Weight Training Intensity Cycling
One of the biggest problem facing most people who want to gain lean muscle mass is frustration and burnout (or overtraining). This causes many people to give up on their muscle building quest and just simply quit, figuring they aren’t genetically blessed and weight training doesn’t work for them.
This is a shame and one of the best ways to avoid this is to employ muscle building tips such as intensity cycling. In a perfect world, we could go all out all the time in our training and reach our goals very quickly. However, we don’t live in a perfect world and our jobs, significant others, and even our bodies, won’t always cooperate.
That is where intensity cycling comes into play. The idea is to continually take two steps back to take three steps forward. You regularly vary your training intensity by making planned changes in the poundages you use and the effort level (intensity) that you put into your workout routines.
The variables in these muscle building tips include training frequency, training volume (number of sets for each exercise), exercise selection, use of high-intensity techniques, etc. When these muscle building tips are put together properly, you can systematically move past sticking points that you have had before in your training.
If we could train all out every workout, that would be the quickest way to make muscle building gains. Many people can’t handle this kind of high intensity training at every workout so this is where intensity cycling comes into play.
The idea behind cycling is to take planned workouts over a period of 6 to 12 weeks and work up to a top poundage that you’ve never used before. Once this is accomplished, you back off and then perform another training cycle, working up to a poundage that is slightly higher than your previous best.
The best example of this is powerlifters. They’ve been using these muscle building tips for years to increase their top poundages in the bench press, squat, and deadlift. And all things being equal, you’ll have bigger chest muscles when you can bench press 250 pounds for 10 reps than you did when you could only bench 150 for 5 reps.
It is best to slightly modify what the powerlifter does, as you are going for muscle mass gains, as opposed to strictly strength gains. And one way to do this is to use slightly higher reps than the powerlifter. You don’t want to peak with a 1 rep max lift. You want to increase your training poundages that you use for 6 to 20 reps.
If you have any questions about weight training intensity cycling, please email us.
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