As you may know by now I suffered a torn rotator cuff and labrum that required surgery. The injury was a long time in the making and the destruction of my shoulder began many years ago when I was doing stupid things like isometronic training in the power rack and other high risk, low reward methods.

Before surgery I was sitting at about 227 pounds. After several months of being incapacitated and eating like a normal human I was down to 179! Like I’ve always said, my hardgainer genetics are freakishly bad. Hell, my wrists don’t even measure seven inches around.

Anyway, the comeback has been long and frustrating. Because I have the undying urge to go heavy whenever I get near iron and the fact that rational thought processes go out the window after I start warming up, I have reinjured my shoulder a couple times throughout the rehab process. Needless to set these setbacks have been incredibly stressful and annoying to deal with.

While training together at CJ Murphy’s gym in Boston once, my friend Dave Tate commented, “You think Jay’s a smart guy until you see some of the stupid shit he does when he’s training.”

And he was 100% right. I do stupid shit. Often and with reckless abandon. It’s my greatest downfall in life. Has been for as long as I can remember. Whether it be flipping dirt bikes, jumping off cliffs or trying to do heavy cleans with an injured shoulder, I just lose control of my rational thought processes when the adrenaline kicks in.

Let’s face it.

You’re busy.

And you have very little time to spend debating what you should do in the gym or what you should be eating.

So I’m going to make it easy for you.

First, let’s cover your workouts. You’re going to train 3-4 days per week and you’re going to get in and out of the gym in 45-60 minutes. This helps to keep your testosterone levels high and allows you to maintain maximum focus throughout.

You’re always going to choose big, compound exercises for each body part. Starting from the top down you will do the following movements:

• Traps- deadlift.


• Shoulders- dumbbell or barbell military presses.


• Chest- dumbbell presses, weighted pushups or barbell bench/incline presses.


• Back- chin ups and 1 arm dumbbell rows.


• Biceps- barbell or dumbbell curls.


• Triceps- dips and close grip benches.


• Lower back, glutes and hamstrings- more deadlifts.


• Legs- squats, squats and more squats.

Simple, right?

To build muscle fast you need to present the body with a stimulus that it isn’t used to. This stress will cause the body to adapt by building itself up bigger and stronger.

Where most people go wrong is that they think they need to annihilate the muscle in order to elicit any type of response. This is counterproductive. When you annihilate the muscle with tons of sets, reps and constantly train to failure and beyon you drastically increase your recovery time. The problem with that is that training frequency is very important. So when you increase your recovery time you have to decrease your training frequency. You’re shooting yourself in the foot.

The key is to do just enough to stimulate size and strength gains but not annihilate yourself so that it takes forever to recover, or worse- that you put yourself in a state of overtraining.

If you want to make consistent size gains you have to make consistent strength gains (in a hypertrophy rep range), while eating enough food and allowing enough time for recovery.

The body will respond to any given stimulus one time and one time only. If you place the same demands on it a second time (like pressing the same weight for the same reps) nothing will happen. You must always be forcing it to adapt and thus you must always ask it do something it isn’t used to.

Stop over thinking. That’s it. That’s one very important key to fast muscle growth. It’s that simple. Stop doing that and instead focus on what’s really important and you’ll grow a hell of a lot faster.

Every day people ask me what angle they should set the incline bench to, should they do hill sprints or sled sprints, whether they should wait two hours or two and half hours between meals, if they should do six reps or eight reps on dumbbell presses, if they should rest between arms when doing 1 arm rows or do both arms and then rest.

It’s all way too much thinking and over analyzing. Stop stressing yourself out over all the minute details that make very little difference in the big picture.

The majority of people who fail to gain any appreciable amounts of size and strength do so because they over think, over analyze and bang away on the keyboard more than they actually eat, sleep and train.

Simplify it all and your results will come much faster. Not to mention the fact that your life will be a lot less stressful.

Let’s say you’re training someone who’s fat and weak but their goal is to get lean. They aren’t obese but they have 25-35 pounds to lose. Pretty much like every average American. Since fat loss is the goal you might be inclined to put them on a typical “fat loss workout.” This means that they would do a total body, circuit style workout, alternating upper, lower and full body exercises with moderately high reps (8-20) and minimal rest periods (0-60).

Sounds like a decent plan.

Except for the fact that they are too weak to get anything out of it. Their heart rate won’t get elevated anywhere near as high as it should and they’ll hardly break a sweat.

Why? Like I said, they’re too weak. When you’re too weak you can’t get much out of bodyweight exercises and the weights you lift are hardly heavy enough to do anything. Weak people can’t recruit anywhere near the same amount of muscle fibers that strong people can. Therefore the same number of sets and reps is nowhere near as taxing for them.

