This was posted by LA at BeyondMass, it's called the 4-4-4 method
Introduction:
Bridging with Slin and Long R
Warning- What follows is a fictional account of what some people are doing. No one should use insulin or IGF in the manner described for any reason without a doctor script. No one in their right mind would ever do anything described in this article!
Picture this- you’ve just ended a 12 week cycle. You are looking goooood now bro. You’ve put on 20 pounds and everyone has noticed. Strength is thru the roof. Now you’re wishing the pencil necks would come up to you and ask you how much you can bench!
But at last, all good things must come to an end. You’ve taken the last shot of prop on Friday and its Monday. Time to start on clomid. You’re going to keep all 20 pounds unlike your two friends who gave back nearly all their gains after their cycles. After all, you’ve got the genetics they don’t. Now fast forward 8 weeks. You are now down 15- that’s right 15 pounds! What happened?
Well what happened is I didn’t write this article until after it was too late for you! (Now that was arrogant!)
Ok, lets look at what I feel are the most common mistakes made when ending a cycle before we get to the “chemical solution”. After all there may be actually 2 or 3 individuals who may not want to use slin and Long R to bridge (nah).
Mistake number 1- You continue do the same workout after you’ve come off as you did while on. Big one here folks. This could be the single most important reason people loose the gains they’ve made. If there is one thing worse than a lack of testosterone, it’s an abundance of cortisol. The juicer feels that he wants to keep his new found super powers, so he keeps doing the grueling 20 sets per bodypart in the 8-12 rep range. Unfortunately, pushing yourself physically harder here isn’t good for your body. Cortisol levels rise rapidly after the 45 minute mark. 1 ½ to 2 hour workouts produce enough cortisol to shred your hard earned muscles faster than a beaver shreds wood. The trick here is to cut your workouts down to no more than 45 minutes long. Next drop the sets to fit within the 45 minute mark. If you really, really trust me (or at least try it once then tell me I’m full of ****) cut your sets down to no more than 6-8 per major bodypart and 4-6 for the smaller ones. Now also drop your rep range down into the 4-6 range. Now comes the good part. Keep your weights as high as you possibly can! So you were benching 3 plates for the first time in your life- good, but now just do 2 sets between 4-6 reps and move on.
Mistake number 2- “I’m fat, and I want my abs back”. Too f-ing bad! If that’s the case you shouldn’t have done the AS cycle to begin with. Your body just put on 20 pounds. That’s a foreign concept to it. It wants to give the muscle back. You have to stop it. By cutting calories you are only helping it along. Now hear this, now hear this. You can’t cut (especially without AS) for at least another 12 weeks. So please inform your girlfriend or anyone else who cares, that you will remain a second cousin of “The Blob” for a few weeks longer.
See, the body has “set-points”. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, a set-point is a natural point of weight in which the body strives to be at. It somehow “remembers” it. This can easily be seen when bulking or cutting. Ever notice how for example when you diet-down, it’s easy to get let’s say get from 220 to 205. But then pushing past 205 becomes a labor of hate! Then when you eventually do, its smooth sailing down to 185. 205 and 185 are set-points. They are different for each person on earth and the number that each person has varies also.
Mistake Number 3- “My test levels will be back to normal in 4 weeks”. Yeah right. I’ve got a friend who gets tested 4 weeks post cycle. He does everything right chemically while coming off. This means he sticks with arimdex (or equivalent) for 3 weeks post cycle and doses clomid correctly also. If it were me (and thank God for HRT so I don’t have to experience this first hand) I’d stick with the arimidex for 12 weeks. You’ve heard me right. The first hindrance in the recovery of HPTA is high estrogen. Besides, do you really want to turn some of that test once your body does start to produce it again into estrogen? Factor the dex into the equation while planning your next cycle. It’s cheap and available today.
Now for the 4 week mark, who came up with this anyway? Give yourself 12. Most of you don’t get tested post cycle so even if you feel “normal” again there is no real proof that you are. Sure you’re chasing your girlfriend around and lifts are on the rise again in the gym but that doesn’t mean you are 100%. Plan a full 12 weeks to recover before you either 1- start on another cycle or 2- start to cut.
