Hope you all do.The Thib System — Fatigue and Best Exercises
Basic Principles Behind My Updated Training Philosophy
by Christian Thibaudeau
We knew we were looking at something special when we opened the huge honkin' file in our inbox. For us training wonks, articles like this one that discuss the science behind training (along with giving us incredibly useful information) are pure heaven.
Trouble was, this article, at over 7,000 words, was a bit too much heaven. So, in order to spare your gray matter (and we're not talking about your underwear) and keep our servers from blowing up, we've split this article into 4 parts.
The plan is to run two parts this week and two parts next week.
— The Editors
A lot of people have trouble "getting" me, at least when it comes to training. This might be because of my diverse training background. While most coaches tend to come from a single background (powerlifting, athletics, bodybuilding, etc.), I've actually trained and competed in most of them.
When I was a football player, I was trained by a great athletic strength coach named Jean Boutet. Not many people know of him because he never cared to market himself, but the guy worked with several Olympians and pro athletes.
His knowledge base is only surpassed by guys like Charles Poliquin. From the age of 14, I was able to train under his supervision. To say I learned a lot is an understatement.
While competing in Olympic lifting, I trained under Pierre Roy, the former national team coach, whom coach Poliquin called "the smartest man in strength training." I was also able to train alongside several Olympians, former Olympians, and other world-class lifters. So again, I had a wealth of knowledge to devour.
Along my way, I gained a tremendous amount of knowledge from Charles Poliquin, so much so that he became my mentor. I can relate to him because his background is also remarkably diverse. The fact that he's worked with hundreds of Olympians, pro athletes, and bodybuilders makes him a unique source of overall training knowledge. I soak up as much info from him as possible.
In addition to my tutelage, I've dabbled in bodybuilding, having lived the lifestyle and competed in a few shows. I've also partaken in a couple strongman competitions for some fun on the side.
The end result is that I often come out like someone who's a generalist more than a specialist. I'm not just a bodybuilding coach, or just an Olympic lifting coach. I'm a symbiosis of all possible training methods.
Understandably, those who want to design their own "Thibaudeau routine" can have trouble doing so because it's hard to pinpoint my exact training style.
While I do use a wide array of methods, I have several basic principles that regulate my way of programming. And here they are!
Principle #1: The Point of Fatigue Induction is Exercise Dependant
One of the most hotly debated aspects of training is whether or not to train to failure. Failure is simply the incapacity to maintain the required amount of force output (Edwards 1981, Davis 1996).
In other words, at some point during your set, completing more repetitions will become more and more arduous until you're unable to produce the required amount of force to complete a repetition.
Even Testosterone has proponents of both approaches! On one side, you have guys like Chad Waterbury and Charles Staley who are against training to failure.
Heck, sometimes they even recommend stopping a set when the reps start to slow down, which is way before muscle failure! Their main point is that training to failure puts a tremendous stress on the central nervous system (CNS).
The nervous system takes as much as five to six times longer than the muscles to recover from an intense session. So by constantly going to muscle failure, you can overload the CNS so much that it becomes impossible to train with a high frequency. And they're right!
In fact, it's possible to drain the nervous system so much that it takes so long to recover that the muscles actually start to detrain while the CNS is still recovering. So you end up in a catch-22.
On one hand, you need to train otherwise your muscles will start to lose the gains that were stimulated by the previous session. But on the other, if you train before your CNS has recovered, you'll have a subpar session which won't lead to much progress and might even cause you to regress over time.
Stepping up for the other side, you have more great coaches, like Charles Poliquin, who recommend pursuing a set until your spleen explodes! Their point is that to maximally stimulate muscle growth you need to create as much fatigue and damage to a muscle as possible.
This is in accordance with the work of famed sport-scientist Vladimir Zatsiorsky who wrote that a muscle fiber that isn't fatigued during a set isn't being trained and thus won't be stimulated to grow.
Taking a set to the point of muscle failure ensures that this set was as productive as it can be. Remember, simply recruiting a motor unit doesn't mean that it's been stimulated. To be stimulated, a muscle fiber must be recruited and fatigued (Zatsiorsky 1996).
