Some of the best muscle mass-gaining workouts are actually very simple. According to "3-D Muscle Building" by Jonathan Lawson and Steve Holman, you do not need to hit every muscle from myriad angles to get excellent training results. Focus on simplifying your training, working intensely and being progressive by adding weight incrementally, five to 10 lbs at a time, as you get stronger.
Positions of Flexion and X-Reps
First comes mid-range training with compound multi-joint exercises, then stretch overload with a stretch exercise, and finally you finish with an isolation exercise. Your training split could be either three or five days per week and can be adapted to fit your schedule. A three-day plan might include shoulders and arms on Monday, legs on Wednesday and back and chest on Friday. An excellent five-day split is shoulders on Monday, arms on Tuesday, legs on Wednesday, chest on Thursday and back on Friday. Each workout begins with a compound exercise to target the most muscle fibers. For example, for chest you start with bench presses and do two working sets to failure in the nine to 12 repetition range. Failure means taking each set to the point where you cannot do another controlled repetition. Add X-reps, mini-rep partials, to the end of your last set with six to 10 inch pulsing reps just below the middle of the range of motion. Next you do one or two sets of flat bench dumbbell flies to failure. Finish with one or two sets of cable cross-overs. X-reps can also be added to the end of stretch overload and isolation exercises as well, but beware over-doing it since they are a powerful technique and may cause extreme soreness.
Multi-Repetition Rest/Pause Training
Rest/Pause training is a unique muscle growth stimulus that take into account the way in which muscles produce energy during resistance training. The "rest" part of the program refers to 10- to 30-second rest periods between rapid-fire sets, allowing muscles to regenerate their ATP or adenosine triphosphate energy stores. The weekly breakdown, for example, might be arms and shoulders on Monday, legs on Tuesday, rest on Wednesday, chest and calves on Thursday and back on Friday. For each muscle group you choose one or two compound exercises and do one or two rest/pause sets. To do a rest pause set, you pick a weight with which you will reach failure at nine to 12 repetitions. After your first set of nine to 12 reps, rest 15 seconds, immediately pick up the weight and do another six reps, rest 20 seconds and finish with as many reps as you can get, preferably three to five. Once you do your rest/pause sets for a given muscle group, finish with one or two sets of an isolation exercise, also to failure and in the nine- to 12-rep range.
Power-Density Training
The Power-Density training technique comes from "The Ultimate Power-Density Workout" by Jonathan Lawson and Steve Holman. This workout combines heavy power training with lower-weight density techniques. The idea is to do two to three sets of heavy compound movements for each major muscle group, followed by four lighter sets done in quick succession. The training splits breaks down as follows: chest, shoulders, triceps and abs the first day, quadriceps, hamstrings and calves the second, rest on the third day, back and biceps on the fourth and a repeat of the first day's workout on the fifth day of the week. Take the next two days off and keep cycling through the workouts in this order. For back and biceps on the third day, for example, you do three sets of lat pull-downs for nine, seven and six repetitions respectively, increasing the weight with each set. Then reduce the weight to one which you could use for 15 reps and do four 10-rep sets in quick succession with only 30 seconds of rest between each. Repeat this same protocol for bent-over rows. Finish with another power-density attack on biceps with barbell or dumbbell curls.
References
- "Advanced Mass Building"; Jeff Anderson; 2008
- "The Ultimate Power-Density Mass Workout"; Jonathan Lawson and Steve Holman; 2009
- Muscle & Performance; "The Best Muscle-Building Moves of All Time"; Chris Logan, May 2010
- "3-D Muscle Building"; Jonathan Lawson and Steve Holman; 2007
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