DO LESS EXERCISE FOR EXPLOSIVE RESULTS

Written by Craig Nybo, President of TOTALhuman.com

Every gym has them: die-hards who seem to live, eat, and drink in the free weight room. After a while you recognize their faces. Just how many hours do they spend pumping iron? Such fitness zealots might cause you to second-guess your own routine. If these die-hards workout for, say, four hours a day, seven days a week, how often should you workout? The answer to this question might surprise you; relatively infrequent but intense strength training workouts are all that is required.

Novices do many things incorrectly during workouts; improper lifting form, perilous, explosive lifting, and over-stretching before strength-training workouts are a few infractions. One of the most frequent violations is overtraining. You hear it all the time from strength-training gurus: don’t overtrain, it’s perilous. But how can you know if you are overtraining? How often should you visit the gym? How many days of rest should you take between workouts?

The answer might involve a paradigm shift for you. Before you can determine if you are overtraining, you must have accurate records of your workouts. You must know if your body is getting stronger with each workout, or if your performance has stagnated. Unfortunately, it’s hard to determine your performance when using traditional reps and sets to measure your exercise. With a standard routine of three sets of eight reps per exercise, you can only gauge your performance by evaluating how much weight you can lift; are you lifting more now than you lifted last time? If so, in theory, your muscles are becoming stronger. But what if you could zone in on a precise way to measure each muscle group’s progress from workout to workout? Would that excite you? It should.

Measuring precise strength gains lies in a concept called time under load. Logging your time under load for each set of exercise allows you to determine, within seconds, if your muscles are growing stronger, or if your strength gains have stagnated. Determine your time under load by starting a stopwatch at the beginning of a set, performing exercise until you reach muscle failure-the point at which you cannot go the weight another inch-then stopping the clock. The end time on the stopwatch is your time under load. It doesn’t matter if you hit muscle failure at the beginning, at the end, or in the middle of a repetition. You don’t have to count your repetitions.