Stale Growth? Enter High Intensity Training
At one point or another, we all think our strength has plateaued. You know the feeling. Your bench has been going up for the past few months then all of a sudden you cannot move anymore weight. In fact you might be doing less reps of the same weight. If you have experienced this, your muscles have passed from their adaptation phase of growth and you are now experiencing the effects of over training.
I would suspect that 80 percent of the people that will read through this article are or have experienced the effects of over training in their workout regimen. “Love to lift” syndrome as I call it. Amateur and experienced lifters alike just think that being in the gym 7 days a week doing 20 sets per muscle group is the key to size. Well ask those people how long its taken them to get to whatever size they are. Likely answer is many years.
What everyone out there needs to understand is that our bodies get used to a routine. Their are specific neurological processes that I am referring to and will talk about in depth in a later article, but for now lets simplify the idea to, our bodies need to be confused if we want them to keep growing. This necessity for confusion is why all good routines offer variety in the exercises one can perform.
Think cycles. Optimally a workout cycle should last 7-9 weeks depending on your physiology. This means you workout for those 7 to 9 weeks then take a whole week off. Do not step into the gym at all. This is when your body undergoes a massive repair and recovery phase and so it is critical that your nutrition is as good if not better than it normally is. Do not believe me that taking a week off is good for you perform your own at home experiment. Go through two cycles and on one take the week off and the other do not. See if you do not come back much stronger and ready to move much more weight after the cycle where you let your body rest and recover.
High intensity training focuses on this style of rest and recovery. Many proponents, and there is an army of them, of HIT training say 3 days in the gym per week, 1 set to failure for the major muscles is all you need. This is great and yes it has been proven to work wonders but not everyone wants to just get bigger. As we talked about in our functional strength article their is more to strength than simply size. It would definitely be beneficial to work in at least 4-5 days of HIT training per entire 7-9 week cycle. It “adds to the mix” and keeps the confusion high. Have 2-3 complete cycles written out or described in some way so that you can go through them and never be stuck in any type of boring repetition.
What do I mean by have complete cycles written out, well have your workouts for each 7-9 week cycle written out. This way you can check to make sure you are changing your exercises, using new techniques, or focusing maybe on explosiveness vs size that cycle. Anything to keep it new to your body.
Here is an example of what a HIT training day looks like for those wondering:
- Dead lifts 1 x 15
- Overhead press 2 x 6~8
- Chinups 2 x 6~8
- Calf Raises 1 x 6~8
- Barbell Curls 1 x 6~8
- Shrugs 1 x 8~10
The key is to give it your all every rep, resting for a few seconds between each rep if necessary. There are many many techniques to HIT training which will be discussed in depth later but for the novice this will suffice. What you are trying to do with a HIT workout is trigger our bodies natural response to stress, the adaptive response, and then get out of the gym. Most HIT workouts are not longer than 45 minutes and some are even broken down so much to last 15 minutes per day. Look for more on this to come.
Till next time. Go hard, get big.
