Review: Mad Scientist Muscle

You may recognize Nick Nilsson’s name from his various e-books and articles on the Internet (he has a new blog at IronManMagazine.com). Nick is an intelligent guy with a lot of great ideas on building muscle—and he’s put loads of them into the new paperback book, Mad Scientist Muscle—Build “Monster” Mass With Science-Based Training.

Being somewhat obsessed with training for muscle size myself, I was intrigued by this book. While I’m not in total agreement with everything Nilsson says or recommends, much of it is very sound and has a place in hardcore bodybuilding programs.

Especially noteworthy is his discussion of overtraining. He explains how to use it to get better gains—you go through an accumulation phase, pushing more and more toward overtraining, then you back off, which produces overcompensation and “great results both in strength and muscle mass increases.”

He outlines a number of styles of training he recommends for size and strength, including various versions of rest/pause, triple-add sets and something he calls cluster training. One version of that last one is to take your 10-rep max and do four reps; rest 10 seconds, then do four more; rest 10 seconds, then do four more—and so on until you’ve done six minisets of four reps. He says it “allows you to reach true muscular failure through tension on the muscles rather than by waste-product accumulation forcing you to stop.” Interesting!

Add this book to your muscle-building library. It will spark ideas—and new size and strength gains.