Methods And Principles Of Training Explained - Part 2

Isolate different parts of the muscle group you are working on a regular basis for specified work on weak areas and for super-detail. Doing this will allow you to develop that muscle in a more complete and balanced way. It's also easier to visualize (mind-muscle connection) small pieces of a body part working and boost intensity levels, than focusing on the entire body part. Isolation will improve your overall symmetry. The more variety you employ in terms of isolating specific pieces of an individual muscle group, the better.

Isolation Training

Isolation training is different than the isolation principle because it pulls focus out a bit and refers to isolating a specific muscle or muscle group by way of a single exercise. The squat is a good example of this. Compound movements such as the squat are great choices here. Essentially, you can think of it as a powerlifting routine. All powerlifters do for chest is bench. All they do for great leg development is squats. In order to develop a complete and balanced physique, include isolation training as part of your regimen to boost mass gains and really perfect the form of that movement to get the most out of it. Perfect form is key and oftentimes when you don't practice a movement like a powerlifter might, you don't get near as much out of it as a result.

Manipulation of Growth

General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) is the body's way of responding to prolonged stress or injury. It consists of the following three stages:

- Shock reaction

- An increase in resistance by the body to something, or an adaptation to a specific movement or apparatus

- Healing and/or exhaustion and disintegration

Resistance training is physical stress. It is a tearing down of the body to create a building up that is better the second time around. But weight training is also mentally and emotionally stressful. It is the tenuous balance between GAS responses by the body and ongoing training that yields pounds of mass. Changing routines, training differently or less, and eating and sleeping more with more rest days in between is the usual prescription for resistance in one form or another by the body. Anabolic steroids will stave off GAS and will surely speed recovery, but there's a time when you're not on them that your own body will have to adapt to stress. Learning how to do that with training that is sane is the key.

Muscle Confusion Training Principle

Muscle confusion ensures that you have variety in your workout that will produce ongoing results with few or no plateaus. Change up sets, reps, exercises, rest periods, etc. on a regular basis, even if you're training in a kind of uniform routine during a set period. Remember to train the muscle using traditional and efficient methods and movements, but also do unconventional things (within reason) to optimize mechanical strength and growth. Utilize different angles and always change up what you're doing within the same category of goal structure. Whether mass training or pre-contest training, vary exercises, reps, sets and rest times, as well as angles and methods to ensure effective hypertrophy. This will keep you motivated and mentally fresh, and keep your progress moving forward.

Negative Repetitions

The negative (or eccentric) part of any movement, is where tension is on the downside. Si in a preacher curl, after flexing, you'll be lowering weight slowly, keeping good control and tension throughout the entire range of motion. Negatives in any movement, it is debated, can create the largest gains. What they really are, is a perfect compliment to the concentric portion of the movement and a necessary part of training to build a complete and aesthetic physique. Always lower the weight slowly and under control, and bring it up, with force and power. Some people say, up in 1 second and down in 3 seconds. You can also solely do negatives by having a training partner do the positive part of the motion for you while you complete the negative. This is a great way to go if you are not as strong with a new weight you are capable of performing negative repetitions with more weight than you would normally use for the full movement. If your one rep maximum (1RM) for bench press is 200 pounds, you should have no problem doing a few negative reps with that weight for 4 or 5 reps with the aid of a training partner.

Overload Principle

Overloading your muscles into growth is what shock is all about. You can overload with increasingly higher poundages as you go. So rather than a pyramid, it's a steady progression upward. Bench press, for example, would start with 150 pounds for 10 repetitions and increase over the course of the workout, or in the scheme of the week of workouts. Increase the number of pounds you lift weekly by increasing the number of pounds by a certain percentage each week or workout. Another overload method is to decrease the amount of rest time between sets. With that, if you can bench press 150 pounds for a total of 10 repetitions, you may want to decrease the rest interval between each set, from two minutes to one and keep the weight the same.

Partial Reps

Partial reps allow you to keep going and going and going. After an initial light muscle failure, you can continue your sets by performing reps that are within a small range of the full motion. On a standing barbell curl, perform reps just within the lower half of the range or the upper half. This will surpass the momentary failure and will complete muscle exhaustion for the body part. Recommended on the final set or two in the final exercise for a body part.

Peak Contraction Principle

This is essentially holding the muscle in a contraction phase. Continuous tension on the fully contracted muscle is achieved by squeezing and contracting as hard as possible and holding it. You can use these contractions to striate muscle, recruit more fiber and give yourself a harder appearance. For example, in a preacher curl, the peak contraction principle would be squeezing the biceps up to the top until it's peaked optimally and holding it for a count of 5 seconds. Let it down slowly and repeat.

Pre-Exhaust Principle

Because many resistance exercises and routines recruit more than one muscle in one lift it's essential to ensure that muscles tire at relatively the same time. For example, when you bench you work your pecs, but you also work your triceps and delts. If triceps give out prior to the time pecs do, you need to compensate. To compensate for that you can perform a pecs-focused exercise that is isolative in nature first so that the pecs tire out around the same time as the triceps or front delts. Once you perform the bench press your pecs are already tired and the fatigue will be more in line with smaller muscle groups

Priority Principle

Prioritizing muscle groups and fibers is a technique used to develop a balanced physique. It allows work on weak areas, while also training your strong areas. Regardless of superior genetics for mass building and bodybuilding, everyone has certain areas that lag in comparison to the others even individual muscles that are not proportional to the muscle as a whole. For example, you may have a decent upper chest, but a lousy lower one.

Good rules of thumb for remedying this with priority:

- Train a lagging body part immediately after a rest day so that it is full recuperated and rested.

- Train a specific body part the weakest at the beginning of your training session to ensure strong reps and a lack of fatigue when you are trying to remedy the problem. A great example, even if you don't have lagging biceps, is training biceps right after back. Weak or not, there isn't much left since pulling exercises always require some of the biceps. That means there is hardly anything left over at the end of the training session. Train biceps instead at the beginning of a workout when you have access to maximal glycogen stores and when your mental state is refreshed.

- Train thoughtfully. Choose specific exercises and only those that will help you achieve the goals you have in mind. If your goal is a defined look, choose detailing movements, varied angles and perform them within a high rep range. Do 12 to 20 repetitions for definition. Do a 6 to 12 rep range for mass.

- Employ intensity techniques that specifically target lagging muscles or muscle groups in order to bring them up to speed.

- Perfect form is the cornerstone to all of your successes. Blasting muscles is great, but only if you are using correct form.

Dane Fletcher is the world-wide authority on bodybuilding and steroids. He has coached countless athletes all over the world. To read more of his work, please visit either www.BodybuildingToday.com or www.SteroidsToday.com

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