Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Getting The Most Out Of Your Weight Training

By Brian

You face one of the biggest challenges to body builders in that all muscle fibers must be exhausted to have the best muscle gain.

The simple answer is, you have work beyond failure and experience a higher level of training intensity than before. This also ensures that workouts remain challenging and continue to engender progress over time thus reducing the likelihood of regression. But how do you go about intensifying your training? Fortunately there is a tried and tested path to follow as outlined below:

1. Increase the resistance of the weight you are using - Meaningful increments in the weights slowly pushes your body a little bit over the point of failure each time. Aim to reach 6 to 8 reps of an increased weight without failing.

2. Change up your exercises - All the muscle fibers in your body must be trained for maximum gain. Introducing a new exercise or changing the angle of a previous one (incline press etc) will help you achieve this.

3. Reduce the amount of rest between intervals - The level of intensity will increase if you give your muscles less time to recover before exposing them to more work.

4. Pre exhaustion - The weakest muscle in an exercise involving two or more muscles will always fail first. This means it will fail before you have the chance to exercise the main muscle to exchaustion. To overcome this, focus on tiring out the main muscle before doing the exercise with both muscles working together.

5. Do supersets - supersets are done by doing two exercises without any rest in between them that focus on the same muscle groups but are different types of exercise. This will fully utilize all the muscle fibers in that muscle group.

6. Do partial repititions - You will not be able to complete the full range of movement for any given exercise once you reach the point of failure. Using only a segment of the lift by doing a partial rep will work your muscles beyond the point of failure. It allows you to increase intensity without adding extra routines that could cause overtraining.

7. Try using isometric contractions - Holding the weight still at the point of failure to stimulate a static contraction in the muscle.

8. Do one more rep than possible - Going past the point of failure by doing one more rep will need the help of a friend. Once you have reached the point of failure, your assistant can help you go just past the point of failure to complete one more rep.

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