Muscles play an essential role in your body's fat and calorie burning. Increased muscle mass can lead to a lower body fat, a stronger immune system, improved energy levels, and reduced stress. Not only does increasing your muscle help build strength, stamina, strong bones and joints, but it can also improve long-term health and longevity.
There are many benefits to muscle gain. However, if you do the same training over and over, you may hit a wall, also known as a "plateau." To prevent a plateau from happening, she suggest 5 intensity techniques to trick the body into consistently progressing.
1. Progressive Overload
In simplest terms, this could mean adding weight after every set.This includes Drop sets and Upsets. Drop sets are decreasing weight along with repetitions. A few examples are 15lbs/10 reps, moving onto 12lbs/15reps and so forth. Upsets are the complete opposite of Drop sets, starting with a lighter set of weights and gradually increasing the weights and repetitions.
2. Rest Pause
This intensifier is pretty straightforward and begins with a normal set to failure. However, once you finish, it's not over. Instead, you will take a 10-15 second break until you cannot rep anymore. Then, rest again, and repeat. Do this 2-3 times through, or until you literally can't move anymore.
3. Partner Manual Resistance
This method involves a training partner. They will push against the movement of the exercise to create greater tension until it has been exhausted.
4. Negatives
These are an intentional training of the eccentric portion of a movement used through a slow count or with a heavier weight. In other words, it will make the exercise harder without adding a bunch of weight.
5. German Volume Training
This old-school method consists of 10 sets of 10reps with only 10 seconds of rest between each set. Start with light weights and progressively add more with each set.
Any of these intensity techniques is a brutally fun way to switch things up whenever your training gets monotonous or you face a plateau. Make sure to let me know how you like these if you try them out, and don't miss our previous blogs!
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