Drew Baye is without question one of the premiere personal trainers in the world. His knowledge of exercise science and its application to one’s personal fitness goals and aspirations is exceptional in the health and fitness industry.

He was a pivotal figure in the Superslow™ training franchises, leaving abruptly on principle when he believed that they turned a blind eye to scientific evidence that suggested that extended contraction times were not as effective as shorter ones with heavier weights.

I first heard of Drew Baye when someone e-mailed me a critique he had written on Max Contraction Training. I scanned his critique, prepared to dismiss it as the ramblings of a stooge for the bodybuilding orthodoxy – but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was an intelligent critique and that its author had obviously given the matter considerable thought and that he was quite knowledgeable about exercise physiology. I filed it away with the plan to review it more thoroughly for the purposes of rebuttal when I had more time. And then I received an e-mail from none other than Drew Baye. “This should be interesting,” I thought to myself as I opened it. I was surprised to learn that Drew had continued his research into my protocol by speaking with various physiology professors and experts in the fitness field and had formulated a theory that explained why the position of full muscular contraction (Max Contraction) was the most important position for building size and strength. In effect, he had reversed his previous critique upon discovering new evidence to the contrary that corresponded to certain facts he knew to be true from personal experience. His intellectual honesty impressed me greatly. He retracted his prior critique and shared with his readers the fruits of his own research into the matter. I recall years ago Mike Mentzer telling me, “The idea shouldn’t be ‘who’s right,’ but rather ‘what’s true?’” I recognized this same quality in Drew.

As time passed, we began to correspond more frequently, typically exchanging studies that had been performed in the exercise science arena and comparing notes. I soon discovered that Drew is a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge in exercise science and a tremendous resource for data checking. I asked Drew to write the foreword to my latest book Advanced Max Contraction Training because I valued his opinion on my latest offering and also because of his knowledge of exercise science. I am very grateful that he agreed and thankful for his honest insights.

In the hopes of broadening people’s awareness of Drew’s background and experiences in training, I am pleased to present this interview with Drew Baye wherein he touches upon what drew him to the fitness field, his break with the Superslow™ protocol, his conversion (based upon his own research) to Max Contraction and the Omega Set, and his greatest successes as a personal trainer. True to form, he also detonates a few cherished but erroneous training myths along the way.

-- John Little

BACKGROUND

JOHN: What first got you interested in bodybuilding/strength training?

DREW: In general, it was girls, actually.

JOHN: (laughing) That’s a solid reason.

DREW: Yeah, I started working out with some friends of mine in a friend’s basement. I was in the seventh grade and our reason for doing it was just because we wanted to have bigger muscles and just be more impressive to the girls. So it wasn’t anything more complex than that at first.

JOHN: What was your earliest training program like?

DREW: It was just pretty basic, simple stuff. We didn’t know what we were doing so we just did whatever came to mind. Mostly benching, of course everybody wanted to know just “how much” we could bench. And then it was basic stuff – curls, overhead presses, triceps extensions and chin-ups and, occasionally, just really, really sloppy squats. None of us really knew what we were doing at the time, but for a bunch of kids in Junior High, we didn’t do too badly. I got more into it in High School with football and track and things like that, but I didn’t know really what I was doing then either. And even worse was going way off in the wrong direction because of what was taught to us by coaches and the influence of the muscle magazines that a lot of the other guys were bringing in.

JOHN: What was the negative influence of the muscle magazines?

DREW: They had all that high-volume, multiple sets, two hour workouts, six days a week routines and I followed those for a long period of time and just got nowhere. It was just overtraining. It was a ridiculous amount of overtraining.

JOHN: What turned you around from that point?

DREW: Well eventually, when I was in college, I started reading Mike Mentzer’s articles in his Heavy Duty™ column in IronMan magazine and I just dropped all the high volume stuff and everything else I had been doing and went to one of his programs that only had me training twice a week, following a routine that he had outlined in one of his columns.

JOHN: And what were your results?

