WEEKLY WEIGHT TRAINING
Ensure the you are building muscle by:
Before you ever pick up a weight at the gym, it is highly important that you understand all of the factors that will help you grow your muscles in a safe and effective way. There are 5 major factors that you will need to understand and utilize to help you reach your genetic muscle building potential. These 5 factors are rep range, sets, temp, rest periods between sets and progressive overload. If you get a firm understand of how to use these factors in your favor, you will build a mind-blowing physique.
What is a Rep?
A rep, short for repetition, is the act of completing the motion of an exercise. For example, 1 rep of a push-up includes the starting position, lowering the body and then returning to the starting position.
1. Rep Ranges - Rep range refers to the specific amount of repetitions you perform in a set. 1-6 reps with heavy weight will help gain strength, and not necessarily muscle definition. The high rep range, 12 or more, helps to build muscle endurance, and typically will not increase muscle size or strength. The 8-12 moderate rep range is where I’ve seen the great amount of muscle growth and development for most exercises. It’s great to use each rep range occasionally, but the medium range will produce the best muscle building and muscle shaping results over time (see chart below).
2. Sets - Sets refers to a group of exercise repetitions done consecutively. 4 sets of 3 to 5 different exercises is the recommended approach.
3. Tempo - Tempo is how fast you perform a rep. Think explosion. Lower the weight down (count 2 to 3 seconds), and lift it/explode up as fast as you can, under control.
4. Rest Between Sets - Rest only around 60 seconds between each set. Rest enough to catch your breath and briefly re-energize. Too much rest will allow you to recover too much, and fewer than 60 sec’s may prohibit you from moving up in weight each set. 60 seconds of rest to the sweet spot!
5. The Progressive Overload Principle - Over time, the human body is fantastic at adapting to changes and reaching a plateau. When it comes to building muscle, it’s very important to keep challenging the body, with, incrementally increasing weight, which prevents the body from adapting. This is the essence of the Progressive Overload Principle. Increasing weight from set to set until failure will provide to great benefits (1) Prevent any two workouts from being the same. You will reach failure at a different set/rep number in each workout. (2) You will prevent your body from adapting to your workout because you’ll continually adjust weight based on energy levels for each workout.
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