Getting Started
Building Muscle: Intensity
When starting a workout programme and your desired goal is to build strength and muscle endurance, one of the key factors you need to apply to your workouts is some form of intensity. If you train on a consistent basis but aren’t pushing past your limits, a minimal amount of progress will be made over a much longer time frame.
Intensity being about how much weight you can lift is a misconception and can lead to injury. To whereas applying intensity through different styles of training and the way you control the resistance is going to be far more beneficial.
Rep Ranges
The correct rep range will vary from person to person and what style of training you’re performing so in theory, there is no correct number of reps. However there are guidelines which you can follow with different styles of training.
Hypertrophy is a method of training which is adopted by most bodybuilders and will usually consist of 8-12 reps across 3-4 sets. This is deemed optimal for breaking down the muscle effectively and to encourage growth.
When performing hypertrophy routines, it’s imperative you work with weights around 80% of your one rep max and your last few reps are to failure. The reason for this is to ensure you are applying enough resistance to achieve the desired effect.
Although 8-12 reps may be one of the most popular rep ranges, it can be beneficial to introduce low weight/high volume and heavy weight /low volume into your routine as this will shock your nervous system and hit the muscle groups in ways they are not used to. It can be a good way of building muscle endurance as well as adding some variation to your routine.
Dropsets
Performing drop sets will instantly add intensity to your workout and exhaust the targeted muscle group.
A dropset is where you perform an exercise until failure and immediately reduce the resistance and continue the exercise once again, to failure. You can repeat this two to three times.
Incorporating these in your workouts are a great way to promote hypertrophy and optimise the breaking down of muscle tissue as you’re repeatedly working the muscle to failure.
Drop sets are also a great way to increase muscle endurance as you can engage an increased amount of muscle fibres then standard sets and increase blood flow to said muscle.
Drop sets are a versatile tool to use when training and can be implemented with almost any resistance-based exercise.
Rest Periods
Your rest period is the time you take between performing each set of an exercise. Depending on what exercise this is, your rest time may vary. However, a great way to up the intensity of a workout is to limit how much rest you take.
If you are to only have a short rest period between sets, it will prevent the muscle from becoming overly relaxed and result in muscle fatigue at a faster rate due to lactate production.
Smaller rest periods are also important when wanting to maintain sufficient blood flow to the targeted muscle in order to keep it warm or ''pumped''.
Rest periods can vary from 20 seconds to 5 minutes depending on what exercise you’re performing and at what level of resistance, however, for hypertrophy training, it is advised to maintain around 1 – 2 minutes between sets for optimal effect. With this said, if you feel you want to push this try and reduce this time by 15 second intervals until it feels more suited.
Controlling Resistance
All too often people will have a tendency of throwing weight around that is beyond their capability and as a result compromise their form and effectiveness of the exercise.
A great way to up the intensity of your workout is to ensure you are controlling the weight and correctly targeting the muscle. By factoring in such simple discipline it can have a dramatic effect on how the exercise hits that muscle and the amount of stress it applies.
If you’re ultimately training for strength, then explosive reps are more suited to promote power and growth, however still maintaining the correct form. To where as for if your approach is bodybuilding and having the more aesthetic muscular physique, you should focus on controlling the weight and performing slower repetitions.
The reason for the above is that slower reps will put your muscles under tension for a longer duration of time forcing more muscle fibres to work against the resistance and therefore optimise the breakdown of muscle tissue, leading to growth. Not only this, but the momentum when performing the exercise is also vastly reduced, meaning your muscle will have to work harder when performing a full range of motion.
To really maximise the effect of an exercise, you can incorporate explosive concentric and a slow eccentric into your exercises. This will adopt the highest amount of muscle fibres and overload the muscle – A great way to build strength and size.