What about CNS fatigue? While it isn't the only cause of muscle failure, CNS overload isn't to be overlooked when talking about training to failure. The nervous system is the boss! It's the CNS that recruits the motor units, sets their firing rates, and ensures proper muscular coordination.
Central fatigue can contribute to muscle failure, especially the depletion of the neurotransmitters dopamine and acetylcholine. A decrease in acetylcholine levels is associated with a decrease in the efficiency of the neuromuscular transmission. In other words, when acetylcholine levels are low, it's harder for your CNS to recruit motor units.
So, if we look at the argument from this vantage point, we also have a catch-22. Stopping a set short of failure, while not worthless, might not provide maximal stimulation of the muscle fibers.
You might recruit them, but those that aren't being fatigued won't be maximally stimulated. However, if you go to failure, you'll ensure maximal stimulation from the set, but may cause CNS overload, which could hamper your long-term progress.
So which one is it, really? If I want to grow as fast as possible should I go to failure or not?
You should do both! In fact, going to failure or not should be an exercise-dependant variable. The more demanding an exercise is on the CNS, the farther away from failure you should stop the set. However, in exercises where the CNS is less involved, you should go to failure and possibly beyond.
The following table shows when you should stop a set of an exercise:
Type of Exercise
CNS Involvement
When to Stop the Set
Olympic lifts, ballistic exercises, speed lifts with 45-55% of maximum, plyometrics, and jumps and bounds
Very high
When the speed of movement decreases.
Deadlifts (and variations), goodmornings (and variations), squats (and variations), lunges and step-ups, free-weight pressing (overhead, incline, flat, decline, and dips), and free-weight/cable pulling (vertical and horizontal)
High
One to two reps short of failure. Accept some speed loss but don't go to failure.
Machine pressing and pulling, chest isolation work, quadriceps isolation work, hamstrings isolation work, lower back isolation work, and abdominal work
Low
Go to failure on at least one set per exercise; you can go to failure on all sets.
Biceps isolation work, triceps isolation work, traps isolation work, calves isolation work, and forearms isolation work
Very low
Go to failure on all sets. You can go past the point of failure (drop sets, rest/pause, etc.) on one to two sets per exercise.
Principle #2: Use the Best Exercises for Your Needs
I'm letting the cat out of the bag: While big compound movements are the most effective overall mass-building exercises, isolation exercises aren't worthless. In some individuals, isolation work will be more effective at stimulating growth in specific muscles than the big basics. This is due to both mechanical and neural factors.
Mechanical Factors
Some people aren't built for some compound lifts. For example, long-legged individuals aren't built for squatting. They won't be able to maximally stimulate lower body growth by only doing squats, front squats, and leg presses.
They'll need a more thorough approach, including the use of isolation work like leg extensions and leg curls, as well as a lot of single limb work like lunges and Bulgarian split-squats. On the short side, those with stubby legs are built for squatting and can get complete lower body development simply by squatting.
The same applies for other basic movements as well. The bottom line is that the less adapted your biomechanics are to a movement, the more secondary and isolation work you'll need to make the muscles involved grow.
Neural Factors
Due to muscle dominance, some people won't be able to optimally recruit a target muscle group during the execution of a compound movement. When you're doing an exercise, your body doesn't know that you're trying to make a certain muscle bigger. It only knows that a big ass weight is trying to crush you, and if you don't lift it, you'll cease to live! So to ensure you're around for the next issue of Playboy, your nervous system will shift the workload to the muscles better suited to do the job.
If you're doing a bench press and you have overpowering deltoids and/or triceps, chances are your pectorals will receive little stimulation. Those individuals can get their bench press numbers sky high without actually building much of a chest.
To get the pecs they want, they'll need to use more isolation work. However, those individuals with dominating pecs won't need much, if any, isolation work for that muscle group.
As you can see, it's not a matter of compound being better than isolation (or vice versa). It's about finding the proper ratio of compound and isolation work that your body structure needs to grow.
