lot of weight, but it’s another to be able to move it somewhere—such as carrying a couch up a staircase or dragging your wimpy opponent across the football field.
To get you there, the Phase VI workout focuses on building life-specific strength from unorthodox exercises, such as the plate drag and the dumbbell hang clean. These moves—and others like them—will teach you how to use the muscles around your hips (the strongest in your body) explosively. One classic strength exercise that will not be featured in these workouts is the bench press. For one thing, we’re guessing you’ve already done it enough to last a lifetime, and we want to keep your shoulders healthy. For another, we want your back and core to be as strong as possible when you’re hoisting heavy loads, so band-resisted pushups and the neutral-grip row to face will be your main upper-body builders. (Don’t worry, the bench press will make a return later in the program.)