Ok now that I feel like I’ve covered the major pitfalls of coming off, it’s time for a little chemical assistance. Quickly, the myth that you can recover HPTA with a low dose of var or dbol first thing in the morning is just that- a myth. Stay away from it. More androgens at this time will only slow the recovery period. You came off cold for a reason. To start the recovery period as quickly as possible, so what we need here is assistance of the non-AS type. Enter slin and Long-R!
We are going to break the rest of the discussion out into 3 4 week sessions. Our goals for weeks 1-4 are to not let the scale drop. We have a problem. We can’t keep eating the same amount of food we did while on cycle. Without all that AS pumping through us we would get fat if we did. So what to do instead? We use slin to get the most out of the calories we do consume. The first 4 weeks we are going to use slin post cycle. The amount of slin you use should be relative to your experience with slin. This article’s intentions are not to give a detailed account of how to use slin. If you don’t know, then you need to research. So we are going to cut our calories some. How much? Well we should go back to take a look at what we were eating before the cycle began. Then figure in the additional 20 pounds. At most start with 500 a day and adjust from there. Clen is also a welcome addition the first 2 weeks off. We are using clen here for it's anti-catabolic properties. With Clen in the mix we are going to cut calories less the 1st two weeks, then drop then further the 2nd two. Also, we are not going to increase our cardio level at all. What ever you were doing during the bulker is fine here. If it was none- then don’t start! If we accomplish our goal the only weight we loose here is going to be water (and with the slin there shouldn’t be much of that). That’s the good news. The bad new is that our bodyfat percentage won’t change. Hopefully we aren’t fatter or leaner, but we have given our body 4 weeks more to get used to that 20 pounds.
Next- weeks 5-8 we are going to add IGF Long R (and drop the slin). Again this article isn’t being written to help you decide how much Long R you’ll need. The goal for the next for weeks is again- not to drop weight! Now this is going to be tricky with the Long R. The Long R is going to start the fat burning process. Just by taking the Long R it’s going to make us leaner. This is good, however we don’t want to drop weight. So what do we do? We are going to be forced to increase calories slightly (argh, lol!). That’s right. We dropped them during the first 4 weeks now we are going to have to increase them again. Now, not as much probably as when on cycle but we are going to have to check that scale quite frequently and make sure it doesn’t head south on us. Also no changes to cardio here either! The end result after 4 weeks, our bodyfat percentage will go down slightly and we will end up with a couple more pounds of muscle. The reason we put the IGF in weeks 5-8 also is too clean up those slin receptors. Now after 8 weeks, the scale hasn’t changed, bodyfat has improved slightly and we have clean slin receptors heading into the home stretch.
Final stage- weeks 9-12. Back on slin. Time to cut calories again. How much depends on if you plan on increasing cardio at this point. You can increase cardio slightly if you desire. Again, make sure your goal is not to make the scale move- up or down! The final 4 weeks gives us a total of 12 weeks for our body to except the additional 20 pounds we put on during our cycle as its new “set-point”. The last 4 weeks won’t be seeing our bodyfat percentage move again. It’s only now that we can make the statement that out gains are permanent!
Also the last 2 weeks we can start to incorporate a new routine. What ever we plan on doing for the period following this 12 weeks can now be practiced. However, don’t go overboard on sets and reps. Just get your new routine time to break in and get some of the weights and the movements down.
What I just described is what I call the 4-4-4 method. It also can be used during cycle to increase gains while on. The method is very economical when you factor the cost slin (cheap) and Long R (expensive) together- over 12 weeks time. So the next time you are planning a 12 week bulker, make it a 24 weeker. Place the “24” into your mind set from the beginning and afterwards you’ll be ensured that the gains you’ve made are real.
Till next time- LA out and it’s “Just My Opinion”!
Copyright 2003 BeyondMass.com
Author's Note- Scorpio will be doing a series (3) of follow-up articles following the protocol of this article. Look for the first of the series- "****, I'm Still Fat" in next month's eZine!
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Originally Posted by JohnnyB
