Benefits Of Strength Training

The benefits of a good strength training program are almost endless. Less disease, happiness and most importantly, showing off your muscles at the beach.

Strength training should be part of everyone’s routine. Even if you are low on time, strength training, according to the ACSM (American College of Sports Medicine), only needs to be done 2-3 times per week with each session lasting no more than one hour. For 2-3 hours per week, huge benefits can be realized.

Regular strength training will:

**help you in day to day activities around the house and in your yard. It will keep you independent which is especially important in the older population. Imagine not being able to lift a 5 pound bag of flour or take the garbage out by yourself.

**lower the risk of osteoporosis, hypertension and diabetes.

**help you avoid lower back pain.

**increase bone density which is important for post menopausal women.

**increase muscle mass which burns more calories throughout the day than an equal amount of fat.

Even with all these benefits, many people are reluctant to start training with weights. Concerns include injury, incorrect form and for women; not wanting to grow muscles and look like a man.

When beginning your strength training program, the risk of getting hurt can be greatly reduced by starting out with machines rather than free weights. As you become more comfortable with the machines, slowly learn to use free weights. If you want to stick with the machines, know that they will give you the same benifits as free weights. As for the concern that women will look like men, it won’t happen without the help of steroids, which you shouldn’t even consider using.

Sometimes when we think of being healthy, we think of eating and running. While these are important, strength training should never be left out. Strength training provides benefits to your health that cannot be found with any other mode of exercise and shouldn’t be forgotten.

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Instantly Increase Your Strength On Every Back Exercise

Do you want a quick, simple and instant way to increase the amount of weight you can lift on virtually every back exercise you perform? Sound too good to be true? I speak the truth, my friend, and the reality is that if you aren’t utilizing this basic piece of gym equipment you’re missing out on some serious muscle size and strength gains. What tool am I talking about?

A pair of lifting straps!

This is such a basic and highly effective piece of equipment yet so many people neglect to use them. For those of you who are unaware, these are basically a set of thick straps made of extremely strong material that are placed around your wrists and then wrapped around the barbell, dumbbell or cable attachment. The purpose of lifting straps is to “eliminate” your grip from the equation by forming a secure connection between your wrist and the weight. If you use these straps properly you can basically hold onto the bar and perform your exercises while expending almost no energy from your forearms.

Why is this so valuable?

Picture this scenario…You’re performing a set of deadlifts (arguably the most powerful muscle-building exercise known to man) with the goal of performing 8 reps. You psych yourself up, grip the weight and clear the bar from the ground. The set is going well, but by the time you reach rep number 5, the strain on your grip is so great that you can no longer hold onto the bar. You’re forced to stop the set because your forearms reached muscular failure.

What exactly happened here?

Well, you gave yourself an amazing forearm workout! Congratulations! Unfortunately you severely limited the amount of muscle stimulation you could achieve on your back, shoulders, legs, and just about every other muscle in your body that the deadlift targets in the process. This is not a good thing!

Lifting straps completely eliminate this problem by making sure that you reach muscular failure in the major muscle groups that you are intending to target rather than on your forearms and grip. They can be used effectively for almost every back exercise or any other lift where the grip is of concern.

The main argument against lifting straps is the idea that they are a “crutch” and will negatively affect the development of grip strength and forearm size. Let’s get real here. What would you prefer, greater muscle mass and strength in your lats and upper back (and just about every other muscle group on your body) or greater ability to crack open a jar of pickles? Take your pick.

The positive effect that lifting straps will have on your overall muscle mass and strength gains will far outweigh any negative effect that they have on your forearms and grip. Besides, you can easily incorporate specific forearm movements into your routine to develop your grip strength and forearm size. If you aren’t using lifting straps already, get on it! You can find them at almost any store that sells sports or fitness equipment or you can order them online. They sell for about 10 or 15 bucks and are well worth the price!

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Increase Your Training Intensity Negative Repetitions

You can only build muscle tissue if you can generate progressively stronger muscular contractions, so this calls for an emphasis on finding ways to increase exercise intensity. This should not be confused with exercise duration as maximum training intensity will actually shorten the time needed to achieve maximal muscular growth.

In an earlier article I outlined the ways in which you can intensify your training. Here we’ll focus on the role that negative repetitions have to play in intensifying the training effect.

