90 Days: A Journey Towards Health

Chapter 10 Getting Creative

Everyone is not creative; no matter how hard they try. But getting creative with your exercise will keep you working out and getting creative with your meal planning will keep you on the right food choices track.

Referring to my workouts, I will:

Increase intensity.
This is important because intensity builds muscle. You want to replace fat with muscle so you can burn more calories along your weightloss journey.

Here are a few techniques that increase the intensity of your workout: Drop sets, supersets, negatives and slow reps.
Other ways you can increase the intensity of your workout are decreased rest times, circuits, forced reps, etc.

When you've been using the same routine for a while it's easy to get stuck in a rut and to loose momentum, you think you're training hard but your intensity level has been dropping slowly without you knowing it.

I encourage you to start at the bottom, you don't want to rush things or you will become discouraged, and increase your goal by 5's every week or two weeks.

Also, switch up your exercises.
Each muscle group has a variety of different exercises that can be used to train it. Take advantage of them and give your body the workout it deserves.

Don't cut out exercises you "don't like". They are beneficial to your training. To skip these exercises is to tell parts of your body that you don't care about it. Love all of yourself equally.

To continue to grow you need to hit your muscles with a wide array of exercises. You should be switching regularly.

My son shared with me that many experienced bodybuilders never do the same workout twice. They work their whole body.

Introduce drop sets.

Drop sets are one of those shock techniques that if done correctly can blast you through a tough plateau. Nothing is more discouraging than being in a plateau for a week or two. Ugh. I have been at one for three weeks.

Drop sets work by forcing more reps out by dropping weight off gradually, this forces more blood into the target muscle group and causes more muscle tearing, which promotes more growth after the repair of muscle tissue.

Drop sets are simple.
Do a set until you can't perform another rep, drop the weight, do another set, drop the weight...and so on.
You can do anywhere from 3-6 sets in total.

One of the most popular types of drop sets is "down the rack" dumbbell bicep curls where you start off at a normal curl weight and move down the rack, going to failure on each set.

Switch the days you work each muscle. Changing the order of your workout days can have a big impact on results.

You should work your weakest muscle groups at the beginning of the week when you have the most energy. But like everything else in your routine, you'll benefit from change.

One point to remember though when switching, always make sure you give each muscle group enough rest – keeping in mind that the muscle group may be hit as a secondary.

You can cycle your workout days so that on the first day of your workout week you focus on a different muscle group.

Compound-isolation same muscle group supersets.
One of the most effective ways to promote growth in a stubborn muscle group is to follow a big compound exercise with an isolation movement.

One of the best examples would be bench press-flat bench flys. You complete your bench press as usual, but immediately after you hit out a strict set of dumbbell flys. You don't need big weights on the second set, your focus should be on muscle contraction. This means slow down and squeeze at the top of the movement.

Here are some good compound-isolation supersets:
Military press then front raises
Close grip bench then skullcrushers
Squats then leg extensions
Bench press then dumbbell flys
Wide grip pull up (or lat pull down) then straight arm pull down
Chin up then barbell curl

Weekly rep cycling. Weekly rep cycling works like this. Week 1 – hit out 12 reps per set, week 2 – hit out 10 reps per set, week 3 – hit out 8 reps per set, week 4 – hit out 6 reps per set, week 5 repeat.

No one knows exactly how many reps you should be doing for optimum muscle growth.

What we do know is, it's between 6 and 12. So cover all bases by starting at 12 reps and over 4 weeks decrease to 6, increasing the weight as you go. If you've got your diet right (which you should have if you want any of the techniques in this article to work) you should find that by week 5 you can lift considerably more than you could in week 1 for 12 reps.

Change the number of days you train.

In muscle building, less is more. If you want to get bigger you don't workout more.

This is one of the most common mistakes of new lifters. You think that dropping back to 3 days from 4 or 5 will mean you build less muscle? You're wrong. Your body will probably benefit from the extra rest.

Change the order of your exercises.

If someone asked me how they should order their exercises I would tell them big compounds first, followed by isolations. But like everything else in your routine, your body quickly adapts. Switch up your exercises...do dips first on your chest day, extensions before squats etc.

Pre-fatiguing (or pre-exhausting) your muscles. Pre-fatiguing (AKA pre-exhausting) is another one of those plateau busting techniques that has been around for ages.

Using this technique you pre-fatigue the muscle group you want to hit with an isolation exercise and then immediately hit it with a big compound exercise.

Here's some good examples:
Leg extension followed by squat
Flys followed by bench press
Rear delt fly followed by row
Front raise followed by military press

Take the week off.

Rest is the most abused aspect of weight training. Bodybuilding is not like marathon running, less is more. Sometimes you'll find that taking a week off from training is the best thing for you. Our bodies (and minds) need regular rest breaks from intense resistance training. Our training routines put stress on the entire body, not just the muscles. How do you know when to take a break? You'll know it, your body will tell you. But as a rough guide, every 8-12 weeks.

Day 10
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