Advanced Exercises (Length)- Repetitions, Reaching a Plateau, and Creating a Routine (from The Ultimate Guide To Male Enhancement)

The following is a chapter taken from the book: The Ultimate Guide To Male Enhancement.

Edited for content

Chapter 24: Advanced Exercises (Length)

Once you’ve successfully completed the beginner’s phase, you’ll be ready for the advanced routines. As an advanced trainee, you’ll be more qualified to discern when you need to take rest days and when you need to change your routine.  As stated in the Basic Routine, you should usually take a 1 week rest every 4–6 weeks or so; but you may find your own individual recuperative abilities, schedule and health may dictate otherwise. This is also a phase for focusing on refinement, specialization and shaping.

Repetitions

Repetitions, intensity and frequency should be your goal to make each workout just a little more intense than the last.  I generally recommend increasing the rep count (volume) by no more than 1–2% each subsequent workout. Don’t be afraid to stay at the same level of repetitions and focus on increasing intensity instead. You’ll likely get a better workout that way.

Reaching a Plateau

A plateau can be defined as reaching a point where you no longer make any gains. You may even see a decline in penile vigor if you attempt to train through a plateau.

To start gaining again, you should take a short rest and change your routine. Upon resuming training after a rest, it’s a good idea to start a little easier than where you left off (refer to Charting Your Progress for details).

Creating a Routine

In addition to the advanced routines listed here, you can create your own routines using any of the advanced exercises.

A good DIY advanced routine will consist of:

● A thorough warm up
● One good girth exercise
● One good length exercise
● Stamina work
● A thorough warm/cool down

When creating your own routines, I recommend sticking to one quality exercise per area worked (e.g. “girth”) unless you’re using supersets or other advanced exhaustion techniques. Pick the exercises which you feel work best for you.
My reasoning behind this is simple– the penis can be easily overtrained. The goal should be to work the penis as thoroughly as needed and no more. Doing an endless number of exercises indicates:
1. You’re not doing the right exercise if you need to do so many.
2. You’re not using enough intensity.

The Distilled [Weight Training] Routine (from The Ultimate Guide To Male Enhancement)

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.

The Ultimate Guide to Male Enhancement

What Is Pre-Exhaust Training – How Bodybuilders Prep for Workouts

This Pre-Lift Training Technique Can Help You Build More Muscle

If packing on mass is your workout goal, try this approach before your big compound lifts.

By Trevor Thieme C.S.C.S. Published: Sep 12, 2022

This article is a repost which originally appeared on Men’s Health.

Edited for content. The opinions expressed in this article may not reflect the opinions of this site’s editors, staff or members.

Our Takeaways:

· Pre-exhaust training is a good way to bring up lagging body parts.

· Supersets can be used with good effect to increase training efficiency.

· Pre-exhaust training ensures all muscles involved are adequately fatigued.

This is Your Quick Training Tip, a chance to learn how to work smarter in just a few moments so you can get right to your workout.

EVERY LIFTER—from grizzled six-day-per-week bodybuilders to trainees on three-day splits with under a year of training under their weigh belt—hits a plateau at some point. So you shouldn’t feel like your gym life is ending when you hit yours. They key is to find the best way to break through.

Maybe you’re stuck because you’ve been hammering the same workout program for too long. Perhaps your periodization plan isn’t quite periodized enough. Or maybe everything is on point, but constantly targeting your largest muscle groups with compound exercises has exposed a critical weakness: the relative strength of your assistive muscles (e.g., the triceps in the bench press or the hamstrings and glutes in the squat). If that’s the case—and the more seasoned you are, the more likely it is—consider incorporating “pre-exhaustion training” into your fitness program.

What Is Pre-Exhaustion Training?

Pre-exhaustion training is essentially a superset strategy, but instead of pairing exercises that target two different muscle groups, you pair moves that target the same one. First, you hit the muscle in question with an isolation exercise, and then with a compound one.

Classic examples include performing the dumbbell fly or cable crossover before the bench press, or the leg extension before the squat. In so doing, you increase the odds that the target muscle doesn’t outlast the supporting ones in the compound movement, and thus the set doesn’t end prematurely and the adaptation stimulus for all of those muscles isn’t compromised.

At least, that’s the theory. But in this case theory is paramount, because science is staunchly against pre-exhaustion training for all of the wrong reasons.

Science vs. Reality in Pre-Exhaustion Training

Many of the studies that discount the benefits of pre-exhaustion training suggest that targeting a muscle first with an isolation exercise decreases activity in that muscle during the subsequent compound exercise. But here’s the thing (and the issue many studies miss): That’s the point.

The goal of pre-exhaustion training isn’t to boost muscle growth by increasing activity in the target muscle during the compound exercise; rather, it’s to boost growth in that muscle and the supporting musculature by leveling the playing field and making sure that all of the muscles involved can be worked to fatigue. Performance outcomes should be secondary.

How to Weave Pre-Exhaustion Training into Your Workouts

Pre-exhaustion training is just like it sounds—exhausting—so only use it to target one or two muscle groups per workout with one or two supersets. Any more than that and you risk overtraining—especially if you have less than a couple of years of pumping iron under your weight belt.

But if you’re an experienced lifter who’s struggling to make gains in big compound moves like the squat, bench press, and deadlift, pre-exhaustion training can help you bust out of a rut—or prevent one from happening in the first place.