Body Beast workout

Sagi Kalev’s Body Beast is a 90-day DVD exercise program meant to build huge muscles, and it’s claimed that if you follow the system closely, you can gain roughly 20 pounds of bulk muscle by the time you’re finished.

According to some experts, even though that might sounds like a big gain in a short period of time, it’s quite practical.

In fact, there have been several articles and guides over the internet that detail out the exact steps to bulk up in as little as 2 months. Two more examples of these kinds of workout programs are Tim Ferris guide and Ben Pakulsky’s MI40 guide.

If you ask me, I prefer Ben’s guide as the best among these 3. And I think it’s better than Tim Ferris and Sagi Kalev’s guides.

Now, regarding Sagi Kalev’s Body Beast guide, it’s really a good program. everything is laid out for you step-by-step, from the workouts to the meals to the supplements. If you’re looking to bulk up as an ectomorph or hard-gainer, this program makes it simple enough that you just press play and follow the steps.

What Is Body Beast?

Body Beast is among the popular impeccable products from home-fitness gurus BeachBody, who have brought us P90X, Insanity and Les Mills Combat. While many of their techniques give attention to cardio, core strength and improving your conditioning, Body Beast is the one that concentrates on gaining muscle.

There are three stages to the 90-day workout, which include the Build, Bulk and Beast phase. You’ll discover the moves in the Build Phase, with advice on how to lift, how to breathe and how to engage.

Once you’ve got the strategies down, you need to do the heavy lifting in the Bulk Phase for the next six weeks.

From there, the final three weeks are the Beast Phase where you complete your quest going from scrawny to brawny — as they say.

In each stage, you work out six days a week and are off one for rest.

How Challenging Is It?

Body Beast is unquestionably going to push your body. Be ready for a condensed workout that’s 40-50 minutes of lifting directed at specific muscle groups with minimal rest.

“The real philosophy behind Body Beast is dynamic set training,” says Kalev. “When you have the philosophy of super sets, drop sets, progressive sets merged with everything that is in the old-school training, you can recruit more muscle in a shorter period of time.”

And that’s what will mainly make your muscles feel like they’re on fire after the workout. By following the specific sequence of sets and reps in their Dynamic Set Training, you maximize the muscle’s time under tension and get a faster, more effective workout.

You’ll start with a set where it’s light weights and high reps, and by the fourth set, you’re finishing with a heavy weight and light reps. All while Kalev and company push you to do whatever it take

Here is a more detailed explanation of Body Beast’s Dynamic set training.

Overall, Sagi Kalev tries to keep workouts varied and interesting, but also challenging enough so that you get results faster than you may have thought possible.

However, in my opinion, MI40x’s CEP technique is way more powerful strategy to include Dynamic set training and definitely more powerful than “muscle confusion” when it comes to adding muscle mass and gaining size.

For more serious, effective and quick muscle building, I would recommend IFBB pro Ben Pakulski’s MI40.

MI40X C.E.P. Training Program is developed by top bodybuilding IFBB pro Ben Pakulski, creator of the original program MI40. The new program MI40X takes over from the previous MI40 and onto the next level, taking Mass Intention into a new dimension called “Cell Expansion Protocol”, his patented technique for quick and serious muscle mass development.

The idea behind the cell expansion as the key for extraordinary and relentless increase in muscle mass in a fraction of time is the result of a scientific study, for which he provides documentation, showing how a “guinea pigs” group involved, made up of ten 20 to 30 year old males, obtained superior increases in muscle mass, strength and reduction of fat tissue comparing to a traditional style training group.

The NOS (Neurological overload set training) and CEP – Cell Expansion Protocol And Training Principle

Neurological overload set training is directly responsible for new growth spurts and overcoming plateaus. On the fourth and final set of a given exercise – usually for each exercise in a workout – Ben performs four consecutive drop sets in 20% increments and try to knock off at least 5-6 reps with each weight.

NOS ™ has proven more effective than any other intensifier technique – beats everything else, hands down. NOS ™ is a great way to overload the muscle, create metabolic debt, as well as overload the nervous system to force adaptation. NOS ™ volume varies based on the client’s training age and will be prescribed to your fitness level.

The idea behind CEP – Cell Expansion Protocol is that muscle cells are like little balloons, so if you increase the balloon size of the cells your muscles will also grow in size and strength while also helping burn fat, a win win situation. The problem is that anyone has a preset, certain certain amount of nuclei within his/her cells that prevents cell expansion under normal, standard stimulation, unless a particular stress is applied in order to increase this amount of muscle cells nuclei.

Cell volumization and enhancing the nucelie is not a new concept, however, the MI40x program really brings some new and effective techniques to the table.

What happens in these workout routines is that when an appropriate and specific stimulus is applied to your muscles, your body starts producing myo-satellite cells to repair muscle damage, leading to rapid and constant muscle mass gains. They also add to give some awesome mass and size gains.

Satellite cells are particular muscle helper cells that kick in only when highly stressed beyond regular failure of traditional weight training. Ben Pakulski likens the effect as your muscle being pumped and growing all the time, specifically at rest after your workouts, rather just being temporarily gorged.

This particular, welcome effect, is the result of a specific kind of hard core training designed to achieve the greatest “Time Under Tension stress” in the shortest possible time, allegedly leading to unprecedented and fast muscle gains.

This high intensity technique revolves around extending your regular set into a 4 minute agonizing struggle against fatigue and pain by adding a static stretching posture while you keeping hold of the weight and contracting the antagonist muscle, instead of dropping it and resting as normal.

After a certain amount of seconds (that feels very long) in the stretched position, you drop the start up weight for a lighter one and repeat the process, then drop again and repeat for up to a total of 4 minutes. Basically it is a sort of drop set with the addition of “isometric static holds” in between drops, intra-set stretching so to speak, and very, very taxing. You only need to do this ONCE.

Bottomline: Sagi Kalev’s Body Beast vs. Ben Pakulsky’s MI40

In my opinion, Ben’s MI40 program beats the Sagi Kalev’s “Body Beast” hands down.

Ben Pakulsky showcases a handy demonstration video for one particular muscle group, but it stresses that each muscle group is different and requires specific, ancillary and targeted techniques for best effect.

No muscle group is the same and results will be skewed if the very same technique for one specific muscle is applied exactly for all muscle groups.

The net result is a pump that lasts forever and more importantly that causes an increase in cell size, hence a fast increase in mass.

Basically, the impressive growth rate causes such a metabolic boost that you actually burn fat while building muscle at the same time, making you ripped as well as big at the same time.

Ben’s Cell Expansion Protocol and the 4 minute CEP Training Principle are not regular training methods, they are in fact really hard, if brief, so it is not so surprising to witness out of the ordinary results, like dropping fat while building mass at the same time, all done without cardio.