No progress anymore? Have you reached a plateau? No more satisfaction after your workout? Then try the following four HIT, High-Intensity Training, techniques! Just make sure you have a partner with you to spot you and carry you out.
Warning: these techniques are intended for advanced athletes. Even this group should be careful with using these intensity-enhancing training techniques too often!
Breakdowns of Triple Dropset
This is essentially a very simple technique, but very painful to execute!
As an example exercise, I’ll use bench pressing:
- Load your normal weight onto the bar, but make sure you don’t have one plate on both sides
- Try to divide the weight into thirds (the calculation is quite simple once you get used to it)
- Now, perform a regular set. Once you can no longer perform repetitions without ‘cheating’, rack the bar, and have your training partner remove about twenty percent of the weight (hence the smaller plates!)
- Once the weight is off, start doing a set with this weight. If you executed the previous set well until you couldn’t do any more, you should only be able to manage about one or three repetitions without cheating. If you can do more, you didn’t finish the previous set properly
- Rack the bar again, and have your training partner remove another twenty percent of the weight, and immediately start another set to failure!
That was the whole triple dropset. If all went well, your chest should be burning nicely, and you won’t be able to do much more with it.
Super Slow Reps
Super Slow Reps or super slow repetitions is a method that requires mental endurance; the pain is truly unbearable!
Simply put, this is a technique where you perform the positive movement – against the weight – in 10 seconds and the negative movement in 5 seconds.
This seems simple, but it’s quite challenging. Expect to reduce the weight you normally use for an exercise by about thirty to forty percent.
Also, the number of repetitions you do in a set decreases by two or three.
This isn’t good for your ego, but it’s good for your muscles!
Bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts are not powerlifters, so we shouldn’t be concerned with the amount of weight we can lift.
Pre-exhaustion
The pre-exhaustion, also known as the pre-fatigue technique, involves doing an exercise for a single muscle, followed immediately by an exercise for the entire muscle group. This way, you tire the single muscle, then do an exercise where you also use the muscles that you didn’t use in the first exercise. These muscles aren’t exhausted yet and can handle relatively more weight than the tired muscle.
A good example is flyes followed by bench presses for the chest.
First, do a set of flyes, which trains the chest muscles in isolation.
Now immediately do a set of bench presses.
The triceps and shoulders aren’t directly trained with the flyes, so they’re still fresh enough to handle enough weight during bench pressing. Your chest muscles are now forced to assist in the bench presses, further fatiguing them.
This is also a good technique to target muscles that are problematic. The chest exercises above were a good example of this, but also the combination of lateral raises / overhead presses is fun for your shoulders.
Negative Repetitions
Negative repetitions are the epitome of intensity. Your muscles are about forty percent stronger in the negative phase of the repetition (when you slowly lower the weight back to the starting position) than in the positive phase.
If you get stronger in the negative phase, it also affects your strength in the positive phase.
Be careful in your choice of exercise for performing negatives.
Some exercises, like deadlifts and squats, are not suitable for this! Pay attention to the safety of the exercise.
There are three ways to perform negative repetitions (you’ll need one or two partners for this!):
- Two training partners lift a weight for you that is thirty to forty percent heavier than what you normally use. Then, you slowly lower the weight, and the process repeats
- After a regular set, with the help of your training partner, perform two or three slow negative repetitions
- Repetitions emphasizing the negative phase. For this, use about thirty percent less weight than usual. Perform the positive phase normally but take 8 to 10 seconds for the negative phase, emphasizing on one limb, with the other limb mainly supporting. Then do the next repetition emphasizing the other limb. This works especially well if you’re using machines (doing this with a barbell is very dangerous!)
Try out these techniques. But don’t blame me if you have trouble moving after such a workout. I’ve warned you!
