Focus on your biggest weakness

December 8, 2008 at 9:53 pm | In Training | Leave a Comment

The old saying “your only as strong as your weakest link” should mean a lot to bodybuilders. If your like the rest of us, with a particular lagging body part, then that could be a contributing factor from a bigger & better YOU.

There’s sometimes genetic reasons for a lagging body part, sometimes a habitual reason (such as avoiding training certain body parts as hard as others). Sometimes both genetic & habitual. Sometimes there’s a different reason all together. Either way, let’s get working on bringging that body up to parr with your best features!

The bad news is that these things like everything else takes time. The very, very good news is that if you commit to a realistic plan of attack & put it into action, half of the work would have been done!

The first step is to determine which exercise is going to best give you the most bang for your buck! If your legs are lagging, then squats are definetly for you! If like a lot of people, the rear deltroids are a major weakness (because you can’t see them like the biceps or front deltroids), then rear delt rows are your best bet.

Now that you know what you need to do & why, the next point of call is to hit the iron. In Brian Tracy’s book Eat That Frog, he talks about getting a task done early on, so that it’s out of the way. The same principal can be applied here. Try hitting that body part early in the week! If you don’t enjoy training legs, then hit them on Monday to get them out of the way!

Dropset your way to success

December 8, 2008 at 7:08 pm | In Training, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

An interesting training method that I personally enjoy doing on an occasional basis are drop sets. It’s the technique of gradually lowering the weight once a prior established amount of reps are done, then completing another set of movements, or reps.

For example on the leg extention you could do 6 reps of 50lb, then another 6 reps of 40lb, without any rest between the two sets.

A method of doing drop sets that I particulary enjoy doing is initallly going so heavy that I”m only doing partial reps for 6-8 reps, then lowering the weight, to do a further 6-8 reps. This process is done all the way down the rack, if using a pin loaded machine or using each set of dumbbells, depending what equipment is being used. THe key to this is, as you lower the weight, working towards increasing the number of reps being done.  Remember, use it or lose it!

A leg extension workout for example may look like this…

90lb x 6
80lb x 6
70lb x 7
60lb x 7
50lb x 9
40lb x 10
30lb x 12
20lb x 12
10lb x 12

So there you go! A new way of doing drop sets, if you haven’t done them before, or a new training method if you haven’t done them before. It’s a great way to mix up your approach to training & well worth trying!

Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.