EXERCISE ROUTINES THAT ACTUALLY GET RESULTS
Why Modern Fitness Advice Confuses Beginners
Never before have beginner gym-goers been this confused about building muscle. Open YouTube, and you will find influencers criticising traditional methods of lifting weights only to promote their new ideas. The simple act of strength building and progressive overloading seems to have lost its voice along the way. Who knew that building muscle would become this complex as time went by?
Two Key Variables That Drive Muscle Growth
The human body is a remarkable system. Muscle, bones and even fat adapt to the effort you place upon them. Before spending any more time wondering what actually works, let’s first drown out the noise and shift your focus to two important variables when it comes to building strength: structure and intensity.
VARIABLE 1: WORKOUT SPLIT STRUCTURE
Let’s start with how your week is laid out. Your workout split is how you organize your workout volume over the period of a week.
While there is no best split for optimal muscle gain, you can adopt any of the following structures to make sure you hit all muscle groups in that week. Only make sure that you follow the one that aids your daily activity levels and recovery as well. Recovery is specific to each muscle. One can start off with a general guideline of 48 to 72 hours of rest before training for the same muscle group again.
Let’s break these down one by one:
Full Body Routine
The entire body is trained, typically 2-4 times per week. Ideally suited for beginners wanting to prioritize overall strength. Also if it’s been more than two weeks since your last workout which may be of a different structure, then starting off with a full body routine using 50% of the previous maximum weight to avoid injury and extreme soreness will work best.
It would be wiser to focus on compound movements as time is of the essence when trying to hit all major muscle groups in a single day. Grouping multi-joint exercises like squats, presses, and deadlifts at the beginning of the session will give you enough energy to push through a full-body split.
Allow two days of rest between sessions to prioritise recovery. One advantage from this model is higher frequency of training per muscle. On the other hand, sessions can become lengthy if volume is not managed effectively.
Upper – Lower Split
A beginner wanting to transition into an early intermediate level of training can adopt this structure of exercise. The Upper – Lower split divides workouts into two regions of the body. The chest, arms, back and shoulders form the upper split while the quads, calves, hamstrings and glutes form the lower split.
With a typical training frequency of four days per week, each muscle can be trained twice according to this structure. However, since multiple muscle groups are trained on the same day, it can lead to increased muscle fatigue and leave one with a feeling of being shorter on time.
Push Pull Legs
These workouts are based on patterns of movements. As the name suggests, push exercises involve the weight being pushed away from the body. These workouts are particularly meant for chest, shoulders and triceps. Pull exercises happen when the weights are pulled toward the body. Back and biceps are predominantly trained under pull workouts.
Grouping lower body workouts into a separate day, would give enough attention for the major muscles of the leg namely quads, hamstrings, glutes and calves.
The Push Pull Legs split works best for intermediate lifters as it allows higher training volumes per muscle group while keeping fatigue manageable. As each muscle is trained every three days in standard rotation, recovery is also well distributed. Typically this workout can be done three to six days a week depending on training experience and recovery capacity.
VARIABLE 2: LOAD MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES
If structure tells you what to train, then load management techniques directs you to how hard muscles are pushed. In most cases, a couch to gym beginner will see the initial muscle gains. From then on, most people fail to build muscle size not because of poor exercise selection but because they failed to vary the intensity. But make no mistake that progressive overload is indeed the way to go to building progress at the gym. The below given techniques can significantly improve muscle hypertrophy.
Reps In Reserve
Reps In Reserve or RIR is a training method that estimates how many more reps you could have achieved, with attention to the right form, before reaching muscle failure. RIR is a self evaluation model of estimating fatigue. 0 RIR marks absolute failure. Each set is pushed anywhere from 3 to 1 RIR. The name also has close resemblance to RPE or Rate of Perceived Exertion. An RIR of 1-2 corresponds to an RPE of 8-9. The lower the RIR, the more the muscle is driven to failure thereby stimulating muscle building. RIR offers a good balance between stimulus and recovery.
