Great Strength Workouts

Great strength workouts should focus their repetition range between three and five reps, which targets muscles for power and strength development. When training for strength, you must be progressive and add weight as you get stronger to force your muscles to continue adapting from workout to workout. Always use a spotter when training heavy on exercises like the bench press, which could be dangerous if you lose control.

Five by Five

Five by five training is a great strength workout that allows you to overload your muscles with five sets of a compound exercise in the five-rep strength and power repetition range. Use a five-day split to keep your workouts brief and productive. This means doing shoulders on Monday, arms on Tuesday, legs on Wednesday, your chest on Thursday and back on Friday, taking the weekend off. You can also train three days per week by pairing up arms and shoulders on Monday, doing legs on Wednesday and chest and back on Friday. Pick no more than two exercises per muscle group for the five-by-five protocol. Smaller muscle groups like biceps, triceps, calves and shoulders may respond better to only one round of five-by-five. Chest, back and legs usually need more volume, so you can choose two. Use compound exercises for the five sets of five reps, for example squats, deadlifts, bench press and barbell curls. You can follow the five-by-five with support work, such as isolation movements like concentration curls for the biceps or dumbbell flyes for the chest. Do one to three sets in the six to 12 repetition range on these exercises.

Power Pyramid

Power pyramid training uses the pyramiding technique, where you increase the weight while decreasing the repetitions with each set. Using higher reps first helps to prepare your joints and tendons for the heavier sets to come. Pyramid only your compound movements like squats and bench presses, doing three sets, eight, six and then four reps. The workout follows a four-day split, meaning you train four days a week, doing legs, chest and triceps on Monday and Thursday and back, shoulders and biceps on Tuesday and Friday. Wednesdays and the weekend you rest. The first workout you do squats, sissy squats, leg extensions, stiff-legged deadlifts, lying leg curls, leg press calf raises, donkey calf raises, standing calf raises, incline bench presses, incline flyes, bench presses, cable flyes, lying triceps extensions, overhead triceps extensions and the dumbbell kickback. Pyramid the squats incline bench press, bench press and lying triceps extensions. For the rest of the exercises, do one or two sets of eight to 12 reps. All calf sets are in the 12 to 20 rep range. The second workout, you do cable rows, one-arm dumbbell rows, lat pull-downs, dumbbell pull-overs, stiff-arm pull-downs, dumbbell upright rows, incline one-arm laterals, lateral raises, dumbbell shoulder presses, barbell curls, incline dumbbell curls and concentration curls. Pyramid the cable rows, lat pull-downs, upright rows and barbell curls. The rest of the sets are in the eight to 12 rep range.

Rest/Pause

Rest/Pause training works great for strength because it allows you to compress a lot of work with heavy weight into a short amount of time. And it takes advantage of the way that muscles work, by allowing short rests for your body to recover its energy resources. Focus your rest/pause sets on compound exercises like squats, deadlifts and bench presses. You can really use any weekly training split for this program, depending on whether you prefer to work out three, four or five days per week. Choose one or two compound exercises for each muscle group. For the chest, for example, you might choose the bench press and the decline bench press. Start with a weight that you can get for six reps maximum. Do only two reps, rest 15 seconds, do two more reps, rest 16 seconds, two reps, 17 seconds, two reps 18 seconds, two reps, 19 seconds and finally do two more reps to finish the set. Following the chest example, you would then move on to the decline bench press and do six two-rep sets, resting 15 to 20 seconds between each. Add one or two sets of an isolation exercise like flyes after your rest/pause sets if needed.