Everybody can gain a significant amount of overall muscle on their body by only working hard on compound movements. However, 90% of the population, if not more, will need to make proper use of isolation exercises to build a complete physique.
If you're pressed for time, only doing the basic compound movements will get you 80% of the way toward a great physique. But if your goal is to be an aesthetic Adonis, you'll need isolation work to go that extra 20%.
Principle #3: Keep Your Training Sessions Under 60 Minutes
Cortisol is a stress hormone that's released during bouts of training. Some is needed, but too much cortisol, especially if it stays elevated after the training session, can greatly decrease muscle growth and strength improvements.
Cortisol is catabolic, meaning that it leads to the breakdown of stored substrates. During exercise, this can be useful since it'll breakdown stored glycogen into glucose and stored fat into fatty acids to provide energy for the working muscles. However, post-training it'll continue to breakdown glycogen which slows recovery. It also breaks down muscle tissue into amino acids, making it harder to add muscle mass.
Furthermore, since both cortisol and Testosterone are both made from the same raw material (pregnenolone), constantly elevated cortisol levels will eventually lead to lower Testosterone levels.
Cortisol output during training has been correlated with training volume; the more work being done during a session, the more cortisol is produced. This is especially true when metabolic-type training (high reps, short rest intervals) is used.
To avoid overproducing cortisol, you want to keep your sessions short, around an hour or less.
Another reason to avoid long sessions is related to mental focus. Regardless of how much you love training, at some point your focus will go in the crapper during a long session. The work performed in that state will be unproductive and could even lead to bad habits that'll screw you in the long run.
You can train more than one hour per day, but split your daily volume into two workouts. In fact, splitting your daily workload into several shorter sessions is much more effective, as it leads to both lower cortisol production and higher Testosterone levels. It's been shown that when two daily sessions are used, Testosterone production is higher after the second workout than after the first.
When training twice a day, it's best to train the same body part(s) during both workouts. I like to take this opportunity to train different types of contractions or goals on both occasions. For example:
Option 1: Muscle Building Emphasis
AM: Compound movements
PM: Isolation work
Option 2: Strength and Size Hybrid
AM: Heavy lifting (2 to 6 reps)
PM: Moderate loading (8 to 12 reps)
Option 3: Muscle Building or Strength Emphasis (Depending on AM Load)
AM: Concentric/regular lifting
PM: Eccentric work
Option 4: Performance Training
AM: Explosive lifting
PM: Heavy lifting
Option 5: Powerlifting or Olympic Lifting
AM: Competition movement
PM: Assistance work
It'd be a mistake to immediately jump to the maximum amount of training you can do with two-a-days. There should be a progression toward that amount of training.
Week
Session 1
Session 2
1
40 to 50 minutes
20 minutes
2
40 to 50 minutes
20 to 30 minutes
3
40 to 50 minutes
30 to 40 minutes
4
50 to 60 minutes
None
5
50 to 60 minutes
20 to 30 minutes
6
50 to 60 minutes
30 to 40 minutes
7
50 to 60 minutes
40 to 50 minutes
8
50 to 60 minutes
None
To judge if a workout was productive, but not excessive, look for three things:
1. At the end of the workout you're tired but not drained.
2. You feel a pump in the trained muscle. The intensity of the pump will obviously depend on the type of training that you did, but you should feel the muscles that were trained.
3. Two to three hours after the completion of the session you should yearn for more training. If you're still tired or lack motivation to train after this amount of time, chances are the session was excessive.
Principle #4: Contraction Type Depends on the Movement
This goes hand-in-hand with the first principle mentioned. There are basically three ways of executing a movement when it comes to the speed of execution/type of contraction.
1. Constant tension movement: You never release the contraction of the target muscle group during the execution of the exercise. Basically, the muscle you're trying to stimulate must be kept maximally flexed for every inch of every rep of every set. Never let it relax, not even between each rep!
The goal of this type of contraction is to prevent blood from entering the muscle during the set. This creates a hypoxic state because oxygen can't enter the muscle. It also prevents metabolic waste (lactate, hydrogen ions, etc.) from being taken out of the muscle during the set. Both of these factors increase the release of local growth factors like IGF-1, MGF, and growth hormone which will help stimulate growth.
