How To Hit Your Target Muscles In 3 Different Ways

You’re about to go into the gym to train. You plan to just come up with your workout on the fly, by feel, in the gym. Bad move. Take 5 mins in the carpark, lets plan a workout that will actually be worth doing.

You want to hit your muscles in different ways to get the best results out of them. Lets hit your target muscles in three different ways today:

1. Strength. These movements will be explosive, hard and heavy. Stay in form but push HEAVY weight, moving the weight as fast as you can through the concentric portion (the part of the lift where you are working AGAINST gravity). You’ll take the movement close to failure – leaving just one maybe two reps in the tank. Do 6-8 reps.
2. Hypertrophy. These movements will be done a little slower with a 1 second concentric followed by a 3 second negative. You’ll take these movements to failure. Do 12-15 reps.
3. Pump. These movements will be done at a consistent pace, a 2 second concentric and a 2 second eccentric. Think of these as constant tension sets, aiming to pump the muscle with as much blood as possible, try to make that muscle pop like a balloon! Do 18-22 reps.

We’ll achieve this by working with giant sets – three movements in succession without rest. We’ll do a Strength set first, then a Hypertrophy set, then a Pump set.

Now pick three muscle groups – lets say chest, traps, lats. We’ll cycle through these muscle groups within the giant sets, changing the target muscle on each TYPE of lift sequentially. Example:

Giant Set 1

Strength – CHEST

Hyper – BACK

Pump – TRAPS

Giant Set 2

Strength – TRAPS

Hyper – CHEST

Pump – BACK

Giant Set 3

Strength – BACK

Hyper – TRAPS

Pump – CHEST

Pick whatever movements you want for each muscle group. By doing this, you will have hit each muscle with three different TYPES of stimulus. You won’t be focussing all your energy on your favourite muscle group at the beginning of the session and doing a half-effort at the end with the muscles you don’t like training. You’ll sweat more than you have in months. And you’ll see what a difference it makes to go in with a plan.

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