Intensity Part IV: Good ol' Drop Sets

Drop Sets.... Some gym goers cringe at the term. They can be down right brutal. I actually enjoy them and incorporate them into my training regularly. A drop set is done by doing an exercise until failure and as soon as failure is reached, you drop the weight and continue until you reach failure again. You can really improvise with drop sets. You can drop once, twice, or as many times as you feel necessary. You can also vary the amount of weight that you drop each time. Of course the more weight dropped the more additional reps you will be able to accomplish and vice-versa.

I tend to drop twice and drop 30% each time. For instance lets say I bench 225 lbs 10 times and couldn't do an 11th rep. I would immediately drop the weight by 65 lbs and crank out as many reps as I could (That would be 160 lbs or 225-65). After reaching failure a second time I drop the weight again. This time by 45 lbs so I am now lifting 115 (160-45), and I continue until I fail again. After two drop sets 115 lbs feels like 500! As you can see it is very important to use a spotter when trying drop sets with bench press, squat, etc. It can be very dangerous otherwise.

Drop sets are one of the best ways I know to reach a maximum pump. Drop Sets flood the muscle with blood. Your veins pop out and your muscle is so tight that you fear your skin might rip at any second. To most people, that would sound scary, but to a regular weight trainer it is what we go to the gym for! Check out this blog post from "An Omnipotent Blog" for tips on incorporating these drop set techniques into a routine. Good luck with drops setting. Check

ENERFIT Burn Rate

A hard body doesn't do you much good if you have layers of fat covering it up. Be sure to check out the ENERFIT Burn Rate calculator at ENERFIT Running. Your Burn Rate is simply the difference between your caloric intake and your caloric output. It takes a cumulative positive Burn Rate of 3500 calories to lose one pound so you can find out what you would need to do to lose, say 10 pounds of body fat. Pretty cool. Speaking of body fat, please check out this press release for ENERFIT. It contains some jaw dropping statistics about how fat we have become as a nation. I hope you find it interesting. Tomorrow I will discuss drop sets as I am off to the gym to do a bunch of them. Drop sets are a great way to really define the muscle.

Workout Intensity Part III: Pre-Exhaust

Last Friday I mentioned how working opposite body parts together can help generate lots of workout intensity. Today I thought I would talk about one of my new favorite training techniques; pre-exhaust. Pre-Exhaust refers to fatiguing a muscle with an isolation or single joint exercise prior moving on to a compound or multi-joint exercise. For example, on a day when you are training the chest, as I did yesterday, you might complete a set of light, concentrated dumbbell flyes until failure or close to failure, pumping as much blood into the pecs as possible before moving on to a compound movement like barbell bench press. This way, you will fatigue the chest before your assisting muscles such as the delts and triceps during the barbell bench press. Once the chest is fatigued, your delts and tri's can act as a "spotter" to help you with a few forced reps allowing muscle hypertrophy in the chest so it can grow harder, bigger, and stronger. Pre-exaust is a great way for someone who trains alone to reach the proper level of muscle fatigue to enduce body changes. Good luck with Pre-Exhaust!