By the way, the use of isometric contractions also falls into this category.
2. Accelerative concentric, controlled eccentric: In this type of contraction, you're trying to accelerate during the actual lifting portion of the movement and lower the weight under control. You go to the exercise's full range of motion, but you briefly pause (around one second) between the stretch position and the following lifting action. This short pause will negate the contribution of the stretch-shortening cycle to the force production.
You see, three things can contribute to producing force when you're lifting a weight: the actual contraction of the muscle, the activation of the reflex known as the stretch-shortening cycle (also called the myotatic stretch reflex), and the fact that muscle tissue is elastic, much like a rubber band.
When trying to maximize the amount of actual work the muscle itself must perform, you want to minimize the action of both the stretch reflex and the elastic contribution of the muscle's structure. By doing a simple one-second pause before lifting the weight, you can accomplish that and thus maximize the amount of force that the muscle must produce.
When you're lifting the weight, try to contract the muscle as fast as you can. This doesn't mean focusing on lifting the bar as fast as you can. Rather, it means that you should attempt to tense the muscle as hard as possible right from the start of the lifting motion. This will maximize the recruitment of the highly trainable fast-twitch fibers.
Finally, when you lower the weight, do so under control. The eccentric portion of the movement is where most of the muscle damage occurs (micro-tears of the muscle fibers) and is a powerful growth stimulus.
3. Using the stretch reflex: With this type of lifting, you want to involve the stretch reflex and elastic component of the muscle. Thus, you want to lift the load as fast as possible. This explosive lifting will improve the capacity, over time, of the nervous system to recruit the fast-twitch fibers.
It isn't effective by itself to stimulate maximum growth in those fibers because you can't fatigue them sufficiently (the time of contraction and duration of the muscle tension per rep is too low). But by lifting this way on some movements, you'll become better and better at activating the fast-twitch fibers. When you're more efficient at doing that, every single other exercise becomes more effective.
So, when do you use each technique?
Every time you do an isolation exercise, use constant tension. Every time! The goal of an isolation exercise is to completely focus the stress on the target muscle. You want a maximal local effect, and to do that you need constant tension. Without constant tension, isolation exercises are pointless. This is actually one of the main reasons why isolation movements get a bad rap. People don't know how to do them properly, and as a result, they end up not being effective at stimulating growth. But when done using constant tension, they're very effective at it.
Don't try to use constant tension lifting with compound movements. Not that it's impossible, but it's a waste of time. The goal of a compound movement is to overload several muscles. By nature, you can't isolate a muscle during a multi-joint exercise, and attempting to do so will make the exercise much less effective than it should be.
With regular compound movements, you want to use the second technique: accelerative lifting, short pause in the stretch position, and a controlled eccentric. This will magnify the hypertrophic effect of the big movements by overloading the involved muscles as much as possible.
Finally, the explosive lifting is best kept for exercises such as the Olympic lifts, plyometrics, and various jumping drills and throws. While these movements won't directly build mass, they'll improve your capacity to stimulate growth by improving your neural efficiency to recruit muscle fibers.
This isn't the end of the line. There are still plenty of principles to cover. Part 3 of Thib's opus magnum will explore ideal training frequency and proper rest intervals.
