Let’s face it, we all love to see results. Whether it be adding on a few pounds of muscle, dropping a few pounds of fat or busting through and hitting a few new personal bests. The following tips are here to help you keep on adding the most muscle weight as possible.
Make sure to check them all out and maybe even throw a few of the strategies together. Enjoy!
Go High and Low:
When you train high/low, you either alternate high-rep (12-20) sets of an exercise with low-rep (four to eight) sets of the same exercise, or you do all high-rep sets of one exercise followed by all low-rep sets of the next, switching back and forth throughout your workout. Use this technique occasionally to alter your rep pattern.
Take a Stand:
Some exercises can be performed standing or seated, and both methods |Have advantages, yet most trainers choose the seated versions. Jay Cutler, for one, likes to do shoulder presses standing to receive additional core work and incorporate momentum to cheat a few final reps.
Do Strong Man Cardio:
Add a farmer’s walk to your cardio regimen. Hold moderate to heavy dumbbells at your sides with your abs pulled and take long strides, walking until you can no longer grip the dumbbells.
Rest 90 seconds each time you fail and then go again, striding for 10-20 minutes total. This gives you the calorie burning of cardio while increasing your grip and core strength, which is important for lifting big weights.
Make and Break Personal Bests:
Consistently beating your previous bests is the best way to increase not just strength, but also size, and keeping a workout logbook allows you to focus on precise strength goals each time you enter the gym. Throughout his Olympia reign, Dorian Yates logged his workouts, to help him keep progressing.
Hit up your Traps:
Your trapezius is a relatively large muscle, so treat it accordingly. It gets work during compound exercises, like deadlifts, upright rows and shoulder presses, so it may not require a plethora of isolation lifts, but, even if you do just four sets of dumbbell shrugs, always think of it as a trapezius workout, deserving your full focus and maximum intensity, instead of as merely a few sets you throw in after delts.
Stretch Till It Hurts:
It is believed that static stretches of 60-90 seconds performed in a deep (and moderately painful) position soon after training a bodypart will boost flexibility and recovery, and may also lead directly to greater muscle size via fascia expansion.
Incorporate Rest-Pause:
Rest-pause is a neglected technique for pushing your sets beyond failure. When you can’t get another rep, set the weight down or hold it in a resting position just long enough to regain a limited amount of strength (about 10-25 seconds).
Then bang out another two to four reps until you reach failure again. Repeat this pattern a second time, getting one or two additional reps. This will help bust through any plateaus you may be experiencing and may even ignite some new muscle gains.
Make sure to check them all out and maybe even throw a few of the strategies together. Enjoy!
Go High and Low:
When you train high/low, you either alternate high-rep (12-20) sets of an exercise with low-rep (four to eight) sets of the same exercise, or you do all high-rep sets of one exercise followed by all low-rep sets of the next, switching back and forth throughout your workout. Use this technique occasionally to alter your rep pattern.
Take a Stand:
Some exercises can be performed standing or seated, and both methods |Have advantages, yet most trainers choose the seated versions. Jay Cutler, for one, likes to do shoulder presses standing to receive additional core work and incorporate momentum to cheat a few final reps.
Do Strong Man Cardio:
Add a farmer’s walk to your cardio regimen. Hold moderate to heavy dumbbells at your sides with your abs pulled and take long strides, walking until you can no longer grip the dumbbells.
Rest 90 seconds each time you fail and then go again, striding for 10-20 minutes total. This gives you the calorie burning of cardio while increasing your grip and core strength, which is important for lifting big weights.
Make and Break Personal Bests:
Consistently beating your previous bests is the best way to increase not just strength, but also size, and keeping a workout logbook allows you to focus on precise strength goals each time you enter the gym. Throughout his Olympia reign, Dorian Yates logged his workouts, to help him keep progressing.
Hit up your Traps:
Your trapezius is a relatively large muscle, so treat it accordingly. It gets work during compound exercises, like deadlifts, upright rows and shoulder presses, so it may not require a plethora of isolation lifts, but, even if you do just four sets of dumbbell shrugs, always think of it as a trapezius workout, deserving your full focus and maximum intensity, instead of as merely a few sets you throw in after delts.
Stretch Till It Hurts:
It is believed that static stretches of 60-90 seconds performed in a deep (and moderately painful) position soon after training a bodypart will boost flexibility and recovery, and may also lead directly to greater muscle size via fascia expansion.
Incorporate Rest-Pause:
Rest-pause is a neglected technique for pushing your sets beyond failure. When you can’t get another rep, set the weight down or hold it in a resting position just long enough to regain a limited amount of strength (about 10-25 seconds).
Then bang out another two to four reps until you reach failure again. Repeat this pattern a second time, getting one or two additional reps. This will help bust through any plateaus you may be experiencing and may even ignite some new muscle gains.
