Amped Training

Strength Training

Ok, with that out of the way, how do you go about starting this process?

It can be very tricky, and as mentioned, there's a lot of conflicting information. Some of it is right, a lot of it is wrong, and some of it is quasi-correct, meaning that it has an element of truth but is being used incorrectly. Sometimes even the correct stuff gets overcomplicated, becoming useless since you can't actually do anything with it at the gym.

Here are the basics:

• Keep your exercises balanced across the body

This means practically speaking, you have a handful of options for your weekly training, since ideally all the basic movements would be targeted multiple times in a week.

Split Body Routine

A split body routine is the most commonly encountered type by most people. They're heavily publicized by magazines and professional bodybuilding/figure competitors. As a consequence, this is how "most" people train.

That does not, however, make it the best.

There are pros and cons to split training just as much as full body.

Pros: It's easy to concentrate a larger amount of work on a specific muscle group or exercise. This is good for people that need to devote work to developing a muscle, or maybe an exercise (such as powerlifters). This is so-called "vertical development", the use of multiple training strategies in a single session.

Cons: If done improperly, it can be very hard to ensure appropriate frequency of training for all body parts, which can lead to too much or too little being done. It can also be difficult to develop specific qualities.

Full Body Routine

Full body routines on the other hand are more commonly used by athletes and competitors in sports that occur outside the weight room. They can be just as effective for bodybuilding and physique purposes however.

Full body routines are a type of horizontal or sequential organization, which means you train the entire body with a single quality. In athletics, this can be a number of things. For physique emphasis, in most instances it will be limited to simple intensity fluctuation, which will affect things like volume, rep range, etc, but not truly training different motor abilities.

Pros: Easy to control and manipulate stress across a week by altering intensity. Can train parts frequently without issues.

Cons: Only allows a limited volume of work for any given part or exercises.

Which you pick isn't that important, so long as it is balanced and provides an appropriate frequency of exposure per part (more on this below). In fact, just out of simple practicality, factors such as boredom, and other issues, it's probably just as good an idea to rotate between the two from time to time.

• Train often

This one is pretty critical. Going by the research available, the average frequency is two or three sessions per week, for any given bodypart.

This is further supported by what we know about the processes of growth that occur at the cellular level. In most cases, they tend to peak around 24 hours after a session, and are largely returned to normal within 2-3 days.

What this means is that in order to ensure optimal growth conditions, you'll want to follow this trend.

There are instances where this may not hold true, and using less frequency might be called for. However, these are generally special cases that are used for those that have plateaued and are using more advanced methods of planning.

For those of you just starting out or otherwise not at an advanced method, such approaches are usually not called for, and you will have the best results by training frequently.

In those new to weight training, the exercises can be thought of as a skill that improves as your strength does. The best way to improve a skill is to practice it frequently.

• Train with weights that are between 60% and 90% of your maximum

This is one area where the research and the anecdote pretty much agree. You need heavy weights to stimulate muscular growth. In virtually all the academic literature, the loads used to stimulate the fastest gains in muscular cross-section fall into this range.

Now in most instances, you see this written as a percentage of the one-rep maximum. Depending on how trained you are and the exercise in question, this may be fairly easy to test or it might be so difficult and risky that it's not worth it.

For practical purposes, this means you'll be handling anything from 3-5 reps on down to 12-15 reps, assuming these sets are at or near the rep maximum (meaning, the most you can do before fatigue sets in). This, not coincidentally, also happens to be how the biggest and the strongest train, so in this instance research and reality coincide.

This doesn't mean you need to be out squatting and benching huge amounts of weight right off the bat. Heavy is always relative. Progression of load is always something to keep in mind as well; if you start out squatting with just the bar and improve to 200 lbs with the same form, I can guarantee you've improved not just your legs, but your entire body.

Women, specifically, tend to be able to do more reps at a given percentage of 1RM than men. So a man might be able to get 8 reps at 85%, whereas a woman could do 10. This can slant things somewhat, but the general idea is still the same.

As long as you're working with a high degree of effort in your chosen rep range and striving to add weight whenever possible, you're in the ballpark.

