Up The Exercise Intensity For Mind-Blowing Results

Millions of people commit many of hours out of their schedules at health clubs working out. The sad fact is, most fitness enthusiasts who regularly visit gyms know little about what makes up an effective workout system. In this article, I want to dispel 90% of the hype and help you understand exactly how to build your routine so it will guarantee that every second you spend in the gym will help you get stronger. After all, you spend a lot of time lifting weights; don't you want to make sure your workout time is spent as efficiently as possible?

With so many strength-training systems on the market today, it becomes difficult to cut through all the noise and find a training system that is based on solid science. A good indicator that a strength training system is less effective is if it uses a one-size-fits-all approach. Your body is unique. You are different than anyone else. It simply doesn't make sense that if you do exactly the same thing in the gym as everyone else, you will get the same results as everyone else. To get the best results, you must understand your body's individual needs. If you can give your body exactly the exercise it needs, nothing more or less, you will maximize your training results while not wasting even a second of your valuable time in the gym.

Another solid indicator that a strength training system is bogus is whether it is based in biology. Many strength-training systems are simply anecdotal. Some fitness gurus peddle their opinions, passing them off as training gospel just because it feels right to them. Be careful. A good training system should be backed up by the physiology of the human muscular system. The more a strength training system is steeped in the actual workings of the human body, the more customized it will be to your body type and the better it will work.

Now that we have explored a couple of indicators of less effective strength training systems, lets take a look at a system that IS based solidly in physiology and IS completely customized to your body.

Scientifically steeped high intensity training (HIT) power-packs your strength training routines. HIT training teaches that muscles grow and adapt more efficiently if they are worked intensely for short bursts of time on a relatively infrequent basis.

Three elements make up an effective HIT workout regimen; slow lifting cadence, timed sets, and adequate rest and recovery time between workouts. Lets take a closer look at these three elements.

Slow Lifting Cadence

Cadence, as related to strength training, is the time it takes to perform one full rep of exercise. Use of a slow lifting cadence is an excellent way to make every second of your workout count.

Fast, explosive weight lifting introduces many problems. First, it is less effective. Your goal, during a set of exercise, should be to spend every available ounce of muscular energy; you can't hope to accomplish this goal if you continually throw the weight past the most demanding parts of the exercise. Second, explosive lifting is dangerous; you can expose yourself to hazardous acceleration, velocity, and momentum spikes. These spikes can lead to loss of control of the weight, causing painful, and possibly permanent, injuries.

To get the most out of your workout, use a slow lifting cadence with every exercise. Each exercise should be divided into 3 lifting phases; move:hold:move. As a rule of thumb, use a 5:2:5 lifting cadence; 5 full seconds to move the weight from an exercise's starting position to its fully contracted position (the most difficult position at which to hold the weight); 2 full seconds to hold the weight in the fully contracted position; 5 full seconds to move the weight back to starting position. It should take a total of 12 seconds to perform one rep of exercise. If you lift enough weight and use a slow cadence, you can be sure that you are firing as much muscle fiber as possible.

Timed Sets

By timing your sets, you can determine the correct weight to rack up for each exercise. You can also be certain that your muscles are sufficiently spent during each set.

We have long been conditioned to break weight training exercise into sets and reps. Many strength training systems prescribe a consistent quantity of sets and reps for every person, regardless of sex or body type. This one-size-fits-all approach might not be optimal for you. Your muscular system is different than anyone else's. It's important, if you want big-time training results, to adapt your exercise regiment to your body's specific needs. Timed sets is the best way to determine how much exercise is best for each of your muscle groups.

To time your sets, you will need a stopwatch. At the beginning of each set, start the clock. With the seconds ticking, perform the exercise until you hit muscle failure. Don't worry about counting reps; complete muscle failure is your objective. Lift until you can't move the weight another inch, then try one more rep. After you have spent every ounce of your muscular energy, stop the clock. Your final seconds count is called your time under load--the total time spent performing the exercise.

A good set of exercise is not made up of a quantity of reps; it is made up of 30 to 60 seconds of high quality, slow cadenced exercise, with muscle failure at the end of the set. As you gain muscle mass, you will have to increase the weight you lift to keep your sets at between 30 to 60 seconds.

Adequate Rest And Recovery Time

With adequate rest and recovery time between workouts, you will hit the gym mentally and physically ready to workout with precision and energy.

Overtraining is a chronic problem among gym rats. Too often the success of a strength-training regimen is measured by the quantity of hours spent in the gym. Each time you workout, you spend a tremendous amount of muscular energy, leaving your muscles in a state of controlled shock. It takes a number of days to fully recover. If over-trained, muscles can remain in a continuously weakened state--a state at which they cannot perform beyond their usual, daily workload. Unless muscles are trained at a level far beyond what is usually expected of them, they cannot adapt by growing, hardening, and strengthening.

You must allow your muscles to fully recover between workouts. This means your strength-training regimen should have more off days than on days. To start, take 2 days off between workouts. As you gain muscle mass, you will need to add additional rest and recovery days. If you experience a stall in your strength gain progress, take a full week off from training so you can hit the gym recharged and strong. Often, the best way to break through a training plateau is to workout less frequently, not to increase hours spent in the gym.

When it comes to workout frequency, don't fall victim to the more is more mentality. Your strength gains stay with you for months before beginning to fade away. As long as you stimulate your muscles into growth and adaptation on a regular and relatively infrequent basis, you will make steady, satisfying progress.

There you have it. If you are after tremendous muscle mass gains and satisfying fat loss, high intensity training is the key. With a relatively infrequent, hard-hitting strength training routine, using slow lifting cadence, you can skyrocket your training success into the stratosphere.

