We have all heard the saying “I wish I’d known then what I know now” and the use of intensity techniques is something that applies to me for that saying. In my first 3-4 years of training I didn’t apply these and I wish I did. Fast forward to now and the last 7-8 years of training I use these every week. In future articles of my workouts you will see when I place these techniques within my workouts. Some of you might already be using a few or all of these, but for those that aren’t here are some ways to increase the intensity within your workouts!
Drop Sets – an excellent technique to take the muscle to complete failure. Once you think you have reached failure with a particular weight, you’re wrong. Your muscle can always perform more reps with a lighter weight. This is by far one of my favorite techniques that I use in almost every single workout. It also guarantees an abundance of blood flushing into the muscle for an extreme numbness pump!
Partial Reps – These will be performed mostly on chest day. Towards the end of a set, once you hit your target number, you continue the set on with partial reps of just the first half of the rep to failure. Usually you will be able to do 5-8 partials. This is a great technique to further tax the muscle in the particular set.
Static Holds – These are KING to help you improve your mind muscle connection. These will mostly be done on back and leg day. You will be holding the weight at the contraction and squeezing the muscle as hard as you can for 2-3 seconds before performing another rep.
Static Stretches – Done on chest day. You will be holding a weight in the stretched position of the rep for a time period. The
amount of blood and pain you will feel is incredible!
Rep Tempo – On certain exercises you will be pausing and controlling the negative for 3 seconds or so. It gets extremely painful!
Rep Ranges – During the beginner program the rep range is anywhere from 6-15. It’s very basic and straightforward. Once you get into the intermediate level, you will start doing higher rep ranges. Moving on into the advanced program, the rep ranges will be all over the place to keep the muscles constantly guessing while also allowing yourself to target fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers.
Pre Exhaust – This technique is used to fatigue the muscle by using a isolation exercise before getting into a heavy compound movement. I use this mostly on leg day and sometimes on chest day. An example of this would be starting out with leg ext before moving onto squats.
Forced Reps – These can only be done if you are working out with a partner. You don’t want to do these too often because they are very taxing and you’re putting yourself more at risk of injury. I suggest cycling these in and out of your workouts every few weeks if you are at the intermediate or advanced levels.