• Train with a good degree of effort

Somewhat linked to the above, you'll also want to be doing reps until you are either incapable of doing any more due to fatigue, or very close to this state. This is something that has been referred to as "workout intensity", and although this isn't quite accurate (the appropriate word is "intensive") , it gets the point across.

Heavy weights are only part of the equation. Having a relatively high degree of exertion is important also.

• Train with an appropriate volume

This is, in conjunction with the above two points, is one of the critical areas where people mess things up.

Volume is the amount of work done. This is expressed in several ways. Firstly, you have the total number of reps performed. If you do 4 sets of 6 reps, you've done 24 reps. If you do 3 sets of 10, you've done 30 reps. And so on.

Secondly, you have tonnage. Tonnage is simply the number of reps multiplied by the weight used. 4 sets of 6 at 100 lbs is 24 * 100 = 2400 lbs. 3 sets of 10 at 90 is 2700 lbs.

What the research on this matter shows, and generally in agreement with observed trends among physique competitors, is that the average number of reps per part per session is around 40-60. Good results have been shown with 20-40, as well as 80-100 and even higher.

In the case of 40-60 reps per part, this is not outlandish. Five sets of 5 for one exercise, then three sets of 8 for another would yield you 50 reps for a part, while falling into the required intensity zones.

However, this is a case where calling upon gym wisdom is useful. In my personal observation, going much over this for long periods of time is counterproductive. It can be done for short periods, or alternated with less stressful workouts (which is the preferred approach), but is not something that should be employed each and every session.

The body's ability to handle stress is limited. You need to trigger that response to a degree, but then back off of it to allow the body a chance to respond and recover. If you don't ever allow this to happen, you simply spin your wheels.

With that in mind, the gist of it is to shoot for a range of around 40-60 total reps per part trained. Other workouts, you can do more than this. Some workouts you can do less.

There's been a couple of review papers out recently that looked at the dose-response effects of training volume in terms of "optimal" responses, and they all seem to agree, and this also happens that it coincides with what does tend to work best in the real world.

The median number of reps is 40-60, with the total "range of effectiveness" being 20-100 reps, per part, per session.

If you sit down and do the math, the high-end of the median reps would be right at 5 sets of 5 (25) and 3 sets of 10 (30) for a total of 55. More moderate approaches like 3 sets of 5 (15) and 2 sets of 10 (20) would still put you right up there with 35 reps.

If you have the work capacity for 80-100 reps a session (hint: most of you don't need this much stimulus) you could do something like 5 sets of 6 (30), 3 sets of 10 (30) and 2 sets of 15 (30) for a total of 90 reps.

On another tangent, it has also been displayed that training with really heavy weights and an eccentric overload can create muscular gains with very low volumes of work, meaning 15 reps or less per session.

An eccentric overload means that on the lowering phase of the lift, the portion where the muscles are lengthening (as in the portion of the bench press when you bring the bar down to the chest) is being exposed to a large amount of weight. This is important, as it has been shown that the eccentric phase has a couple of neat effects. For one, it alters how the muscle recruits its fibers, bringing in more of the high-threshold fibers that are responsive to growth, and for two, it stimulates the fibers in a fashion that is positive for growth.

This type of work is employed by powerlifters seeking to improve their strength on a handful of barbell exercises, and has been used in the past by bodybuilders in a technique called negatives.

The idea here is to find the lifts that allow you to use a ton of weight, the aforementioned things like back squat, deadlift, the bench press, and barbell rows, then work up to very heavy sets of one to three reps over the course of a workout. This approach, called the maximal effort method, has been used to great success among powerlifters.

Bodybuilders using the negative technique have loaded up a barbell with more weight than they can lift on their own (typically 10-30% over the 1RM), then lowered the bar under control with a partner raising the bar back to the starting point. These are going to be very stressful on the system, and should not be attempted without a training partner.

As a rule, the maximal effort workouts are the preference, as they involve a pronounced eccentric phase on each lift just by the nature of it being very heavy, and tend to be less stressful on the body as a whole (albeit not by much).

Typically speaking, both approaches should be used with a spotter or two, and are not for the beginner. In any event, if you use such approaches, be aware that it is quite easy to do "too much", As noted previously, the total number of reps done should be less than 15. Keep in mind the body's recovery ability. Doing too much too often is not the trend to follow in nearly all instances.