Written by Ron Harris
23 July 2018

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Milos Sarcev: The Lost Files

 

When Insulin Is Your Best Friend

You are known as the first person to realize that insulin could have muscle-building benefits. How did you discover that?

I was looking at some research done in the 1960s in East Germany, Russia and Bulgaria. Insulin was mentioned several times. Those countries were well known for using steroids in their elite athletic programs, but insulin seemed odd to me, so I looked into it. Insulin is a storage hormone in the body that transports everything: amino acids, glucose, ATP, etc. That could be beneficial to bodybuilders, I thought. The only problem was, back in the day no one had any idea how to use it for anything other than the medical applications for diabetics. I had to experiment on myself. I would inject a certain amount, eat a certain amount of carbohydrates, and take notes on the results. At times, the insulin would overpower the glucose, and I would get hypoglycemic. Through trial and error, I figured out how to use it. Back then, there was no fast-acting insulin like Humalog®. We had Humulin® N, L, R, M and U. These were specific formulas, but they all stayed in the body for a minimum of eight hours. This was in 1993, 1994 and 1995. In 1995, I wrote an article about it for Muscle Media 2000. Since I had a Weider contract at the time, I had to write it under the name “Professional X.” That one article revolutionized the sport. Some people said I was the worst thing to happen to bodybuilding because of that, but just as with anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS), there is a huge difference between using insulin correctly and incorrectly. The progress I made in my physique from 1993 to 1995 proves that. I didn’t get a bubble gut or any other side effects. People decided to make up their own protocols using their own nutrients and timing, and created trouble. I still say insulin is your best friend if you know how to use it. Using it before training and immediately after, which I do with all my athletes, and for carb-loading before a competition— those are the times when it makes sense. I never competed without insulin from 1993 on. My condition was usually pretty good. There were times when I intentionally sacrificed condition for a fuller look, because I had to stand next to men like Dorian Yates, Nasser El Sonbaty, Paul Dillett and Markus Rühl. At the 1999 British Grand Prix, I was onstage with Ronnie, Kevin Levrone, Flex, Dexter, and Markus. I knew I had to get big for that show! I loaded up on insulin for sevem days and was 255 onstage. That’s the biggest I ever was.

 

Coaching Other Athletes and My Gift for Gains

At what point did you realize you had a special talent for coaching other athletes?

It really started off just by giving advice to other athletes who would come to me for help. One time in Germany in 1993, Nasser sat down with me for two hours asking questions. A few weeks out from the 1994 Mr. Olympia, he came to visit me in San Diego. I’d kept training notebooks going back to 1987. Every page had my workouts with the weights, sets and reps, my meals, with calories and macros, all very detailed. Nasser picked one up and started looking through it. He saw the notes on my insulin doses and asked me if that was accurate. Was I really taking insulin? I said yes, I told you about that last year in Germany, don’t you remember? That’s when his wife spoke and said he did the opposite of everything I had told him to do, because he thought I was lying to him so I could beat him in competitions. Nasser then asked me if I had made up this notebook and left it out for him to look at and get more fake information. So I went and got all my notebooks going back eight years and handed them over. I asked him, do you think I made all these up ahead of time just to trick you? He realized how ridiculous he was being. We started working together in January of 1995, and by May he had made gains like you can’t imagine. Nasser started talking, and more guys came to me looking for advice and coaching. Looking back, I never even charged Nasser a dime! I’m such an idiot sometimes. But I don’t regret it.

 

Training Style Is Difficult But Not Impossible

You have a unique style of training. How did it evolve, and what were some influences from either other bodybuilders, scientific research, or both?

It’s very important to clarify that I had used variations of giant sets for many years. But when Hide Yamagishi came to my gym in California from Japan in 2006, his sponsors hired me to coach him. On GetBig.com, the trolls were saying this Japanese guy can’t ever be in the Mr. Olympia contest. He’s too short, he doesn’t have the structure, this and that. I guaranteed he would get to the Olympia. Hide asked me why I said that. Because I believed it! My business sense kicked in. I told him to ask his sponsor if they could pay me a $50,000 bonus if I could get him qualified for the Mr. Olympia. They agreed. I had less than a year to make this happen. I thought, oh shit, now what? I had to answer this question. What is the most intense way to train that would stimulate the most hypertrophy? It would be a combination of Heavy Duty, progressive overload, supersets, giant sets and drop sets. I started making his workouts more complicated. Every workout had to be better and more intense than the previous one. If you want to stimulate the maximum amount of muscle fibers of a target muscle or muscle group, can you accomplish that in just 10 sets? What if, after you finished a Heavy Duty set, you continued with a second, third, fourth and fifth exercise? You can’t tell me your Heavy Duty method or any other is superior to mine, because I’ve accomplished everything that you did. I keep hitting muscles from different angles, different tempos, different grips and stances, range of motion, etc. I’m able to reach a lot more muscle fibers: surrounding muscle fibers and dormant muscle fibers. And with my Hyperemia Advantage theory and all this saturated blood, plus the insulin to transport the nutrients, the results are astonishing. I don’t have double-blind published studies to prove it, but I have experience with hundreds of athletes who got real results. It’s not the only way to train, but it’s very effective. In most commercial gyms in the USA, it can be challenging to do 5-10 exercises back to back unless you’re in there at 2:00 a.m. But I’ve done it in packed gyms like Gold’s Venice. Difficult is not the same as impossible.

 

Need a Good Coach for My Workouts

You don’t have to name names, but I am sure not every pro who has trained with you knew exactly what he was in for in terms of the intensity and the sheer workload. Have any of them quit or passed out attempting to complete a giant-set workout with you?

Nobody has ever quit on me. I’ve had guys doubt these workouts were possible to complete, so I would do them myself to show them. You can’t do this type of training on your own. Even I can’t. It’s so devastating because the intensity gets greater as the sets go on. But with a good coach pushing you, you can do it and make excellent gains.

 

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