But that doesn’t mean high-rep sets have no place in your routine. Specifically, weight loads that produce muscle failure at or less than seven reps are ideal for producing strength. It’s more than an adage, it’s a fact: If you want to get stronger, you have to train heavy. Need more convincing? Unilateral training can also help expose and correct muscular weaknesses, because when you have an arm or a leg going solo, it doesn’t have the benefit of its opposing limb helping to balance the bar or press more than its share on a machine. That’s okay a few calculated cheat reps through these four weeks will pay off down the road. When training one side at a time, there’s a natural tendency to use some body english to get through a few reps. And the stronger your core grows over time, the more effective-as well as injury-free-you’re likely to be on bigger lifts such as squats, deadlifts and bench presses. In the one-arm overhead dumbbell press, for example, the imbalance in weight distribution causes your core to work overtime in an effort to stabilize your torso. In addition, unilateral training tends to maximize the number of growth-prone fast-twitch fibers that are called into play.īut regular unilateral work provides yet another advantage for building strength: core training. Consider the barbell curl: A lifter who can curl a 100-pound barbell for 10 reps can likely perform dumbbell curls with 55 or 60 pounds in each hand because of the resultant increase in muscle fiber recruitment. Research confirms that training one limb at a time forces the recruitment of more muscle fibers and produces more force, since a limb working alone requires more effort to move a weight from point A to point B than when it’s working in concert with another limb. But read on: Unilateral training is actually an excellent way to quickly boost strength. This approach might seem unproductive, since working more muscle (not less) tends to produce the most marked results in strength and mass. The first step to increasing your overall strength is getting strong one side at a time. Perform two sets of specific warm-ups before each exercise. If you can complete four or more reps, add more weight and try a second set. After those two specific warm-up sets, choose a weight you think you can handle for three reps. Your performance will provide you with a fair assessment of your strength so you can accurately measure your gains at the end of the program (Week 13).Īfter a 5-10-minute full-body warm-up, head into two lighter, high-rep sets of your first exercise-in this case, the bench press. In “Week 0”-a single workout to be performed one full week before taking on the rest of the program-devote an entire gym session to finding your three-rep max on five multijoint lifts. To know how far 12 weeks of hardcore training have taken you, you’ll need to know where you began. Dayįinding out how much weight you can move for three reps is key to this program. Complete muscular recovery from these intense sessions is essential to your ultimate success on this plan. Weight training is limited to three days a week, but if you push yourself as hard as possible during those workouts, trust us: You’ll need every minute of those four days to rest. 25% Stronger Splitįollow this split all three months of the program. It’s a 12-week, big-weight, balls-to-the-wall strength boot camp, with each four-week phase providing a different focus to keep the gains coming.Īt the end, if you’ve adhered to your training and observed proper rest and nutrition, you’ll have boosted your three-rep max on all of your major lifts by roughly 25%. If that sounds familiar, this strength training workout routine, designed and gym-tested by our fitness director and senior science editor, is for you. We want to move more weight-lots more-and we’re ready to put in the work. It’s this cacophony of iron that pushes us to push ourselves. The primitive, rep-beating grunt of fellow strength-seeking men. The seismic thud of a stacked set of dumbbells hitting the floor. The clanging of non-collared plates on a big set of squats. For us recreational enthusiasts, there are few things that provide more inspiration than the audible feats of strength that take place in our own gyms every day.
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