Forced Repetitions.
The use of forced repetitions at the end of one or two of your work sets for a given muscle group will greatly enhance the quality of stimulation that the muscle receives, and will lead to faster progress, if used carefully. Forced reps are a way of taking the muscle beyond the point of failure with a given weight, and if you think about it, in terms of what the muscle is exposed to, have similarities to descending sets.

Taking the bench press as an example again, say you complete eight reps in good form, and reach failure at the ninth. At this point, a workout partner or partners would supply just enough lift to the bar to enable you to complete another rep with extreme difficulty. A second forced rep may be performed in this manner, but beyond two forced reps, the muscle will be so fatigued that further such reps will achieve little.

The key to this technique is having the right person(s) supply the assistance – you don’t want them to lift all the weight for you, but to give just enough help so that you complete the rep in otherwise good style with extreme difficulty.

I Go/You Go System.
This style of training is well suited to smaller muscle groups such as biceps, triceps or calves, and requires one workout partner. Taking barbell curls as an example, select a weight that you can both get 10-12 reps in good form, but with difficulty i.e. fail near the twelfth rep.

Complete your set, and then immediately hand the bar to the person you’re training with, and let him/her complete their set. The bar is then handed back to you as soon as they’ve completed their set, and so on. Depending on how crazy you get, you can keep going like this until your a jellied heap on the floor, which with this technique won’t take long, as their is minimum rest time.

The best part about this technique is that it creates a direct competitiveness between you and the person you’re training with, each trying to beat the others last rep count, which can create ferocious intensity, if you’re in the right frame of mind. This was apparently one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s favorite methods for shocking biceps.

Pre-Exhaustion Training.
Pre-exhaustion is yet another method for taking a target muscle beyond the point of failure, and involves the use of both a compound exercise and an isolation movement coupled together. If your training chest for example, you could complete a set of dumb-bell flyes, which work the pectorals in relative isolation, to muscular failure. You would then immediately start a set of bench presses, again to complete failure.

The rationale behind this is that having exhausted the target muscle with an isolation exercise, the use of a compound movement immediately afterwards brings into play other muscles which are fresh and unworked, so that with the assistance of these other muscles, the target muscle group (the pectorals, in this case) are forced to keep on contracting past what would normally be their failure point.

A really good combination to try is leg extensions and squats done in this manner. The leg extensions will exhaust the quadriceps, but the muscles of the back and the glutei will be fresh and enable you to then squat and take the quads well beyond their normal failure point.

In the squat, it is normally the muscles of the lower back that fail first in a regular set before the quads meaning that you have to stop the set (you can no longer move the weight due to lower back failure, not quad failure) i.e. the spinal erectors are the weak link in the squat.

By pre-exhausting the quads with leg extensions, you make the quads the weak link so that they are pushed to failure before the fresher lower back muscles, which means more growth stimulation for your thighs. There are few things harder to do in the gym than this particular leg exercise combination, if done properly.

CAUTION!
The above techniques are examples of the many ways in which you can increase training intensity. They are all extremely taxing on your body, and you must be very careful with their use, or you will severely over train, and end up getting smaller and weaker, and if you’re reading this article, I don’t think you want that, do you?

It is best to use them periodically throughout your training cycle, and be careful about how many sets you do employing such techniques; listen to your body – it will tell you when your doing too much.

Always remember, the basis of your routine, if your looking toward building further muscle mass and strength, should always be a core of basic compound exercises, which bring many muscle groups into play in the execution of the exercise, using heavy weights (relative to your strength level) for moderate repetitions (8-10 per set to failure).

However, you must always remember to cycle your training intensity and style to prevent physical burnout and mental stagnation (boredom).

A Big Thank You to Mick Hart for this one.

Train Hard!
CC

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