At the most basic level, human muscles have three types of strength:

1. Positive strength – the ability to raise a weight.

2. Static strength – the ability to hold a weight.

3. Negative strength – the ability to lower a weight.

Many bodybuilders concentrate primarily on their muscles’ positive and static strength but equal focus should be given to negative strength, or lowering the weight, if true muscle failure is to be achieved. You can emphasize this aspect of training by completing a set of negative reps after reaching positive failure.

You’ll need one or two partners to lift the weight to the top position so that you can lower it under your own control. Once you can no longer control the descent, the set ends. Take special care with leg exercises and avoid negative squats to protect the knees.

Beginners should not attempt negative reps while intermediate and advanced bodybuilders can be imaginative in how they incorporate negative reps into their training programs.

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Scientific Principles For Effective Muscle Gain

It’s an unfortunate reality that throughout the years there has been a growth of strength training techniques that have no scientific proof to back them up. Have a look at the facts presented in this outline of muscle gain principles and make up your own mind.

Below you will find Scientific Guidelines for strength training that have always been around but are not followed by many training systems these days.

1. Limited Energy Level

A strength-training program should be short and simple as you only have a limited amount of energy per training session.

Scientific studies reveal that blood sugar levels (energy) start to deplete after 30 mins, so exercise selection and the time taken to perform them is crucial.

What you should be aiming for is stimulating as many muscle fibres in the shortest period of time available.

Your blood sugar levels deplete after high intensity training (usually between 20 – 30 minutes) and remember that you need energy to recuperate after the workout.

The trick is to give yourself a high intensity workout before your blood sugar level depletes, and then you will have given your body the exercise that it requires to gain the maximum amount of muscle possible.

2. Progressive Overload

Progressive Overload is the main exercise principle you need to be aware of in order to get the results that you’re after with strength training.

The two most important points are:

 Complete your exercise with perfect technique

 Push to total failure when doing a set and overload the weight on the bar progressively. (Overload your targeted muscles to beyond what there used to)

Basically this means that when the body is stressed by high intensity training beyond its normal demands, the body will adapt to these new demands of improved strength.

When I say “normal demands,” I mean what level of stress/strength your body is used to now.

An example: The set that you performed last week using the same technique and weight, your body will now have adapted to. If you stay at this level your muscles will not become stronger or bigger, so this is where the Progressive Overload plays a major part.

Once your muscles have adapted to a particular weight then it’ll be time to overload them further (add more weight, speed, repetitions). You’ll need to keep on repeating this process of overload if you want to become stronger.

Remember to always use GOOD TECHNIQUE. Technique must never be sacrificed for extra load.

3. Training Frequency

The sad reality is that the popular high volume type of training that you find in bodybuilding books and magazines (and used by the stars) is irrelevant to the majority of the population and has a shocking failure rate.

What is good for Joe Star is probably not good for you. Everybody has different genetics; most of us have poor genetics and are not taking steroids like the stars.

The only way the majority of us can make any gains at all is to perform short intense workouts followed by long periods of rest so that we don’t overtrain.

4. Over-Compensation

Many studies conducted around the world have shown clearly that recuperation from strength training requires far more rest time than previously thought.

Infrequent, short, high intensity weight training sessions, followed by the required amount of time to recover and become stronger is necessary for you to increase your functional muscle.

Here’s what you need to do – allow your body enough recuperation time for over compensation to take place, so that the muscles can adjust to their new strength and growth.

5. Exercise selection for intensity

I can’t stress enough of how exercise selection is absolutely crucial. There are only a few exercises that you really need to perform. These exercises consist of multi-joint movements.

These particular exercises are far superior to that of isolation exercises (working 1 muscle group at a time) because you are required to use more muscles from every muscle group.

By using these exercises your whole body will be worked hard.

6. Visualization

Over my 20 years in the industry, I’ve noticed that this area is by far the most neglected by mainstream health and fitness professionals…

Most books or courses concentrate on the physical side of muscle gain or fat loss and completely neglect the mental side of things.

By training your mental state as well as your physical body you can even further progress in muscle growth.

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The Most Powerful Muscle Building Tool Available

The bodybuilding debates will never end. The endless arguments over how an effective muscle-building program should be structured will most likely continue until the end of time. Just scour the Internet message boards, flip through any muscle magazine or talk to the sales rep at your local supplement store. No matter who you talk to or what you read, it seems that everyone is an expert these days.

If everyone is an expert, confident in their own ideas and beliefs, how can the average beginner possibly know who to listen to? He or she is instantly confronted with endless questions that seem to have no clear-cut answer.

