Things To Note:
● The rep range is between 8-12 reps to focus on strength and hypertrophy (muscle building). This will not make you look bulky! The more muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn at rest because your metabolism will be faster which means increased weight loss.
● Consume a high protein meal within an hour or two of working out.
● The first exercise of each workout is the heavy compound move of the workout, so push yourself as hard as you can for this exercise especially.
● Use a weight that you can lift for the given number of reps, but by the last 2 reps you are really pushing yourself to lift it. If you can do more than 12 reps your weight is way too light.
● Always warm up (5-10 minutes of low intensity activity e.g. walking uphill on treadmill).
● Always stretch after a workout.
● Take a 45 seconds – 1 minute rest between each set. Try not to take longer because you want to keep your heart rate up to keep burning calories.
● Leave a day gap between full body days to recover.
How To Perform Exercises:
1. SLOWLY
The amount muscles are worked depends on how long they are under tension for ‘time under tension’.
● Your muscles can not tell how heavy a weight is, they can only tell how much energy they are being forced to exert.
● Performing exercises slowly forces your muscles to adapt. If you perform an exercise quickly, it is unlikely you are targeting the correct muscles and rather just stabilizing yourself which can lead to injuries.
● You are more able to contract the right muscles e.g. in a squat during eccentric contraction (when the muscle is lengthened – at the bottom of the movement i.e. being in squat position), when you pause you are able to connect to the glutes and feel them contracting.
● Count during a set e.g. in a squat: down 1,2,3 pause 1,2,3 up 1,2.
2. MIND TO MUSCLE CONNECTION
● A ton of research has been done on this, here’s the summary: if you can’t feel a particular muscle working in an exercise, chances are it’s not working.
● It may sound stupid but you need to physically imagine each muscle working in an exercise (helps if you perform it slowly) e.g. in a romanian deadlift, physically imagine your hip flexor tilting backwards and your glutes relaxing and then drive them forward tensing/contracting them and then pause standing up straight holding the barbell with your glutes still contracted for a few seconds and then repeat.
3. PREPARE TO PUSH YOUR MUSCLES
● Warm up your body with dynamic stretches like leg swings, overhead reaches and core twists to make sure you are warm, and not going to injure yourself.
● Mentally prepare yourself to push yourself. Tell yourself before you enter the gym that you are going to really try your hardest and that you’re going to be so proud of yourself when you are finished. This will create a positive habit cycle and will prepare you to go hard.
PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD
Ignore every person who has ever told you that you need to switch up your workout routine every few days to ‘shock’ your muscles. There is literally zero scientific evidence to show this, your muscles are muscles not people, they don’t know what you’re doing they just know how much they are being forced to work. Progressive overload involves doing the same exercises for a sufficient period of time changing only the intensity of the workout. This forces your muscles to work harder each time so they continue to tear, repair and grow.
So how do you implement progressive overload?
● Increase the weight – this is the most typical way of implementing progressive overload. Even just increasing the weight by a 5 lbs will force your muscles to work harder and adapt quicker. Make a note of the weight your using each workout so you don’t forget.
● Increase the volume – increasing the reps forces your body to adapt however it can cause too much muscle damage, meaning you have to take more rest days in the week so only do this for exercises that are lighter weight, higher rep like body weight, upper body or isolation exercises – avoid doing this method for compound exercises like squats and deadlifts.
● Decrease the rest time between sets – this causes you to work harder and keep your heart rate up. This method is better for endurance based exercise rather than hypertrophy (muscle building). So feel free to implement this on the lower body/HIIT superset day or upper body but not for heavy lower body days as rest time is important.