Day 2: Off
Day 3: Upper body
Day 4: Trunk (abs and lower back)
Day 5: Off
Day 6: Repeat
Day 1: Whole body
Day 2: Off
Day 3: Lower body
Day 4: Upper body
Day 5: Off
Day 6: Repeat
If you're average (or below) in your capacity to recover and/or your life is a mess, you should bump it up to a seven-day cycle. You then have these options:
Day 1: Chest and back
Day 2: Off
Day 3: Lower body
Day 4: Off
Day 5: Arms and shoulders
Day 6: Off
Day 7: Repeat
Day 1: Lower body
Day 2: Off
Day 3: Upper body
Day 4: Off
Day 5: Trunk (abs and lower back)
Day 6: Off
Day 7: Repeat
Day 1: Whole body
Day 2: Off
Day 3: Lower body
Day 4: Off
Day 5: Upper body
Day 6: Off
Day 7: Repeat
Day 1: Whole body
Day 2: Off
Day 3: Whole body
Day 4: Off
Day 5: Whole body
Day 6: Off
Day 7: Repeat
Day 1: Pushing muscles (chest/shoulders/triceps)
Day 2: Off
Day 3: Lower body
Day 4: Off
Day 5: Pulling muscles (back/biceps/forearms)
Day 6: Off
Day 7: Repeat
Obviously, you might need to experiment to find the right approach for you. It's also possible that as your recovery capacity improves, you might be able to increase the training frequency.
In regard to two-a-days, what's been said still applies. When you're doing two sessions a day, you should be training the same muscle group(s) during both sessions, so you aren't increasing the frequency of training days per muscle. You're simply splitting up the amount of work into two micro-sessions instead of a single macro-session.
Principle #6: The Proper Rest Intervals are Goal Dependent
The amount of rest between sets is an often-neglected variable. I'm not the kind of guy who's super anal about this. If you take 65 seconds instead of 60, I won't have a heart attack! But, having some kind of guideline to use keeps you in line for the proper training effect.
The amount of time you rest between sets will affect several factors that are important in the adaptations brought on by your training. The length of the rest period:
Affects the partial or complete restoration of the short-term energy substrates necessary for maximal performance
Allows for the clearance of the metabolites accumulated in the muscle following intense muscular work (which can be either a good or bad thing depending on your goal)
Permits the CNS to recover
Slows down the elevated metabolic rate/heart rate (again, a good or bad thing depending on your goal).
1) Rest periods for strength: If your main goal is strength, the length of the rest intervals should be long enough to allow the nervous system to recover almost completely, but not so long that you lose what's called the post-tetanic potentiation (PTP) effect. The PTP effect refers to the phenomenon by which your contraction strength potential will be increased for up to five minutes after a heavy set because of a greater neural activation.
The peak effect (greater potentiation) occurs around two to three minutes after a near-maximal contraction. The effect then gradually loses its effect so that it's gone by around the fifth minute. So when training for strength, you should rest around three minutes between sets of the same exercise.
You'll still have the full potentiation effect with less rest, but you'll also have some neural and/or muscular fatigue which will counter the PTP effect. When you're doing a proper strength session, you should actually become stronger with every set of an exercise (until cumulative fatigue sets in after four or five sets).
Note that I mentioned three minutes between sets of the same exercise. If you alternate two exercises for opposing muscle groups, you can have less time between sets, provided that you still have the three minutes between sets of the same movement. For example, if you alternate the bench press and weighted pull-ups, you might do as follow:
A1) Bench press
5 sets of 5 reps
90 seconds rest
A2) Weighted pull-ups
5 sets of 5 reps
90 seconds rest
Which would look like this:
First set of bench press
Rest 90 seconds
First set of pull-ups
Rest 90 seconds
Second set of bench press
Rest 90 seconds
Second set of pull-ups
Rest 90 seconds
And so on and so forth.
So while the rest between sets is actually 90 seconds, you have around three to four minutes of rest before hitting the same muscles again.
By the way, the above alternating of two opposing muscle groups or movements is the best way to train for strength. And not just because I said so:
It allows you to do more total sets without training for too long.
It makes sure that opposing muscle groups receive the same training stimulus.
It has been shown that contracting a muscle group before working its antagonist will increase the strength in the later exercise.
2) Rest periods for size: When using the big compound movements for building size, we want to use rest intervals that aren't that far off from what we would use in a strength protocol.
As mentioned earlier, when you're using compound movements you don't want to create excessive CNS fatigue, so you should rest long enough to allow for at least a near-maximal neural recovery between sets.
The goal of the compound movement when training for size is not to burn, destroy, or annihilate the muscle, but to progressively use more weight in the proper size-stimulating zone (6 to 8 and 8 to 12 rep ranges). So when using compound movements for size, you want to take around two minutes between sets of the same exercise.
