Written by Ron Harris
23 December 2020

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12 Tips for Maximum Muscle Growth

Intensity Techniques for Bigger Muscles

 

By Ron Harris

 

Oh no, not another one of these articles about the same old intensity techniques! Fear not, loyal MD readers. Training is my obsession, and I am forever researching and experimenting with new and more effective ways to stimulate muscle growth. With that in mind, here are my favorites. There are a couple in here I’m sure you’re familiar with, but I promise many of these will be fresh and new to you. Start trying them out immediately and I’m confident you will see results!

 

Partial Reps

 

Partial reps are used for many purposes. In powerlifting, lifters will work a certain segment of the lift/rep they are weaker in, such as the lockout or the bottom. We bodybuilders can use partial reps to extend sets past the point of standard momentary muscular failure. Here’s one example. Let’s say you’re doing lat pulldowns with 200 pounds on the stack for 10 reps. You pull the bar to just a couple of inches above your clavicles on each rep, and mightily struggle to get that 10th rep. There’s no way you can get another one. Not all the way down, that is. You will still be able to pull the bar about halfway down, to around your eyeline level, for another three to five reps. When you can’t do that, you could still get a few more very short reps in the stretch position of the rep. Right there, you took a set that would have wrapped up at 10 reps and forced another six to 10 additional reps out of it. Your lats are screaming from the lactic acid flooding them, and the tight pump rushes in the moment you take your grasp off the bar. You can use partial reps on almost any exercise once you figure out which part of the rep is still possible once you’ve failed with a full range of motion. For many movements, it will be near the stretch position. On presses for the chest or shoulders, the few inches shy of lockout will be that sweet spot. The point is, partial reps can be an excellent tool to intensity your sets.  

 

Static Holds

 

Static holds are a great technique that never really caught on, despite being used and mentioned many times by the late Mr. Universe and father of Heavy Duty training, Mike Mentzer. Maybe they just don’t sound very demanding. You just hold the weight, that’s it? Give them a try on something so seemingly innocuous as a preacher curl machine to get a sense of what they offer. You can do them alone, but preferably with a training partner so the “holds” are unexpected. Pick a weight you can do 10 reps with. Do those 10 reps. Now, pick a point in the range of motion. Let’s say it’s about a third of the way up from the bottom stretch. Get into that position and hold it for a count of 10. Have your spotter bring the handles up so you’re halfway up, or cheat it up there yourself, and hold it for another 10 seconds. Finally, get into the fully contracted position for your biceps, and hold that for as long as possible. Once you can’t maintain that contracted position, fight the negative and strive to lower the weight as slowly as you can. You’ve just dramatically magnified the intensity of that set of machine curls. Static holds tend to work better with machines. Try using them on lateral raise machines, leg extensions, leg curls, pec flyes and lat pulldowns, though you can really apply static holds to any exercise. You can hold in one or more position along the range of motion. As I said, these are suited better to training with a partner, as they can help you into the holding position after you’ve reached failure on your set. Otherwise, you might have to give yourself a few seconds to regain the strength to do that on your own.

 

Weighted Stretches

 

John Parrillo was espousing the benefits of aggressive, intense stretching nearly 30 years ago, and it later become one of the components of Dante Trudel’s DC Training. The idea is to stretch a muscle under load while it’s fully pumped, with the goal of breaking up the tough connective tissue called fascia that encases all skeletal muscles. For instance, after training back, you would strap yourself on to a chinning bar and hang for 90-120 seconds with anywhere from 50 to 100 pounds or more hanging from your waist. Obviously, caution must be exercised in a scenario like that to avoid shoulder injury. Both Parrillo and Trudel prescribed stretching the pecs by getting into the bottom stretch position of a dumbbell flye with heavy dumbbells and holding that stretch. Shoulders are stretched leaning forward with your arms behind you with an underhand grip on a barbell as in a “skin the cat” stretch used by gymnasts. The same stretch with an overhand grip will be effective for the biceps. In those two cases, your bodyweight alone is used. For the hamstrings, you hold the bottom position of a Romanian deadlift. The take-home point here is that these loaded stretches are painful but may very well help your muscles expand. These are very different and far more intense than traditional passive stretching, which is geared more toward maintaining or improving flexibility. These stretches hurt, and they are meant to get you growing.

