Intensive care: how to manage your training intensity for the best gains possible

Flex, Dec, 2007 by Greg Merritt

Sweat stings your eyes as you fall back on the bench, gripping two dumbbells. You grimace and grunt, driving the weights up. One, two, three, four. A shout spills out of you as the fifth rep goes up, and again on the sixth. Gasping, you steady the quivering dumbbells and then, with a curse, let them pull your arms down before you let go. The dumbbells bounce away.

The set looked and sounded intense, but was it? Intensity is one of the most important yet least understood concepts in bodybuilding. This month, H.U.G.E.[TM] ignores the sights and sounds and goes straight for the pain barrier to explain the true meaning of intensity and how to harness it for outsized growth.

INTENSITY DEFINED Maybe you reached a new strength plateau, worked out faster or longer, added new exercises, or used techniques you'd never tried before; maybe you shouted, grimaced or sweated at your all-time greatest propensity. None of these necessarily mean you trained intensely. A personal best doesn't always push you to the max, and a faster workout certainly won't if it consists of halfhearted sets. Frequently, when volume is increased, intensity wanes; new exercises or techniques may or may not make your training harder; and all the gym sound and fury you can muster might signify nothing.

Bodybuilding intensity requires short-term exertion. Training with maximum intensity is training with maximum effort. For this reason, if you get a six-rep personal best in the bench press and, yet, you could've gotten a seventh rep, you probably didn't do the set with utmost intensity. Likewise, you may do supersets in every workout, but if you're merely pumping out easy reps of back-to-back exercises, your intensity is likely low. As we'll see in the following seven categories, there are numerous ways to help impart intensity. You can use multiple methods simultaneously, but the crucial component is for you to channel your optimum mental and physical will.

Maximum lifts The most straightforward way to train intensely is to go to failure, meaning you do as many reps in a set as you can until you can't complete another.

Set extension Once you reach full-rep failure, you don't have to stop. There are several techniques for pushing the set further. You can do forced reps (receiving assistance in completing more reps), drop sets (doing additional reps with a lighter weight), cheat reps (using other muscles and momentum), partial reps (performing shorter-range reps) or rest-pause (pausing just long enough to regain some strength before continuing).

Time under tension This term, abbreviated to TUT, refers to the length of time muscles resist weights during a set. For example, if you spend two seconds curling a bar up and two seconds lowering it for each of 10 reps, your TUT was 40 seconds. If you do an eight- to 12-rep set (ideal for growth) but lengthen your TUT, you can boost intensity. Slow reps--performed in six seconds or more--and negatives (lifting the weight at normal speed, but lowering it slowly) are two ways to lengthen TUT. Conversely, fast reps--performed in two seconds or less--can boost intensity by dramatically reducing TUT. A static contraction (holding a weight at or near contraction for as long as possible) can be done to extend a set, or you can do it after all sets of an exercise. Static contractions and sets consisting of nothing but partial reps, such as top deadlifts in a rack, can accustom your mind and muscles to greater stress via time under tension with heavier-than-usual weights.

Tension increase Without necessarily lengthening a set in either reps or time, you can also make sets more difficult by using continuous tension (flexing the targeted muscle or its antagonist throughout the set without pausing at the top and bottom of reps) and peak contraction (flexing hard at the contraction of reps).

Combinations By doing exercises in combinations, overall degree of difficulty can also be raised. Supersets (sets of two exercises for antagonistic bodyparts with minimum rest between), compound sets (sets of two exercises for the same bodypart with minimum rest between), trisets (sets of three exercises with minimum rest between) and giant sets (sets of four or more exercises with minimum rest between) can each up the ante by reducing rest and creating a synergist effect between multiple lifts. Pre-exhaustion (doing an isolation exercise before a compound exercise, which works the same muscle stressed in the isolation exercise) can turn up the fire, as can the variety of doing different exercises or altering the order of the same exercises.

Rest reduction One way to increase the overall intensity of a workout is to decrease rest time between sets through the combination sets discussed previously and/or stopping for no longer than a minute. This is a popular precontest metabolism-booster. As with other techniques, however, it is only truly effective if you're pushing your sets to the limit (although the weight will probably be lower than with longer rest). Less rest should be a means of increasing effort, not reducing it.