ADVANCED WORKOUT

The advanced routine is a continuation of the intermediate routine with some additional tools thrown in. Now that your body has experienced positive failure there are a few techniques to go past positive failure. These will help with physiological blocks as well as physical. It can be debilitating to not increase in an exercise one week which can cause a stall to progress. These methods can help you get past this plateau.

Sunday – Back and Biceps

Monday – Legs

Tuesday – Chest, Triceps, and Abs

Wednesday – HIIT Workout

Thursday  – Shoulders and Forearms

Friday – Rest

Saturday – HIIT Workout

Assisted Repetitions
Once you have reached positive failure, you can have a partner or assist yourself in achieving one more repetition with greater emphasis put on the negative portion of the lift. For example if you are doing bench press and a spotter helps you lift the bar up after you have achieved failure, lower the bar on your own in a slow and controlled fashion. Maintain good form for all repetitions. This method can be done on your own for exercises you can do one leg or arm at a time as well as exercises where you can use another body part to help you such as pushing on your legs with your arms to help with the lift.

Rest Pause
After you have reached positive failure, you can rest for the amount of time it takes to take one or two deep breaths, then perform one more lift. The idea behind the rest pause method is that you want the minimum amount of time to pass before you can perform one more repetition with good form. This can be done multiple times, but we recommend starting slowly and only adding one rest pause rep at a time.

Pre-exaustion
Pre-exaustion is a technique used to ensure the proper muscle is being fully stimulated. You will tire out a muscle in an isolation exercise that may hit failure after some of the auxilary muscles during a compound exercise. An example of this is doing a set of 6 reps to failure of lat pullovers or straight-arm pulldowns which will isolate the lat before doing a set of wide grip lat pulldowns to failure. The wide grip lat pulldowns should be failing because of exhaustion of the lats, rather than exhaustion of the biceps in this case. This technique can be used to ensure the proper muscle is being stimulated rather than failing because of a weaker auxiliary muscle.

Staggered Progression
When you fail to increase in resistance during a workout, there can by a physiological component that can keep you from further progression. A method of getting around this can be to utilize a staggered progression where you are alternating the resistance between a higher rep lower weight and lower rep lower weight. For example say you are doing 500 pounds on the leg press for 11 repetitions, but you’ve been having an impossible time progressing from there. You could start alternating between two different repetition ranges. For week 1 you do 500 pounds 11 times. Then for week 2 you do 450 pounds 16 times. Week 3 you go back to the first range and do 500 for 12 times. Then for week 3 you do 450 for 18 times. Week 5 you do 520 for 9 times and so forth. Keep one of the rep ranges lower, say 8-12 reps, and the other one higher such as 16-20 reps.

These different methods can be used by themselves or combined. Add these extra measures in slowly to ensure you don’t cause any injuries.