How many days should I train per week? How many sets should I perform for each muscle group? What type of rep range should I be using? What are the most effective exercises for stimulating muscle growth? How long should my workouts last?

These questions go on and on until he or she is eventually led to believe that building muscle is an infinitely complex process involving rocket-science precision and an intimate understanding of human physiology. I mean, that’s what takes to build muscle, right? Wrong! Believe me, there are answers to these important questions, and if you are willing to put in the time and effort you will most definitely find them. But that’s not what this article is about.

You see, amidst all of the confusion and endless debating, the majority of lifters end up losing sight of the big picture. Beyond all of the specific workout principles, such as rep range and exercise selection, remains one crucial principle, a principle that lies at the very heart of the muscle growth process. If this principle is not given full attention, or even worse, completely ignored, building muscle becomes next to impossible.

The bottom line is that muscles grow as they adapt to stress. When you go to the gym and lift weights, you create “micro-tears” within the muscle tissue. Your body perceives this as a potential threat to its survival and reacts accordingly by increasing the size and strength of the muscle fibers in order to protect against a possible future “attack”. Therefore, in order to continually increase the size and strength of the muscles, you must focus on progressing each week by either lifting slightly more weight or performing an extra rep or two. In doing this, your body will continue to adapt and grow to the ever-increasing stress.

Building muscle is all about building strength!

So what is the most powerful muscle-building tool available? Quite simply, it is a pen and a piece of paper!

Every time you go to the gym you must write down exactly what you accomplished and then strive to improve upon it the following week. If you aren’t always getting better, then you’re either staying the same or getting worse. Every week you should have an exact plan of attack ready to be executed. You absolutely cannot afford to start throwing weights around aimlessly without a clear-cut goal in mind.

The specifics of building muscle are important to understand and implement, but regardless of what style of training you’re currently using the ultimate deciding factor between success and failure is progression. You can sit around all day obsessing over specific principles, but the bottom line is that if you aren’t getting stronger every week, you absolutely will not be getting any bigger. Examine your training approach closely. If you haven’t been paying laser-like attention to the amount of weight you’ve been using, the number of reps you’ve been performing, and then striving with every ounce of your energy to improve upon those numbers each week, you are completely ignoring the very foundation of the muscle growth process. If you want to see the best gains in muscle mass and strength that you possibly can, a pen and a piece of paper is the most important tool you could possibly have in your arsenal.

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Strength Training Strategies That Actually Work

Over the years there has been a surge of different strength training techniques that have come onto the market and just faded away. Here we discuss the training strategies to gain the maximum amount of muscle in the shortest time possible that have stood up to the test of time.

Most of these strength-training strategies have been around for years but are not followed by many training systems these days. Lets look at a few below that actually work.

1. Training Frequency

The two main components of strength training are the intensity of the exercise and the recovery after the exercise. Infrequent, short, high intensity weight training sessions, followed by the required amount of time to recover and become stronger is what is needed to increase functional muscle size in the shortest period of time.

The latest research has repeatedly shown that muscles over-compensate (become stronger) up to a week after the previous workout, provided that the muscles are trained to failure.

Remember it’s not the training volume but the intensity and recuperation that are important when it comes to gains in strength and muscle.

2. Exercises Per Session

Tests under strict gym conditions have revealed that you’ve only got a limited amount of (readily available) energy to use for a weight training session. Blood tests on individuals have also revealed that blood sugar levels (available energy) drop dramatically after 20 to 30 minutes of high intensity training.

As you only have a short period of time to train before our blood sugar level drops, “Exercise Selection” is crucial. You have to use Multi-Joint or Compound movements, as these offer the most training stimulus for the available amount of time. In other words, we can train many muscles simultaneously and thus use our energy more efficiently.

Performing three to four exercises with high intensity during a session are what most people are capable of. All the main structures of the body are worked hard during this time. Working on these big compound movements has a knock-on effect throughout the whole body; there is no need for specialization techniques or isolation movements.

The fact is, the whole body is worked hard, rest and recuperation is allowed to take place and at the next exercise session we push out a few more reps than before with the same weight, then we have gotten stronger i.e. more muscle.

3. Number of Sets per Exercise

After performing one complete set a compound exercise to total failure, it should be just about impossible to generate the same force and intensity for another complete set of the same exercise.

If you’re able to generate the same force and intensity for this second set then it’ll be pretty obvious that not enough effort has been put into the first set. Thus you’ll have to raise the intensity level you put out for the first set.