Shane Provsgaard, M.S., C.R.T., and Craig Nybo teach many more in-depth principles related to high intensity training in their book, Total Human: The Complete Strength Training System, now available at www.totalhuman.com or wherever good books are sold.

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Weight Lifting Program - High Intensity Training For Massive Muscle Gain

One weight lifting program which will pack on mass quickly is high intensity training (or "H.I.T."). This form of training was popularized by the likes of Dorian Yates, as well as Mike Mentzer, and has had a strong following throughout recent years.

Basically it involves using heavy weight and training to failure. If you truly train to failure then you only will need to do 1-2 sets. High intensity training is a weight lifting program which only requires performing 1-2 exercises per body part, and only doing 1-2 sets.

For example a chest workout could include dumbbell bench presses performed with a weight that you can get for 5-7 reps. When you perform a HIT weight lifting program you are going to want to try to go for 8-10 reps. Much of lifting is mental, and when you know you only have one set to perform, then you push like never before. People who normally get 5 reps for a certain weight, end up pumping out 7-8 reps. This is one of the reasons HIT is so effective. It pushes people beyond their perceived limits, thus further forcing the body to develop muscle.

Next for chest you could move to a pec dec machine and again perform your one all out set. Of course before each of these exercises you want to properly warm up with lighter weight. 2-3 sets of warm ups are fine, just don't go to hard or too heavy. Save it for your one big set.

High intensity training has different routines as far as how often per week and how you split up the body. Some will do whole body workouts twice a week. But most trainees workout 3 times a week, splitting up the body 3 ways (thus working each body part once a week). The thing with HIT is that you need recovery time since you are pushing it to the max every workout. This isn't a program for everyday training.

HIT is very effective for hard gainers who need to put on muscle quickly and effectively. Many trainees have tried every routine under the sun, but it wasn't until HIT that they were able to make noticeably big gains in muscle size.

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Building Muscle and Strength in Only One Hour Per Week - High Intensity Fitness Training

Most people spend the greater part of their lives building up personal wealth, only to spend the money on their fading health during their last few years. From my experience this isn't due to lack of knowledge as most people already understand the health benefits of exercising and training with weights. They know that exercise and healthy eating will extend their lives and keep them healthy, happy, energetic and strong, but they lead busy lives and don't think they can make time for it. I once agonized over that same problem and even stopped exercising entirely for almost five years because of it. While I knew that I wanted to stay young, strong, and physically fit I was unwilling and unable to spend several hours per day at the gym like most successful bodybuilders were advocating. That's when I read the story of a man named Casey Viator. Casey had won the Mr. America bodybuilding title back in 1971 and was arguably the best Mr. America the contest had ever seen. What made Casey's win so interesting was that he was engaged in an unconventional method of training that eventually came to be known as High Intensity Training, or HIT for short. Casey's High Intensity methods would initially be discounted and rejected by the experts who would soon be forced to revise their opinions when faced with its incredible success. Unlike all the other top bodybuilders who were training anywhere from three to five hours per day, six times per week, Casey was only training one hour per day, three times per week. It struck me that if Casey could win the Mr. America title with only three hours of training per week, then someone with more modest goals could probably achieve a state of excellent physically fitness in even less time than that.

The principle of High Intensity Training is based on putting 100% of your lifting capacity into a very small number of repetitions and then giving your body lots of time to recuperate. Famous bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Franco Columbu suggested doing anywhere from 12-20 sets per body part, and most of us quickly realize the difficulties involved with training six days and 25 hours per week. When you consider that a nine to five job keeps you busy for 2080 hours a year, 1,200 hours per year for physical fitness is virtually impossible to justify. With the High Intensity Training method you do only one set, with the greatest amount of weight you can lift at least once-- but not more than six times. In other words, you do only one set per body part per week, and you put everything that you've got into it so that by the end of the set you've reached what's known as the point of muscular failure; the muscle should not have the physical ability to lift any more at the end of the set. Every time that you achieve an increase in your strength the amount of weight used must be increased as much as needed to make sure that no more than six repetitions are possible for you. The idea is that if you're physically able to lift a weight more than six times, then you're probably only putting out 80% of your capacity most of the time and it's 100% exertion that best stimulates the body to adapt and grow stronger. After doing that one set you then give that muscle a full week to recover before training it again. The only exception to this rule is your legs with which you should do 6-10 repetitions for either one or two sets. Realistically, you should be able to train all the major muscle groups of the body in about one hour per week, broken into three 20 minute training sessions.

I have personally found this method to work extremely well. Using the bench press as a gauge- when I once returned to the gym after five years of inactivity I weighed 186 pounds and was able to achieve a one rep maximum lift of 150 pounds. 18 months later I weighed 169 pounds and on the same lift I was working with 315 pounds. That represents a significant reduction in body fat and a strength increase of over 100%, all based on a healthy diet and only four to five hours per month of real exercise which actually became quite enjoyable.

While some cardiovascular exercise is also recommended to keep a healthy heart, high intensity weight training is in this author's opinion the most time efficient method of keeping a healthy body and warding off the harmful effects of aging. Aside from looking good at the beach-- weight training can improve your general health, skin tone, bone density, circulation, strength and metabolism. It can also act as a stabilizing force in your life, make your back resistant to injury and help ensure a long active future. For a cost of only one hour per week it may just be the best investment you'll ever make.

Jason Roskopf is a competitive bodybuilder, author of numerous health and fitness related articles and is owner of I.T. Milwaukee computer repair service centers.