DREW: Well, after years of making little or no meaningful progress and just grossly overtraining, I was able to go from the low 150s and not much definition, to a fairly lean 180 to 182 pounds.

JOHN: And how long did this take you?

DREW: That was over a period of maybe a half-year or so.

STRENGTH AND SIZE

JOHN: I like that because one of the strong points of Mike’s writings was that, number one, you had to keep a progress chart, and, number two, the only meaningful way to ascertain progress was strength increases. And there’s been a lot of nonsense going around, particularly in Internet chat rooms, that building strength has nothing to do with building muscular size – which is false on its face. If you were able to build 30 pounds of muscle over six months as a result of what was essentially a “strength-building” program -- that puts the lie to that.

DREW: Absolutely. The idea that strength and muscular size are not related is absolutely absurd. A person can improve his performance in an exercise without gaining muscle size, because there are other factors affecting performance, but there is just NO WAY, it is impossible – absolutely impossible – for a person to get bigger muscles without becoming stronger; if you increase the cross-sectional area of a muscle that has to translate to an increase in strength. Nothing else is possible because you have more muscle mass contributing to the force produced when you are contracting with that muscle. It baffles me how anybody can think that you can become larger without also becoming stronger.

JOHN: Their argument seems to be that while it’s true that a bigger muscle is a stronger muscle, you have to make the muscle bigger before it gets stronger. And that it is not only possible but preferable for you to remove the strength-building component from your workouts and somehow facilitate a hypertrophic response. Figure that one out.

DREW: Well, I don’t think it’s quite that clear cut. As it’s becoming stronger it will become proportionately larger for that person. I mean if you have an increase in contractile tissue, you have an increase in tissue that is contributing to the force production of the muscle. I think that part of the confusion is the actual amount of strength increase relative to the size increase is going to vary considerably between individuals. For two different people, they can have the exact same increase and one of them might have a much greater relative increase in muscle size. There’s a study 1, and I can’t remember the exact title, but it had to do with interleukin-15, I think I sent you the study a while back, and it actually showed that the difference between the size gains relative to the strength gains strongly correlated with the type of receptors that a person had. Moreover, it theorized that the reason for some people gaining a larger amount of muscle mass relative to strength was that there was actually a compensation for having a lower quality of muscle; the muscle that they had wasn’t producing as much force per cross-sectional area, so, to compensate, the body actually had to make more of it – which also only goes to show how important it is to train at the highest possible level of intensity to get more muscle because the body is resistant to do it.

JOHN: Right.

DREW: It’s metabolically expensive and from a survival standpoint, you want to just have enough tissue to get the job done because anything else is going to require you to try and go and bring in that many more calories – which could be scarce – and that much more of a drain on energy and resources that could be going to other vital systems.

THE ALURE OF SCIENCE

JOHN: Well, as Mike Mentzer said, “a bodybuilding program is essentially a strength training program.” And the dramatic gains you experienced in muscle mass while following his strength-building program are proof of this fact. I’m curious if it was Mike’s writings and, perhaps more importantly, his science-based approach, that caused you to then move more in the direction of science in training? Because you are, in my estimation, probably the most literate person out there in terms of reading – and even wanting to read – the science reports, but digesting them thoroughly and looking at how the studies were done and even having the wherewithal to accurately critique a lot of them.

DREW: Well, there are a lot of people out there who do this. I might just be one of the more vocal ones. There are some guys out there like Ryan Hall, a very sharp dude – he’s usually the guy I ask about new research. He stays on top of it even more than I do. I do my best but there are other guys out there who are really on top of it – Dr. Doug McGuff, too, I would include in there, as staying on top of things. But as I was getting into this I was also studying biology and exercise physiology at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. The plan was to eventually go into medical school. I had a cousin who was a doctor and I just thought it seemed like a good thing to go into. But the more I got into the exercise, the more interested I became in that and the more I wanted to do something in the field of fitness. Frankly, I think it is probably doing people more good from this end, in helping prevent potential problems than helping fix them after the fact. Not to take away anything from the important work doctors do, but I’d rather have people prevent situations than have to deal with them afterwards.

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