Q & A With Pete Sisco

Q. Do those 1 Ton Hooks you talk about help with all lifts? Are they really worth the money?

A. Lifting hooks are a great tool for pulling exercises. (They don’t serve any use for pushing exercises, such as bench presses, triceps press-downs and the like.) Most of us are totally unaware that when we reach failure on exercises such as deadlifts, shrugs, lat pulldowns, T-bar rows, low pulley rows, etc. it is primarily due to grip fatigue!

That means your lats, traps, etc. quite likely have much more power left in them to exhaust…but you never get the opportunity to go to true failure because your grip strength fails first.

When people first use lifting hooks, they are usually astonished at how much more they can lift…either in total weight on the bar or the number of reps they can complete or both!

Are they worth the money? That really depends on what price you put on gaining more muscle and reaching new levels of strength and fitness. I know guys who spend $300 per month on nutritional supplements that don’t have a prayer of giving you the fast gains those hooks will. So by that measure they’re worth it. I’m a bit biased on this because I helped designed the specifications of the 1 Ton Hooks. So I know they will last any lifter a lifetime (in fact they’re guaranteed to) and they’re the most comfortable hooks I’ve ever owned.

You can count the number of products I endorse on the fingers of one hand…so that should tell you a lot about the quality and effectiveness of the 1 Ton Hooks.

Q. What are some of the exercises to get ripped and toned with some muscle mass gain but not get too bulky?

A. There is a direct correlation between muscle size and muscle strength. Just like a steel cable, a muscle fiber’s strength is proportional to its cross sectional area. And a muscle can only do one of three things: get smaller, get bigger or stay the same size.

So, irrespective of whether your goal is to “tone up” or to “bulk up” you are trying to make your muscles bigger. And whether you want “more strength” or “more size” you are trying to make your muscles bigger. This means that there is not a set of exercises for “getting ripped” and a different set of exercises for “getting bulky”. There are only exercises for making your muscles bigger.

The key to getting the result you desire is to monitor the development of your physique and determine when you have the tone or definition you want then to switch you training to a maintenance routine where you keep everything the same. And on the subject of being “ripped”, muscle definition is a function of muscle size and low bodyfat. In many cases people would be satisfied with their current muscle size if they had lower bodyfat that revealed their muscles.

Q. You advocate not using the whole range in lifting, but does this cause a decrease in flexibility?

A. We've never specifically studied whether partial range of motion strength training decreases overall flexibility. The reason is that we don't advocate any form of strength training as a means to improve flexibility.

I can tell you that we did a study on golfers where we used Static Contraction Training to improve their strength and measure how it affected the distance of their drives. (Increased up to 30 yards!) The participants reported that their overall game was also improved as well as their stamina on the course. But we did not measure and quantify those particular improvements.

My advice is completely separate and highly focused workouts for each of the three pillars of physical fitness: strength, flexibility and endurance. Mixing different types of workouts is a bad compromise.

Q. I’ve been using your methods for a few weeks and now I’ve maxed-out the leg press and soon I’ll be near the maximum on some of the other equipment. What can I do?

A. What a great problem to have! I’ve been hearing this for years and I never get tired of it. It’s wonderful to show people how they can get stronger than they ever thought possible. This really underscores how limiting conventional training methods…and conventional training equipment really is!

In the past I’ve told people about how they can switch many exercises (leg presses, toe presses, lat pulldowns) to unilateral exercises. That is, doing one leg or arm at a time as a means to get more utility out of the limitations of their equipment.

But in the next few weeks I’ll be telling you a lot more about the revolutionary new exercise equipment being manufactured by Explosive Fitness. I had a hand in the development of this static contraction exercise equipment so it was designed from the very beginning to deliver massive overload in every exercise used in an SCT workout. I have the latest versions of this equipment and most of my family and I have been training on it in recent weeks. It is truly amazing!! I really mean that…it is just amazing and a joy to use!

All you do adjust the bar (or footrest) to where you need it to be for your height and then push or pull for all you’re worth. When you’re done you press a button and a large digital readout shows you the exact maximum weight you achieved. So your leg press weight might be 2,327 pounds and your bench press might be 293 pounds…and that’s an exact measurement you just never get with conventional equipment. Instead you have to estimate what your maximum is by loading plates and you can never be certain of exactly what you “had in the tank.” Thanks to this new equipment, those limitations and many others are now a thing of the past.

In the next few years I believe this equipment will permanently change the way people exercise. That what a higher technology always does. Here is their website.

Stay tuned for more updates.

Pete Sisco

>> Click here for Pete Sisco's Maximum Strength and start making explosive gains. (Generate optimum workouts to achieve maximum results. Average increase in strength of 70.2% in 30days)