 

Rest-pause

 

Rest-pause has been around for many decades and was best promoted by Mike Mentzer. DC Training took it to another, more quantifiable level by having you record the number of reps you got with your rest-pause sets so that you had to beat it next time. Once you surpassed a certain prescribed number of total reps, you would add a little weight and start the process over. For instance, let’s say you are doing a rest-pause set on the Hammer Strength incline press machine with four 45-pound plates on each side. You get eight reps. Take 10 breaths, and go again. You get four reps on the second round, then take 10 more breaths. On the third and final round of the set, you fail at two reps (partial reps don’t count). That was 16 reps. If the range you are supposed to be working in for these is 15 reps, next time you would add a little weight, maybe 5 more pounds to each side, and start over. The goal over time is to be able to handle more weight, as Dante strongly feels this is the main key to adding muscle mass. Many thousands of DC devotees have sworn by it, including top 212 pro David Henry, who used it for many years, and the massive Dusty Hanshaw. Rest-pause really boils down to doing more reps with any given weight. It’s not suited well for certain compound movements where technique would break down, such as squats, deadlifts or the bench press. It’s perfect for almost any machine or cable movement, and plenty of exercises with dumbbells like lateral raises or curls. I recommend three “rounds” similar to what I described above, and I wouldn’t choose a weight you can’t do at least six to seven reps with in the first round.

 

Drop Sets

 

I’m sure you’ve all used drop sets in your workouts, so let me just get right to how to make them work more effectively for you. One key is to select the appropriate resistance to “drop” to. You don’t want to pick a weight that’s so heavy you can barely get another rep, nor do you want one that allows for another 20 reps. Unless, of course, you’re on a leg press and really want to put the blowtorch to your thighs. In most cases, the second part of a drop set should be nearly equal in reps to the first part. If you did 10 reps of lateral raises with 40-pound dumbbells, going to 35s right away would probably only allow for three to four more reps at best. Likewise, a pair of 20s would see you getting about 15 reps. Try a pair of 25s or 30s, and you would likely come close to 10 reps. Think of drop sets as being the same as forced reps on your own. You wouldn’t want your partner/spotter helping either too much or not enough, so that should be how you determine your weight reduction in a drop set too. Another tip for drop sets is to not bother doing them on plate-loading movements unless you have a spotter or training partner to help you strip plates. If you have to get up and do it all yourself, too much time goes by before you get back down and continue the set.

 

Up and Down the Rack

 

Up and down the rack sets are meant to be performed with dumbbells, and they’re only suited for two exercises: curls and lateral raises. In one of the old “Battle for the Olympia” tapes from the ‘90s, Ronnie Coleman demonstrated a brutal set of lateral raises that used every pair of dumbbells on the rack going up from 15s to 50s, then all the way back down in reverse order. These are different and a lot tougher than simply starting heavy and going down. You do have to pace yourself and not go quite to failure on your sets on the way up the rack in weight, otherwise you’ll never complete the entire sequence. Even then, it will take you a few tries to figure out how many pairs you should use and which ones. I could sit here and tell you that you must do five sets of 10-12 reps with increasing weight, taking zero rest before going back down with four sets using the same dumbbells you did on the way up. But that wouldn’t be best for everyone. Some of you would get a great pump using just three pairs of dumbbells, while other people might need four to six pairs going up and the same pairs down to achieve the ultimate pump. If you work hard enough, you would never need to do more than two of these sequences in a given workout. If you do decide to try this technique with other exercises, your best bet is to use machines or cables with selector stacks so you can simply move a pin to change the weight.

 

Stationary Supersets

 

I am a huge fan of supersets. The only problem in doing them at commercial gyms is that you usually entail tying up two pieces of equipment at once. If the gym is even moderately crowded, you always risk someone plopping down on one of those while you’re using the other. It sure can be awkward trying to explain the whole “Excuse me, I’m supersetting” thing. That’s why I prefer supersets that can be done in one place, preferably with the same machine, barbell or pair of dumbbells. A few examples would be front squats to squats, seated dumbbell curls or lateral raises to standing ones, reverse barbell curls to barbell curls, wide-grip lat pulldowns with an overhand grip to pulldowns using a close hand spacing and underhand grip, and underhand to overhand cable extensions/pushdowns. All of those can be performed in one spot without needing to drag any equipment anywhere or have a training partner standing guard over a piece of equipment like a parking space at the mall on Christmas Eve. The other major benefit to stationary supersets is how fast you’re able to get into the second movement. Usually it’s only a matter of standing up or changing your grip.

