Short Workouts - The Fast Way To Quality Muscles

Building a good bod is no mystery. It only demands Intensity and consistency. An awareness of what "good pain" is, is also critical in gaining muscle. In fact, anyone who tells you that gaining muscle can be a painless experience has either never worked out or they simply are trying to take your money by promising paradise. A simple truth in gaining muscle, losing weight or doing almost anything of any value, even non-sport, dictates hard work. But the work need not be long and tiring. It must only be effective.

The key, as already said, is intensity. Intensity and quality. It's about short, honest, "good-pain"-level training. Workouts that work and are tailored to normal people with 8 hour jobs. But what is "good pain", you ask? Good pain is the degree of pain you feel in your targeted muscle (The general or specific group of muscles you want to target in a particular movement) after correctly lifting a manageable weight for a varying number of repetitions (how often you need to repeat a movement till the pain comes).

This is a two day workout plan that is short but exploding-at-the-seams in meaningful, no-nonsense work that leads to the fastest results. It is geared at people who, as said, are not professional bodybuilders, work full time and want to spend as little of their free time as possible within the confines of a gym or fitness studio. For that reason it demands honesty where the question; "did I really give it my all" can be answered for 90 percent of your workouts with a solid "yes".

As an aside, a rule of thumb when lifting using this program is:

1. Do one local warm-up set when doing heavy sets (Bench press, lat pulls and squats), in the form of a low-weight single set.
2. Use big weights for larger muscle groups (back=pull-ups + lat pulls / chest = Bench press + dips)
3. Wave goodbye to the idea of a fixed number of reps per set. The main concept of this workout is the reaching your "good pain" stopping point with each set. The 5 sets should be enough for most people. So the number of reps you do can't be determined by anything other than your own strength and will power.
4. Take longer rest periods between sets of exercises where heavy weights are used and shorter rests between sets where lighter weights are used.
5. Always wait till your breathing returns to normal after each set before starting with the subsequent set.
6. Breath in deeply when lowering a weight and out when lifting it. For some the reverse of this might feel better. An important concept to remember is that you should never hold your breath during the weightlifting process.
7. Pyramid your heavy lifts starting with a weight that you can lift for 10 clean reps (at least) but going for burn-out (good pain) on every set (except of course your warm-up. Since we said that we don't stop at a set number of reps full power sets with weights that you can lift 10  times may see you doing 20 reps or more. 
8. Effort is all about giving everything you've got at the time you need to give it. In point 7, I said that when giving your all, you could be lifting a weight you'd normally lift for ten reps for more than 10, possibly even 20-25 reps. While that is true, the very opposite could also happen. Your best effort could also mean merely reaching 8 reps instead of 10 because you feel crappy on that particular day and your very best effort for that day is 80% of what you're usually capable of doing. It's all about effort so if you reach only 80% of your normal output in spite of giving 100% of what you had on energy for that particular day then you've still had a winning workout and should pat yourself on the back for a great effort. It's what you do on days like these that make the difference!
9. Never bench or squat to failure because you could get pinned under the weight (in a bench press), or you may not be able to cleanly set the weight back on the rack (squats) if you do. Use A heavy weight that you feel you could lift for a given number of reps and lift the weight just one or two reps below that amount. This is contradiction of terms and concepts that we've been touting up till now but where bench press and squats are concerned correct execution from start to finish is of absolute importance. Bad things happen if you don't make correct execution a top priority with these two excellent but potentially dangerous (if done sloppily) movements.
10. Try to do your ab work separate from your actual workout because your stomach should be empty when working abs. For the rest of your workout you'll need to feel strong. That means you'll have to have eaten a good amount of food at least an hour before your workout also you'll need to drink lots of water during your workout, which makes ab training somewhat difficult which explains the split workout.
11. With the exception of squat and bench press do enough repetitions using good form to cause enough "good pain" in your muscle to make a further rep unbearable. Sounds masochistic. Maybe it is, but it is the key to short meaningful workouts that add muscle to your body.
12. Try to limit your workout to one hour and fifteen minutes to one and a half hour of training time with a two day break between the two days. This is enough to pack on muscle while allowing you time to enjoy your life.

Prioritize your training. If we look at the human body we can reduce it's ideal shape as that of being wide above and narrow below (example; broader shoulder width relative to the waist etc.) Each section kind of resembles that of a triangle or diamond where the wide end faces the sky and the narrow pointed end of the triangle or diamond "points" to the ground. The ideal upper body for both men and women are large breasts or well a developed pectoral area, broad shoulders (muscular, where men are concerned) and as tiny a waistline (the pointy thinner end of our triangle) as possible. muscular thighs and calves also share the "upside down" shape characteristic of a diamond. That merely means that problem areas of your body require more extensive training in the form of one or two more sets at top intensity.

