Supercharge Your Workouts

Supercharge your strength training workouts by incorporating advanced training principles.  Because muscle recruitment is highly dependant on the size principle, your workouts will normally recruit the same muscle fibers as the previous workout.  In order to recruit more muscle fibers or different muscle fibers, you need to involve the "overload principle." 

There are several ways to "overload" your muscles including increasing the number of sets, increasing the number of reps, increasing the amount of weight, or decreasing the amount of rest time.

Other advanced training principles include forced reps and dropped sets.  The goal of every strength training workout should be to recruit more muscle fibers than the previous workout.  A good indicator of increased recruitment is muscle soreness.  You don't have to be sore after every workout but soreness, even slight soreness, indicates you may have recruited fibers that were NOT recruited in the previous workout.

Personal trainers often help their clients with forced reps.  Once a client can NOT do any more reps, the trainer will assist the client with one or two more reps.  This ensures that the client is recruiting muscles fibers that may not have been recruited previously. 

Common sense will tell you that the same workouts will yield the same results.  If you want to make changes, if you want to make improvements, then you should improve your workout by changing it up.