In an early post I spoke about the two most basic ways to increase your training intensity in the gym; increasing your resistance, and increasing the number of repetitions in your sets. Throughout your training you will encounter a number of training plateaus, which are essentially barriers to achieving your goals. In order to keep achieving results and progress in your training you need to know how to break through these plateaus, which incidentally get longer and longer the more advanced your training state. One of the most effective ways to break through these plateaus is by increasing training intensity, which can be done a number of ways.
You should by now be quite experienced with the concepts of altering your training resistance and reps, and so I won't address them directly within this article. Instead I want to talk about varying the duration of your rest between sets. The first change you can make to your workout in order to increase the intensity is to shorten your rest period by around 15%. It is quite common that training programs prescribe a 60 second break between sets. As a start, try cutting that back to just 45 seconds. You should find that the workout on the whole is considerably more intense, and more difficult to sustain the same performance levels. This is of course a natural physiological response, and your body will again adapt over time to accommodate the increased workload. It does this by increasing the muscle strength, commonly by increasing muscle size.
Once you find that your body has adapted to the shorter rest period, you can do a couple of different things. You can of course alter the resistance, the number of reps in a set, the number of sets or progress to supersets. A superset is the term given to performing to sets back to back without a rest period between them. Supersets can target the same muscle group, opposing muscle groups, or different muscle groups altogether!
Probably the most common type of superset is the one that targets the same muscle group. For example, you perform a set of barbell bicep curls followed directly by dumbbell concentration curls without a rest period. This increases the intensity twofold: firstly because of the absence of a rest period, and secondly because the bicep is already in a fatigued state from the first exercise before performing the second exercise. One of the reasons this is so popular is because it has a dramatic effect on increasing muscle size. It has been show that when a muscle has to perform work while in a fatigued state the muscle increases its size more rapidly than without this stimulus.
The next most popular is the opposing muscle group superset. For example, you perform a set of dumbbell bicep curls followed directly by a set of dumbbell triceps extensions. The intensity is increased due to the absence of a rest period, however the emphasis with this kind of superset is to promote symmetry between the muscle groups. This is exceptionally important in order to prevent chronic injuries later on. It is simply not healthy to work the 'beach muscles' such as the biceps and chest while ignoring the triceps and back muscles as you might create an asymmetry and cause a hunch back for example.
The above techniques are based on the principle of altering the rest period between your sets, and in some cases eliminating it altogether. You wouldn't superset every exercise, in the same way that you don't need to reduce the rest period between every set. The aim is to increase the intensity, which you might only need to do in the first half of your workout in order to cause increased intensity through fatigue in the later half.
Alexi has studied and worked in the health and fitness industry for over 10 years and specializes in health, lifestyle and fitness topics. Alexi has a number of websites that provide valuable information on equipment that helps you get the most out of your training sessions. One such site is Harbinger Gloves HQ. Harbinger make a great range of weight lifting gloves and you can get the low down on a variety of Harbinger gloves for men and women before you buy some.
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