Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Tips For Weight Trainers

By Brian

Making sure that all muscle fibers have been exhasuted during a given exercise is one of the difficulties that bodybuilder face. Only by pushing your muscles past their limit will you get the biggest gains.

But here is a good path to follow to try and get the most out of your muscles:

1. Restance increase - increase the resistance of the lifted weights in small increments. When you reach six to eight reps and you don't fail, that's a good number to stop at and then repeat when you can do more.

2. Change up your exercises - All the muscle fibers in your body must be trained for maximum gain. Introducing a new exercise or changing the angle of a previous one (incline press etc) will help you achieve this.

3. Reduce the amount of rest between intervals - The level of intensity will increase if you give your muscles less time to recover before exposing them to more work.

4. Pre-exhaustion - when an exercise involves two or more muscles the weakest will prevent you from working the primary muscle to failure. The answer is to first isolate and tire the primary muscle before immediately moving to another exercise that works the set of muscles to failure.

5. Do supersets - supersets are done by doing two exercises without any rest in between them that focus on the same muscle groups but are different types of exercise. This will fully utilize all the muscle fibers in that muscle group.

6. Use partial reps - at the point of failure you will not be able to complete the full range of movement for a given exercise. Completing a partial rep that uses only a segment of the lift will still work your muscles beyond the point of failure. This technique is especially useful to advanced bodybuilders as it allows them to increase intensity without adding extra routines that could cause overtraining.

7. Use isometric contractions - this involves holding the weight still at the point of failure to stimulate a static contraction in the muscle.

8. Get help from a friend - having a gym partner will help you push your body one or two more reps past your point of failure. When you are at the point of failure, your friend can assist you in doing one more rep than you normally would be able to do. - 15266

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