Using Intensity Techniques to Unlock Your Full Potential

So now you understand how muscle growth works, you can start to apply this concept to your training at home. The key is to recognize that you need to create microtears, you need to create metabolic stress and you need to challenge yourself with increasing weights.

You then need to ensure you get adequate rest and protein so that your body can build this back up. This is where the discrepancy comes in with a lot of home workouts. Because if you are simply picking up a weight, curling it ten times and then putting it down, you aren’t doing anything.

All you’re doing is using some fast twitch fiber and some slow twitch fiber to move a weight 10 times. You’re building up a few metabolites and you’re maybe causing a few tears – but it’s not enough to see rapid growth. You need to train like a bodybuilder. What does that mean? It means you need to cause maximum stress and damage to the muscles and really challenge yourself. And that in turn means thinking outside the box and getting creative.

The Weider Intensity Principles

The 70s are often referred to as the ‘golden age’ of bodybuilding. Back then, you had a lot of big names elevating the status of the sport, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Franco Columbu, Lou Ferrigno, Frank Zane, Sergio Oliva etc.
A lot of this popularity could be credited to media mogul Joe Weider, who observed these bodybuildlers training and examined the techniques they used to trigger growth.

He codified these to create the ‘Weider Principles’, which included such things as super sets, burns, forced reps etc. If you’ve ever trained with a fitness instructor, you may have come across some of these techniques! At the time, Joe nor the bodybuilders he learned from necessarily understood the science behind these methods.

Instead, they trained intuitively by listening to their bodies and starting to recognize the signs that a workout was working. But as it happens, all these techniques were either causing muscle tears or they were causing pump – and we can take some of these and apply them to our home workouts to make them much more effective. In particular, I’m going to be looking at ONE of these techniques and then a variation on it. And it will change the way you train forever.

Seriously.

So the technique I’m talking about? That would be the Drop Set. A drop set is a routine where you start with a heavy weight, probably something you can lift for about 8-12 reps. You then perform your repetitions as normal until failure. Then, when you’ve reached the point where you can’t lift the weight once more, you simply lower it slightly and then carry on.

So let’s say you’re doing curls in a gym. You might use an approach called ‘running the rack’, which means you’ll move down and down the rack until you reach the lightest weight. You might start with 15kg in each hand and perform 6-8 reps. Then you might put those down, immediately pick up 12kg weights and perform 5 reps. Then you’ll put those down, pick up 10kg and perform 6 reps.

Put them down, pick up 8kg and perform 5 reps. Then finish on 4kg and perform just 4 reps before collapsing.
That is one set. That means you need to repeat this whole process 3 times. So why is this so good? Simple: it’s causing the maximum amount of muscle damage AND it’s swelling the muscle up with metabolites.

When you start out, you’re lifting a heavy weight and you’re going to perform 6-8 reps. This is as many reps as you can muster, so you’re forced to engage a lot of muscle fiber, specifically the fast twitch kind which will exhaust quickly. Then, once those fast twitch fibers are exhausted and torn, you’re slower twitch fiber will kick in to help.

Eventually, you won’t have enough combined strength to keep going, at which point you can’t lift the weight any more. Around the same time, you’ll be switching from the ATP-PC system to the glycolytic system, which allows you to go for longer. But you’re not stopping at failure! You’re picking up a slightly heavier weight and you’re continuing to lift.

This then allows you to engage your slow twitch fibers continuously while continuing to fatigue those few remaining fast twitch fibers that are still working, making even more microtears. At the same time, you’re now reaching a much longer time under tension as you’ll be approaching 20 reps. Your muscles will begin to fill up with lactic acid creating the ‘burn’ as a by-product of the glycogen energy system.

You eventually fail as a result but then you drop the weight and you continue to go – now relying entirely on slow twitch fiber and starting to tear those too – causing maximum muscle damage. Eventually it gets to the point where even 5kg is too much, at which point you’ve caused maximum damage that will lead to maximum growth of all types. It couldn’t be more different from simply performing 10 reps of an exercise you can do comfortably!