The following weight training advice is taken from Chapter 50: Tips and Notes for Advanced Trainees from The Ultimate Guide To Male Enhancement.
Edited for content
The Distilled Routine
As of the writing of this book, my own personal training endeavors have spanned about 30 years and included many different forms of exercise. While there’s no one magic routine which works best for everyone, I’d like to outline some advanced principles I think apply well to very advanced trainees.
There are many different ways of increasing the intensity and effectiveness of your workouts, and as you advance in your training, you’ll need to find ways of going beyond standard training methods if you wish to keep up the momentum of your gains. This will allow you to offset the effect of diminishing returns from your training.
The challenge comes from balancing intensity and volume of your training with your recuperative abilities.
Over time, I’ve come to find not only is it possible for you to pare down your workouts to the mere essentials to maximize recovery and training efficiency, but this practice may actually lead to increased gains!
Before we proceed with the routine, I felt it was necessary to include this chapter for veteran trainees have found their latest training efforts stunted by a combination of hitting their recuperative ceilings and other factors which can interfere with training– such as accumulated injuries. Many injuries veteran trainees suffer, may stem from reckless training done earlier in the trainee’s history. In my own case, I was very big on training through pain in order to achieve my goals. This has resulted in my having to omit certain movements and practices in my own training in order for these injuries to stop recurring.
While it is possible to overcome obstacles like the above, they involve switching mentalities from merely training hard to training smart. As an advanced trainee, you HAVE to be honest with yourself and learn to omit or train around certain practices or movements which cause recurring injuries.
Methods to Increase Intensity While Minimizing Volume
To summarize the routine below, what I discovered was much of the volume of training normally goes to warm up or preparation for the heaviest sets. While the preparation should not be omitted, it CAN be made more efficient. For intensity, I’ve found methods like the following help to increase the intensity of your training while minimizing the volume.
● The Rest Pause Technique – You do a few reps with a heavy weight, then rack it for a short period when you hit fatigue; you resume after a very short break to try and crank out one to two more reps. This is continued until no more reps are possible
● Partials – You perform only a partial range of motion during an exercise– depending on the range, you can usually use much heavier weights than you could with standard sets, or you can target a sticking point on a particular portion of the range of motion
● Supersets/Flip Flop Sets – Typically, supersets involve performing one exercise immediately after the other. This can be done for singular body parts, but also beneficial when you use them for antagonistic or unrelated body parts. This method not only increases intensity, but when done for antagonistic/unrelated body parts, it
has the effect of trimming your overall workout time. A Flip Flop set is similar to supersets, except the time in between exercises doesn’t necessarily have to be very brief.
● Timing Rest Between Sets – If you’re going for strength and power, you’ll normally need more rest between sets than if you were training for size, endurance, or other aspects. Still, you might want to keep track of the time you take between sets and see where you can trim it, so it’s not excessive. While you do want to recuperate between sets, you do not want the rest to be so excessive; so you cool down and/or the quality of your training suffers.
PNF
Volume training does have its place in training, especially if you’re after pure size. The more intense your training is though, the more you’ll have to cut back on your volume in order to allow for full recuperation.
The Distilled Routine uses some variants of the above–described methods, but with certain exceptions. As an example, while the rest pause method works well, the drawback comes from racking the weight and having to unrack it to continue. While this in and of itself can help you to develop functional strength, it does detract a bit from the momentum of your training. The solution in the Distilled Routine is to perform the most intense sets (especially in the latter portions of the training cycle) in “breather” style.
Here’s an example of this breather or prolonged set style training using the squat. If you wanted to do a set of breather squats, you’d pick a weight you’d normally do for ten reps on a typical set, but you’d do twenty instead. You do this by performing your standard ten reps, then (while remaining standing with the weight on your back) you pause to take several deep breaths, and you’d then proceed to crank out a few more reps. By the time you get to your final reps, chances are you’ll have to take many frequent pauses just to catch your breath and to allow some of the fatigue to dissipate. The training effect of one twenty–rep breather set may be enough to offset a full typical quadriceps workout.
Now, because there’s a drastic omission in warm up sets, it’s vital you warm up prior to your weight training session in order to be very thorough. I also suggest finishing most body parts with a PNF style stretch in order to help put a final stretch on the muscular fascia.
A PNF stretch for specific body parts involves a slow passive stretch for ten seconds, contracting in the stretched position for six seconds, then stretching again for five to ten seconds.
Sample Format:
Monday:
Quads– Leg extensions: 1×20, Full Squats– 1×15, 1×6–8
Flip Flop sets
Hams– Leg curls– 2×15–20
The exercise order is as follows for above: leg extensions > leg curls > full squats (1×15)> leg curls > full squats (1×6–8)
The terminology of “breather” training is courtesy of the author of “Super Squats”.
For a great resource of exercise description images and videos please visit EverKenetic.com.