Never neglect a body part. Keeping the total package in mind, we should never allow our training to shrink to the exclusive performance "glory" exercises such as biceps and triceps movements. At every gym you'll see these types; they've got thick upper arms and spend huge amounts of time training biceps and triceps. But they train nothing else. This type of training gives you a great looking body if you are wearing a T-shirt and the rest of your body is clothed. But as soon as you peel-out of your clothes and head for the beach the previous looks of awe other people took of you will turn to private laughs when they see the terribly unbalanced build of your body. This kind of build looks pretty stupid and it also looks (and is) pretty undisciplined. While good biceps and triceps both are nice to have they are of least importance of all of the muscles in perfecting the total package.

Mind to Muscle contact. Change your approach to lifting weights. Concentrate on the feel in your muscle when lifting. Lift the weight with the muscle instead of with your arms, hands or body. This approach will crystalize over time and you'll profit from quality lifts that really dig into any muscle you happen to be working.

Your training plan could look like this:

Mon. and Thurs. ;

5 Sets of squats done to near-muscular failure or leg press or 5 X leg extension+5 X leg curls.

5 sets of calve raises done to muscular failure

3 sets of stomach crunches done to muscular failure on an empty stomach

3 sets of side crunches also on an empty stomach

Flat Bench press lowering the weight till it touches the chest (not too slow but also no bouncing) pyramiding from lightest to heaviest weight for 5 sets.

2 sets of dips

Following each Bench press set you should do a "big back" movement such as wide grip pull-ups or (if you can't lift your body weight) lat pull downs.

Allow enough time in between sets to come down to normal breathing before moving on to the next set.

Upper arms - one at a time. Once you've done 5 sets for chest and 5 sets for back its time to move on to the specific muscle groups of the biceps and the triceps. Barbel movements are nice but dumbbell movements are more efficient and one armed dumbbell movements are most efficient. Because we want to work the bicep efficiently we want to exclude any muscle - where possible - from the movement. Since barbell movements force other muscles of the body to help in some way, valuable energy we could be investing in working our targeted muscle is wasted on assisting muscles. Thats why one armed exercises are superior to two armed movements where dumbbells can be used, regardless of the muscle being worked whether bicep shoulder or triceps. Here you'll do 5 intense sets to failure for each muscle. That means curls for biceps and cable extensions or dumbbell extensions done on your back. Never do triceps kick-backs because the effective training range of motion is ridiculously short. Also it is an elbow joint pulverizer.

Effective training range of motion is the range of motion within the entire movement in which the "pull" of the weight can actually be felt in the muscle. in many exercises where curling motions happen, virtually no weight can actually be felt in the muscle over the first third of the movement which means that 1/3 of your work is wasted. Kick backs head the list of these notorious "lift for nothing" movements. That's also the reason why, for example, leg extension machines that aren't fortified with cables can't be found in any serious fitness studio anymore. They just don't work.

Once the biceps and triceps are done we move on to the last but one of the most important groups of all, the deltoids (shoulders).

The all important shoulder group. Visually the most important muscle of the upper body. Wide, well developed shoulders are the only muscle that get noticed even when you're wearing an overcoat in winter, that is, if you have them. We've intentionally left these for last because burned out shoulders keep us from exercising most muscles of the upper body effectively. The main exercise for training the shoulders are flys which are done using light weights which allow controlled slow movement over the course of enough reps to reach a good burn in the muscle.

You'll do 5 sets each for the anterior and medial delts as well as bent over flys for the all-important posterior delts (total of 15 sets). You can rotate as you please as long as each deltoid head is worked thoroughly. Although this sounds like a lot of sets this is a rather short phase of your workout because the down-time is zero and the muscles reach the "good pain" zone rather quickly.

Where shoulder work is concerned it is of crucial importance that only light weights be used and that the movement be slow and controlled. Sloppy jerky movement is totally unacceptable where shoulder training is concerned.

I referred to each muscle as a group. The reason for this is that each muscle has at least 2 major "sub-muscles" that are responsible for completing a movement. Also no movement works a specific muscle group only, but rather targets a specific group while enlisting the aid of surrounding muscles . For example, the shoulders assist in biceps and triceps work and vice versa.

Shoulders, back and chest are each complex groups capable of lifting huge amounts of weight but we use light weight for targeting shoulders directly because these injure easily. They also are helpers in bench press (and all other chest exercises) and back exercises so that specific targeting with heavy weights become unnecessary. This Hub will be updated from time to time with different routines for home training and for training at the gym so drop by occasionally for more stuff -Dave