While it is completely counterintuitive, what this person needs to do is actually get strong first. They should actually be doing the same type of workout I would give the typical skinny hardgainer- low reps, a lower average number of sets and adequate rest periods. Then, when they get stronger you can put them back on the fat loss circuit style routine and they will actually get something out of it.

The pull up is quite possibly the ultimate measure of strength. It’s also one of the greatest muscle building exercises in existence, which is precisely why it’s been called the upper body squat. Lat pulldowns can’t even come close to comparing. Whenever you move your body through space the level of neuromuscular activation is dramatically higher.

People all too often ask, “How much can ya bench?” A more appropriate question would be “How many pull ups can you do?” The pull up measures your strength to weight ratio better than almost any other exercise known to man. You are pulling up nearly one hundred percent of your bodyweight, in the exact manner the human body was designed to work. It’s one of the most natural exercises you can do. While not everyone can squat or deadlift due to lower back or knee problems, pretty much everyone can do pull ups. Or should be able to do pull ups…

To this day I am still haunted by the image I witnessed in a local park a few years ago when I was there training. A man my age was there with his wife and his son. He was shooting some hoops, watching his kid play, and basically just enjoying the beautiful July weather. At one point he wandered over to the pull up bar and got on it. He then proceeded to twist and squirm and strain for the next 10-15 seconds as he attempted and failed to do one pull up. ONE PULL UP! Now mind you, this guy was not obese. He had the average adult male physique- 5’9”, 165 pounds with a 38 inch waist, ten inch arms and “a chest like a wet blanket,” as Frank Rizzo of The Jerky Boys would say.

Like Bob Seger advised, I have always tried to be a simple man. Mainly because I have a simple brain and am left with no other choice. But I have always believed that the more you can simplify things, the happier and more productive you will be.

On any given day there’s a good chance that I’ll sell all of my material possessions and move into the wild. Or at least I dream I will. I imagine a life with no TV, no internet and no cell phones, where I am eternally happy and stress free. I know that the internet makes our lives easier and helps many of us, including myself, make money. It’s just that it also complicates things and takes up too much of your time, if you let it. We live in a society where everyone always needs to be plugged in. I, for one, just want to be unplugged more often.

A couple years ago I got rid of email on my phone and then downgraded to something more basic without all the bells and whistles. On most days, now, I don’t even turn my cell phone on until somewhere between noon and four in the afternoon. I can’t really explain why, except for the fact that maybe I miss the eighties and early nineties, when people couldn’t get a hold of you at anytime, no matter where you were. That and the fact that it helps me be more productive due to far fewer interruptions.

It never ceases to amaze me that there are still combat athletes out there using the same outdated conditioning methods that have been long been proven ineffective and useless. The methods I speak of include hours and hours of long distance running and other unproductive forms of aerobic activity.

Folks, please understand this: neither wrestling nor any form of mixed martial arts are aerobic sports. Therefore, aerobic training of any kind is a complete waste of your time.

Yet every single high school or college wrestler I have ever come across is still running each and every day like they are training for a marathon instead of a six or seven minute bout of high intensity grappling. How is thirty to sixty minutes of low intensity jogging going to prepare you for six to seven minutes of absolute hellacious combat?

It isn’t.

It makes about as much sense as trying to become a world champion skateboarder by practicing your golf swing for eight hours a day while never even touching a skateboard.

Well then if that’s not the approach to take then what is, you ask? To answer that question let’s briefly take a look at what occurs in a wrestling match. At the high school level there are three periods consisting of two minutes each. At the collegiate level, there are three periods as well; the first consisting of three minutes and the final two consisting of two minutes each. At the Olympic level there is one five minute period and a three minute overtime period, if needed. In ultimate fighting athletes compete for 3-5, five minute rounds.

Here are a few random tips that will help you get more done and probably enjoy your life a little more in the process. I can’t take credit for “inventing” these tips but they are very useful and have helped me to be more productive.

Get your most important tasks done first thing in the morning- Do this before you check email or voicemail or anything like that. When you start getting sidetracked with other stuff ten minutes can turn into two hours and before you know it it’s time for your lunch break. Get the important stuff done first.

Don’t answer every phone call or text you receive- You are not required by some odd law to do so. You are not required to be at the beck and call of everyone you know. Many friends and acquaintances get upset if you don’t immediately pick up or text them back.

“That bastard! I know he has his phone with him right now!”

But these people fail to realize that a cell phone is a luxury that you have for your convenience and it is meant to make your life easier; not more difficult and more stressful. It is not meant to keep you on a leash and accountable to everyone in your life at all times.