Superset
A superset combines two exercises back to back without any rest interval. This allows for a higher training density with no loss in intensity. Pairing upper body with lower body, agonistic and antagonistic muscles or push-pull pairing are examples. Supersets work well when the workouts need to be quick and efficient.
Compound Set
In a compound set, two exercises from the same muscle group are worked together in succession. A push up set immediately followed by bench press is an example. Exercising in this manner causes the muscle to fatigue early, forcing muscle fiber recruitment with the second exercise. This helps break hypertrophy plateau at the targeted muscle group.
Giant Sets
Giant sets are an accumulation of three or more exercises done in succession with minimal or no rest. If you do an overhead press, front raises, lateral raises followed by rear delt fly back to back in a single session then this constitutes a giant set. Done primarily to push hypertrophy, it promotes muscular endurance. Since it is extremely taxing on the local and body system as a whole, this technique of load management is recommended only for advanced lifters.
Drop Set
The method of decreasing the load and going beyond the initial fatigue and increasing the metabolic stress is known as a drop set. Drop sets are best suited for isolation movements and can be used as a finisher exercise.
How a Drop Set Works:
- Taking an example of a bicep curl exercise, start with a 10kg dumbbell.
- At around 12 reps, muscle fatigue kicks in and you feel you are one rep shy of failure.
- Instead of ending the set, switch to a lighter dumbbell without no rest in between.
- Continue the set until you are again one rep shy of failure.
Drop sets allow you to increase the training density by accumulating fatigue in a shorter training time. But with fatigue being high, these sets should be used few and far between your workouts or used as a finisher.
That being the reason, drop sets are not to be used with heavy compound lifts like squats or deadlifts as fatigue can compromise form and for reasons of safety. Instead, this method is best suited for isolation movements.
Training to Failure
Widely adopted by competitive bodybuilders, extreme caution must be taken when using this model to drive muscle hypertrophy. Here, keeping good form in mind, the working set is driven to the point where you simply cannot lift anymore. While muscle stimulus for growth is maximal, it draws in a substantial amount of fatigue to your central nervous system as well. Knowing when to include this sparingly in the training program is the key to seeing progress. Training to failure helps measure maximum effort. But when overused, it can lead to excessive fatigue and poor recovery. Ideally this method is utilised in the last set of an exercise.
Forced Sets
Forced sets involve performing a few more repetitions even beyond the point of muscle failure with the assistance of a partner. This makes it one of the most fatigue causing techniques if not the most. Research has consistently shown that high-intensity resistance training from forced sets does not enhance strength anymore than conventional methods. Once failure is reached, no additional sets or forced repetitions yielded improvement in gaining strength or power when compared to traditional failure training.
While these training methods are tools to increase workout intensity, they should be applied based on a person’s goal, experience and training capacity.
Below are some of the commonly asked questions gym-goers often ask about these methods.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Q1) Which of these training methods is best for beginners?
Reps in Reserve should be focussed by a beginner stepping into the gym. Leave 2-3 reps short of failure for consistent progress building.
Q2) Should high intensity techniques like drop sets or forced sets be used in every workout?
Definitely not. High intensity workouts should never be the foundation of any exercise program. These advanced sessions must be used only occasionally.
Q3) How often must one train to failure?
The closer your workouts get to failure the lesser it should be used. Following every set to failure can negatively impact your overall performance. Training to failure may be used on the last set of an exercise.
Q4) Can using multiple high-intensity techniques produce better results?
No. Overusing high-intensity techniques hinder recovery and can lead to excessive fatigue. For this reason, such methods must be used only sparingly.
KEY TAKEAWAY
If your goal is to keep lifting weights and be gloriously good at it throughout your life, rather than losing thought on what workout structure split or what load management technique is ideal for you, stick to the following time tested principle of weight training. Weekly volume matters. Lift weights 70-80% of your 1RM (one rep max). Without doubt, a vast majority of the outcomes arise from progressive overload and periodization. Techniques like supersets, giant sets, drop sets help cut down the training time compared to traditional training. On its own, they are no more than powerful tools but not the foundation.
Take care of the basics and the desired outcome is inevitable.