If you give the first set 100% effort and work the exercise hard to total failure (eg. you cannot move the bar after the last rep) then there will be not more requirement for further muscle stimulation on that specific exercise.

If you think that volume training (multiple sets) is more effective then you’re wrong! The latest research shows that single set training is as beneficial as multiple set training. Training one set will decrease the chances of over-training. It will also allow you to save more energy for other exercises required during the workout.

4. Number of Repetitions per Set

The development of muscle and strength is interrelated, it always has been. Strength training Sessions produce increases in strength that is equal to increases in functional muscle. (You’ll become stronger and grow muscle).

Cycling intensity through changes in repetitions and weight throughout a ten-week program is an effective way to maintain progression and avoid training plateaus (slumps in strength).

Repetitions can be cycled, the higher repetition range will stimulate the slow twitch muscle fibres and promote endurance. Moving further down the scale, the lower repetition range will activate the fast twitch muscle fibres and increase strength and muscle size.

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Weight Gain Myths

The vast majority of myths about weight gain are mostly passed down from

“gym talk” and so-called experts who know nothing about the body’s workings.

Myths that lead to wasted time, frustration and if are taken blindly as truth, can really set back your progress in the gym. Don’t believe everything you hear in the gym when it comes to exercise and weight gain, do the research yourself.

Simple, basic principles apply to all weight and muscle gain such as progressive overload, variable frequency of reps and high intensity workouts. Lets take a look at some of the most common weight gain myths.

High repetitions burn fat while low repetitions build muscle.

Progressive overload is needed to make muscles bigger.

Meaning that you need to perform more reps than you did

for your last workout for that particular exercise.

If you perform the same amount of reps at each workout nothing

will change on you, also if the weight doesn’t changes on the bar nothing

will change on you. You need to become stronger.

Definition has two characteristics, muscle size and a low

incidence of body fat. To reduce body fat you will have to

reduce your calories; the high repetition exercise will burn

some calories, but wouldn’t it be better to fast walk to burn these off?

Better still; use the low reps to build muscle, which will

elevate your metabolism and burn more calories (less fat).

Vegetarians can’t build muscle.

Yes they can! Strength training with supplementation of

soy Protein Isolate has shown to increase solid bodyweight.

Studies have shown that athletic performance is not impaired

by following a meat free diet, and people strength training

and consuming only soy protein isolate as a protein source

were able to gain lean muscle mass.

Strength Training will make you look masculine.

If it is not you’re intention to bulk up from strength training

you won’t. Putting on muscle is a long hard slow process.

Your strength-training regime coupled with quality food will

determine how much you will bulk up. To bulk up you also require

more food. Women don’t produce enough testosterone to allow

for muscular growth as large as men.

By working out you can eat what ever you want to.

Of course you can eat whatever you want, if you don’t care

how you want to look. Working out does not give you an open license

to consume as many calories as you want. Although you will

burn more calories if you workout than someone who doesn’t,

you still need to balance your energy intake with you energy

expenditure.

If you take a week off you will lose most of your gains.

Taking one or two weeks off occasionally will not harm your

training. By taking this time off every eight to ten weeks

in between strength training cycles it has the habit of refreshing you and

to heal those small niggling injuries. By having longer layoffs

you do not actually lose muscle fibres, just volume

through not training, any size loss will be quickly re-gained.

By eating more protein I can build bigger muscles.

Building muscle mass involves two things, progressive overload

to stimulate muscles beyond their normal levels of resistance

and eating more calories than you can burn off. With all the

hype about high protein diets lately and because muscle is made

of protein, it’s easy to believe that protein is the best fuel

for building muscle, however muscles work on calories which

should predominately be derived from carbohydrates.

If I’m not sore after a workout, I didn’t work out hard enough.

Post workout soreness is not an indication of how good the

exercise or strength training session was for you. The fitter

you are at a certain activity, the less soreness you will

experience after. As soon as you change an exercise, use a

heavier weight or do a few more reps you place extra stress

on that body part and this will cause soreness.

Resistance training doesn’t burn fat.

Nothing could not be further from the truth. Muscle is a

metabolically active tissue and has a role in increasing

the metabolism. The faster metabolism we have the quicker

we can burn fat. Cardio exercise enables us to burn

calories whilst exercising but does little else for

fat loss afterwards.