For the isolation work you perform, fatigue, especially cumulative muscle fiber fatigue, is the main goal. So rest intervals should be shorter. Not so short that your strength drops off too much from set to set, but you should try to gradually take less rest over time.
When training for size, a strength drop-off of 5% per set of isolation work is acceptable, and a total drop-off from the first to last set of 20% is a good target. In other words, shoot for a reduction in performance of 20% between your first and last set of an isolation movement. This reduction can either come from reps or load.
For example, if on the first set you perform 12 reps with 140 pounds, a 20% reduction could mean:
Doing 9 reps with 140 pounds on the last set
Or...
Doing 12 reps with 110 pounds on that last set
If you can't achieve a 20% drop-off in four sets of isolation work, it means that you're either not training hard enough or that you're taking too much time between sets.
For isolation work when training for size, the rest intervals should be anywhere from 30 to 75 seconds.
3) Rest periods for fat loss: When training for fat loss, you should always shoot for incomplete recovery, meaning that you must accumulate an oxygen debt from set to set. Your breathing should stay hard and heavy for the whole workout. If you can talk normally during a fat-loss workout, you aren't training properly! So the rest intervals should be shorter, even with compound movements.
How short? Well, again, this depends on your level of conditioning and work capacity. Since the goal is incomplete recovery, get back to work before your breathing normalizes!
During a fat-loss program, you should feel out of breath and almost nauseous during the whole workout (the nausea is mainly due to the increase in lactate/lactic acid production).
You should rest anywhere from 15 to 60 seconds between your sets with a tendency toward gradually reducing the amount of rest you take.
This isn't the end of the line. There are still principles to cover. Part 4 of Thib's opus magnum will explore progression and now often to change your program.
Principle #7: Vary Your Training Often... But Not too Often!
Rarely do you see someone changing their workout at an optimal frequency. They either change their workouts too often (the "I want to try that program I read about today" phenomenon) or not often enough (the "I can stay on the same routine longer than the same woman" phenomenon).
Both of these knuckleheads have it wrong.
If you don't change your program often enough, your body will fully adapt to it and as a result the workout won't represent a challenge anymore. When it stops being a challenge, there's no need for the body to adapt, change, and grow.
If you change it too often, then you never actually give your body a chance to progress from a program. The one universal rule of gaining size or strength is progression. Every week you must become a bit better and work a little harder. But it's kind of hard to show progress when you never stick to a program for more than one week.
As a rule of thumb, you should stick to a program for four to six weeks. After that, switch to a new one. There's no need to change every single training variable, though. Generally, the less progress you're making at the end of your current program, the more changes you should make on your next one.
Principle #8: Progression is the Real Key to Success
The real secret to building muscle and strength is to progress. You must challenge your body on a consistent basis and find ways to progressively ask more of it. If you do the same thing over and over, you'll still look the same ten years from now.
Now, there's more than one way to progress. What we're looking for are ways to make our bodies work harder. This is progress, and it's what'll lead to growth. Here are a few ways to make your body work harder.
1. Increase the load: You can challenge your body by adding weight to the bar and performing the same number of reps per set. For example, if you did 225 pounds for ten reps on the bench press last week and put up 230 for ten this week, you've forced your body to work harder.
Obviously, this method of progression has its limitations. You can't just keep adding weight to the bar every week and expect your body to adapt. You'd increase your bench press by 260 pounds a year simply by adding five pounds to the bar per week if this were possible. Unfortunately, it's not.
This first method of progression, while it can be used with any exercise, is better suited for compound movements.
2. Increase the reps: Another way to make your body work harder is to do more reps per set with the same weight. For example, if last week you did 225 for ten reps and this week you do 225 for 12 reps, you've progressed. Just like with the previous method, you can't add reps like this every week.
3. Increase the average weight lifted for an exercise: This is very similar to the first method, except whereas increasing the load refers to lifting more weight on your max set, this refers to lifting more weight on average for an exercise.
