MetalFortress
Master Don Juan
Especially for people who are doing workouts involving low volume, high intensity, such as DC or (God forbid - heh sorry, too much time spent at bbing.com) HIT.
When you're at your last reps, use muscle tension throughout the entire body and you will end up with more strength to do more reps. Not throughout every rep, but let's take seated preacher curls for example. When your biceps are starting to struggle with reps, harden your abs. Flex your chest. Tense your glutes and hams and calves. Even flex your neck. The extra tension will add up to reps going up faster, and more reps going up before you can't do
Let's use a real world example. I have BB preacher curls as part of my DC routine, and on my workset, I picked a weight that, when I first started curling it, I didn't think I was going to even get 12 reps out of rest pausing it. I started to have difficulty around rep 6 or 7, but I remembered what I am typing now, and began tensing more and more muscle groups to grind it out better. I ended up hitting a total of 10 reps before my first rest-pause. Two rest pauses later, I ended up with 17 total reps.
This works for any exercise, compound or isolation. This is why squats are such a great exercise, because they naturally force your body into using more tension. Ditto deadlifts. If you do compounds the way most people do isolations, which is just trying to use the main targets as the lifting muscle, you're going to do WAY less reps than if you tense your whole body as if you're staking your very existence on squeezing out the last few reps. This tip is really about doing every exercise, even isolations, the same way you do compounds.
Not only does your target muscle get a tougher workout, but surrounding muscles get worked too from the extra tension, and while the bbing.com wimps are trying to achieve the peak flexion atop the premium isolation of the concentration curls with their barbie weights, you will be toughing, sweating, and grinding out as many reps as possible and growing like a weed.
When you're at your last reps, use muscle tension throughout the entire body and you will end up with more strength to do more reps. Not throughout every rep, but let's take seated preacher curls for example. When your biceps are starting to struggle with reps, harden your abs. Flex your chest. Tense your glutes and hams and calves. Even flex your neck. The extra tension will add up to reps going up faster, and more reps going up before you can't do
Let's use a real world example. I have BB preacher curls as part of my DC routine, and on my workset, I picked a weight that, when I first started curling it, I didn't think I was going to even get 12 reps out of rest pausing it. I started to have difficulty around rep 6 or 7, but I remembered what I am typing now, and began tensing more and more muscle groups to grind it out better. I ended up hitting a total of 10 reps before my first rest-pause. Two rest pauses later, I ended up with 17 total reps.
This works for any exercise, compound or isolation. This is why squats are such a great exercise, because they naturally force your body into using more tension. Ditto deadlifts. If you do compounds the way most people do isolations, which is just trying to use the main targets as the lifting muscle, you're going to do WAY less reps than if you tense your whole body as if you're staking your very existence on squeezing out the last few reps. This tip is really about doing every exercise, even isolations, the same way you do compounds.
Not only does your target muscle get a tougher workout, but surrounding muscles get worked too from the extra tension, and while the bbing.com wimps are trying to achieve the peak flexion atop the premium isolation of the concentration curls with their barbie weights, you will be toughing, sweating, and grinding out as many reps as possible and growing like a weed.