Weight training enables us to burn calories whilst

exercising but also helps us to burn calories whilst

at rest. Weight training encourages muscle growth

and the more lean muscle mass we possess, the more

fat we burn though an increased and elevated metabolism.

No pain no gain.

This is one myth that hangs on and on. Pain is your body

signalling that something is wrong. If you feel real

pain during a workout, stop your workout and rest.

To develop muscle and increase endurance you may need

to have a slight level of discomfort, but that’s not

actual pain.

Taking steroids will make me huge.

Not true, strength training and correct nutrition will

grow muscle. Taking steroids without training will not

make you muscular.

Most steroids allow faster muscle growth through greater

recovery, while others help increase strength which

allows for greater stress to be put onto a muscle.

Without food to build the muscle or training to stimulate

it nothing will happen. Most of the weight gain seen

with the use of some steroids is due to water

retention and is not actual muscle.

Strength training won’t work your heart.

Wrong!! Strength training with short rest periods will

increase your heartbeat well over a hundred beats

per minute. For example, performing a set of breathing

squats and you can be guaranteed that your heart will

be working overtime and that your entire cardiovascular

system will be given a great overall body workout.

Any intensive weightlifting routine that lasts for

20 minutes or more is a great workout for your heart

and the muscles involved.

I can gain muscle and lose fat at the same time.

Wrong. Only a few gifted people with superb genetics

can increase muscle size while not putting on body fat.

But for the average hard gainer, they have to increase

their muscle mass to its maximum potential and then cut

down their body fat percentage to achieve the desired shape.

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8 Proven Strategies For Maximum Muscle Gains

There is so much conflicting information out there when it comes to the topic of building muscle, and sometimes it can be very difficult to know where to start. If you’re an average beginner looking for some basic guidelines to follow in the gym, the following 8 points will start you off on the right track.

1) Train With Weights and Focus On Compound, Free Weight Movements.

If you want to make solid, noteworthy gains in muscle size and strength, you absolutely must train with free weights and focus on basic, compound exercises. A compound exercise is any lift that stimulates more than one muscle group at a time. Examples of these lifts are the squat, deadlift, bench press, chin up, barbell row, overhead press, dip and lunge. Compound movements allow you to handle the most weight and will stimulate the greatest amount of total muscle fibers.

2) Be Prepared To Train Hard.

One of the biggest factors that separates those who make modest gains from those who make serious gains is their level of training intensity. In order to stimulate your muscle fibers to their utmost potential, you must be willing to take every set you perform in the gym to the point of muscular failure.

Muscular Failure: The point at which no further repetitions can be completed using proper form.

Sub-maximal training intensity will leave you with sub-maximal results, plain and simple.

3) Track Your Progress In The Gym From Week To Week.

Our bodies build muscle because of an adaptive response to the environment. When you go to the gym, you break down your muscle fibers by training with weights. Your body senses this as a potential threat to its survival and will react accordingly by rebuilding the damaged fibers larger and stronger in order to protect against any possible future threat. Therefore, in order to make continual gains in muscle size and strength, you must always focus on progressing in the gym from week to week. This could mean performing 1 or 2 more reps for each exercise or adding more weight to the bar. Keep a detailed training log to track your progress as your strength increases over time.

4) Avoid Overtraining.

Overtraining is your number one enemy when it comes to building muscle size and strength. When most people begin a workout program, they are stuck with the misguided notion that more is better. They naturally assume that the more time they spend in the gym, the better results they will achieve. When it comes to building muscle, nothing could be farther from the truth! If you spend too much time in the gym, you will actually take yourself farther away from your goals rather than closer to them. Remember, your muscles do not grow in the gym; they grow out of the gym, while you are resting and eating. Recovery is absolutely vital to the muscle growth process. If you don’t provide your body with the proper recovery time in between workouts, your muscles will never have a chance to grow.

5) Eat More Frequently.

The main area where most people fail miserably on their muscle-building mission is on the all-too important task of proper nutrition. Training with weights is only half of the equation! You break down your muscle fibers in the gym, but if you don’t provide your body with the proper nutrients at the proper times, the muscle growth process will be next to impossible. You should be eating anywhere from 5-7 meals per day, spaced every 2-3 hours in order to keep your body in an anabolic, muscle-building state at all times. Each meal should consist of high quality protein and complex carbohydrates.

6) Increase Your Protein Intake.