Let's say you perform four sets of ten reps on the bench press:
Week 1
Set 1: 200 pounds x 10 (2,000 pounds)
Set 2: 210 pounds x 10 (2,100 pounds)
Set 3: 220 pounds x 10 (2,200 pounds)
Set 4: 225 pounds x 10 (2,250 pounds)
Total weight lifted = 8,550 pounds
Average weight per set = 2,137 pounds
Average weight per rep = 213.7 pounds (214 pounds)
Week 2
Set 1: 210 pounds x 10 (2,100 pounds)
Set 2: 215 pounds x 10 (2,150 pounds)
Set 3: 225 pounds x 10 (2,250 pounds)
Set 4: 225 pounds x 10 (2,250 pounds)
Total weight lifted = 8,750 pounds
Average weight per set = 2,187 pounds
Average weight per rep = 218.7 pounds (219 pounds)
As you can see, even though the same top weight was reached during both workouts, on week two you lifted five pounds more on average. This is progression!
4. Increase training density: You can also progress by increasing the amount of work you perform per unit of time. This refers to decreasing the rest between sets while using the same weight. By reducing rest intervals, your body is forced to work harder and recruit more muscle fibers due to the cumulative fatigue phenomenon.
This method of progression is better suited for either a fat loss program (in which case it can be used with any exercise) or isolation movements during a mass-gaining phase.
5. Increase training volume: This is probably the simplest progression method. If you want to make your body do more work, then do more work! This means adding sets for each muscle group. For example, on week one you might perform nine work sets for a muscle group and bump it to 12 on week two and 14 on week three.
While this can work, it shouldn't be abused, as it can lead to overtraining. Most trainees should stick to no more than 12 total sets per muscle group 90% of the time.
6. Use intensive training methods: The occasional inclusion of methods such as drop sets, rest/pause sets, tempo contrast, iso-dynamic contrast, supersets, and compound sets is another way of making your body work harder. It also shouldn't be abused, as it constitutes tremendous stress on the muscular and nervous systems.
Furthermore, intensive methods, as we saw earlier, should be used to accomplish a specific purpose, not to trash the muscle for the sake of trashing it!
7. Use more challenging exercises: If you're used to doing all your training on machines, then move up to free weights. You'll force your body to work harder because you have to stabilize the load. If you use only isolation exercises and start including multi-joint movements, you'll also make your body work harder because of the intermuscular coordination factor.
8. Produce more tension in the targeted muscle group: It's one thing to lift the weight; it's another to lift it correctly in order to build size! As I often say, when training to build muscle, you're not lifting weights; you're contracting your muscles against a resistance. You can improve the quality of your sets, thus making your body work harder, by always trying to flex the target muscle as hard as possible throughout the duration of each rep.
This method should only be used with isolation exercises.
9. Increase the time under tension by lowering the weight under control: I'm not a huge fan of precise tempo recommendations, as I find that they can interfere with training concentration. However, when a muscle is under constant tension for a relatively longer period of time (45 to 70 seconds), more hypertrophy can be stimulated.
The best way to do this without having to use less weight is to lower the weight even slower, while still focusing on tensing the muscles as hard as possible the whole time.
10. Increase the lifting speed: The concentric part of a strength training movement is where you're "lifting" the weight. In that phase of the contraction, the force formula applies:
Force = Mass x Acceleration
If you lift a certain weight with greater acceleration, you increase the amount of force you produce, thus making the set harder.
It takes a lot more force to throw a baseball 50 yards than to throw it five feet. The weight is the same, but you must accelerate the ball more. More acceleration equals more force.
This method of progression is best used for Olympic lifts, ballistic exercises, speed lifts, and the like.
As you can see, there are several ways that you can use to improve the quality and demand of your workouts on a weekly basis. The more often you can progress, the more you'll grow, period!
There You Have It
With proper application of my general principles, you'll be able to crank up your growth. However, the individualization factor still remains the basis of my system. This is why in the future I'll talk about how to assess your own needs and select the proper exercises and methods that'll lead to the greatest rate of progress possible.
Taken from T-Nation.