 

Intense Flexing

 

If you train at Planet Fitness, where flexing in general is frowned upon by management, this one might not be practical. For everyone else, it’s time to get your pose on. The aforementioned John Parrillo advocates pumping the muscle with your weight-training exercise, flexing that same muscle hard right away, and then getting into an aggressive stretch. Bodybuilders of the Golden Era all the way through the end of the 1980s believed that intensely flexing the muscles produced a denser, more detailed look. I bet those of you who compete have proven this without knowing it. You favor one of your quadriceps in the abdominals and thigh pose. That’s the quad you lock out your knee and squeeze for dear life every time you practice your posing. When you’re in contest condition, you will notice that quad has more detail and horizontal cross-striations than the other one. That’s not a coincidence. You can put this principle into practice at every workout, either choosing to flex that body part for a few seconds after every set, or else waiting until you’ve finished training it completely and then flexing the shit out of it for 90-120 seconds. I do find that following that up immediately with stretching is the best course of action. But if you thought posing and flexing was just for showing off, you’re wrong! You can help use it to build more muscle and get a more detailed look to those muscles too.

 

Dual-tempo Sets

 

Who would ever imagine that something so simple as changing your rep speed could turn a regular set into an inferno of intensity? Even on paper, it doesn’t sound so tough. Let’s take a machine chest press, for example. Select a weight you can do about 10 good reps with but slow them down a little. That will probably see you nearing failure around rep seven. At that point, speed up your reps and go as fast as you can, taking care not to bounce out of the bottom stretch position. You should be able to get another six to eight reps that way. You can put this technique into practice on almost any exercise, doing reps slower than the standard tempo, then faster. The key is to not take the first part of the set to failure. You should feel like you have another two to three reps in you still before you pick up the pace.

 

Angle/Grip Change Mid-set

 

This one is similar to stationary supersets, but a bit more flexible. In all cases, you will move from a more difficult way of performing an exercise or using a piece of equipment to one that’s easier, so you can continue with the set. We already mentioned one with lat pulldowns, going from a wide overhand grip to a closer underhand grip. You can also try close-grip bench presses to bench presses, regular dumbbell curls to hammer curls, wide-stance leg presses or squats to shoulder width, or lat pulldowns with a vertical torso to leaning back away from the stack and pulling at an angle between a pulldown and a row. There are many variations on this theme you can try. One of the most intense ways to do barbell curls I’ve ever tried involves changing hand spacing twice. I start off with my hands very wide on the bar (I prefer a cambered EZ bar) for eight to 10 reps, then switch to a very close grip for eight to 10 more reps and finish off with a standard grip. Oh, the burn! It was all with the same weight, but the difficulty level was unique for all three hand spaces on the bar.

 

Sevens

 

Finally, I tip my hat to the Pro Creator, Hany Rambod, for this technique taken from his FST-7 Training system. If you’ve experienced difficulty getting a pump in any body part, Sevens are the answer to your prayers. As the name implies, Sevens are nothing more than seven sets of an exercise performed with just 30 seconds rest in between. It usually takes some fiddling around to find the right weight. If you chose correctly, the first two to three sets aren’t very challenging at all, and you will think you should have gone heavier. By sets four and five, you suddenly realize that notion was not warranted. The sets are getting harder to complete. The seventh and final set should require maximum effort to finish. By that point, you will have done about 70-100 reps of an exercise in less than five minutes. Your target muscle or muscle group should be pumped up like a balloon. Personally, I find these are best done as the final exercise for a body part. Otherwise, you either won’t feel like doing anything else for them, or you’ll be too fatigued to do justice to the rest of the workout even if you’re determined to.

           

That’s it – some nasty techniques to blow up the intensity of your workouts. Use them judiciously, meaning don’t use them all at every workout! Applied tactically when needed, they can definitely aid you in your quest to be a bigger and better you.

 

Ron Harris got his start in the bodybuilding industry during the eight years he worked in Los Angeles as Associate Producer for ESPN’s “American Muscle Magazine” show in the 1990s. Since 1992 he has published nearly 5,000 articles in bodybuilding and fitness magazines, making him the most prolific bodybuilding writer ever. Ron has been training since the age of 14 and competing as a bodybuilder since 1989. He lives with his wife and two children in the Boston area. Facebook

 

 

 

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