Of the 3 major nutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fats) protein is without a doubt the most important for those who are looking to gain muscle size and strength. Protein is found in literally every single one of the 30 trillion cells that your body is made up of and its main role is to build and repair body tissues. Without sufficient protein intake, it will be physically impossible for your body to synthesize a significant amount of lean muscle mass. If your body were a house, think of protein as the bricks. A general guideline is to consume 1-1.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight each day from high quality sources such as fish, poultry, eggs, beef, milk, peanut butter and cottage cheese.

7) Increase Your Water Intake.

If you want a simple, easy and highly effective way to maximize your muscle gains, drinking more water is it. Water plays so many vital roles in the body and its importance cannot be overstated. In fact, your muscles alone are made up of 70% water! Not only will drinking more water cause your muscles to appear fuller and more vascular, but it will also increase your strength as well. Research has shown that merely a 3-4% drop in your body’s water levels can impact muscle contractions by 10-20%! Aim to consume 0.6 ounces for every pound of bodyweight each day for optimal gains.
8) Be Consistent!

Consistency is everything. Those who make the greatest gains in muscular size and strength are the ones who are able to implement the proper techniques on a highly consistent basis. Simply knowing is not enough, you must apply!

Building muscle is a result of the cumulative effect of small steps. Sure, performing 1 extra rep on your bench press will not make a huge difference to your overall results, and neither will consuming a single meal. However, over the long haul, all of those extra reps you perform and all of those small meals you consume will decide your overall success. If you work hard and complete all of your muscle-building tasks in a consistent fashion, all of those individual steps will equate to massive gains in overall size and strength.

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Your Weight In Muscle

You probably have heard that muscle weighs more than fat. Many people notice a small weight gain when they begin lifting weights consistently. As a general rule, if you lift weights 2 to 3 times a week, you can gain 1 pound of muscle per month for about 6 months. After that, the rate of increase slows down as you start to reach your genetic potential. For the same reason, you will make a lot of progress on weight progression at the beginning, but the longer you lift; your progression will lessen because you are reaching your genetic potential.

Don’t be alarmed at the extra pounds of weight from weight training because it is well worth the effort. For every 3 pounds of muscle you build, research shows you increase your resting metabolic rate by about 7 percent. For example, if your body burns 1,200 calories per day (not counting exercise or any other movement), you would burn an extra 84 calories per day with those 3 extra pounds of muscle.

Many women have a difficult time outgrowing 2-3 pound dumbbell weights, because they are afraid that if they increase the weight they will bulk up. If you are happy with the strength and appearance of your muscles, you can do a maintenance program with 5 pound weights. However, if you want more strength, you could progress to 8 or 10 pound weights and still not bulk up. Using heavier weights can increase muscle size, but it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get bulky. Women don’t naturally have enough of the hormone, testosterone, required to build huge muscles, and even if you could bulk up, you’d have to use significantly heavier weights.

Another option to tone muscle is to increase your repetitions instead of increasing weight. A high-repetition/light-weight program will develop muscle tone and increase strength and endurance without significantly increasing muscle size.

I like to tell my clients to not just go through the motion when lifting weights. I use the word “squeeze” a lot to describe the contraction of the muscle you should be focusing on. Think about the muscle you are working and squeeze or contract it as you are lifting. You will get a lot more benefit for your efforts if you squeeze the muscle on the lift rather than just raising and lowering the weight without focusing on the muscle.

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The Role Of Repetitions In Your Muscle Building Program

Repetitions are the basic building blocks of any strength or muscle building program but it is something that many lifters take for granted. How often do you see people at the gym speed through their reps, breathe haphazardly or fail to complete each rep correctly from a technical perspective? There is much more to the simple rep than meets the eye.

The first thing to note is that a repetition consists of three elements – namely lower, pause and lift. The speed at which this is achieved depends on the desired outcome, but to maximize muscle growth a slow, controlled tempo is required. The process should never be rushed, jerky or bouncy but instead should be controlled and smooth.

The second consideration relates to how many reps need to be performed. Once again, this depends on what you hope to achieve but you can use the following as a basic rule of thumb:

1. A single repetition maximum (1RM) increases muscle strength.

2. A six to eight repetition maximum increases muscle size.

3. A higher number of repetitions will have more effect on muscle endurance and little impact on size or strength.

Your aim therefore should be to complete six to eight reps of a load equivalent to 75-80% of your 1RM. This will maximize your muscle building potential, provided you complete each lift with perfect form in a smooth controlled manner.

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