Intensity builds Immensity

As simple as that phrase is, it is true. To be successful in a sport like bodybuilding, you have to train with all you got, every time you get a chance to. If you think about it, our training time is important—To break it down for you, let’s say you’re on a 5 day split, training one body part each day. There’s 52 weeks in a year; you only get 52 sessions per body part to get your arms bigger, or bench stronger, or bring up your hamstrings. And that’s being idealistic. Realistically, with family, work, school, vacation, injuries, and anything else that comes up in every day life, you probably will have to miss more training sessions than you need to in those 52 sessions. So what are you going to do to optimize those 52 training sessions? You’ve got to raise the intensity every time you step foot into the gym. First and foremost you’ve got to come in with the mindset that you’re going to wreak havoc. There’s no doing things halfway. It’s either you move the weight, or you go to failure. It needs to be black or white—learn to push your body to the limit. For me, there are three main ways to increase the intensity of my workout: Increase your weight. This might sound like a gimme, but some people don’t recognize this problem. The heavier the load on the muscle, the more it will stimulate the muscle to will grow. You got to break it down to build it up—a simple concept people often over look. Increase your sets or repetitions. If increasing the weight isn’t quite your style, then try to incrase the volume to your workouts. If you’re not getting a good pump or good blood flow to your muscles, increase the numerical amount that you’re doing. Decrease the rest time between your sets. Things like super-setting, overload work, and drop sets should come to mind when I mention this. The magic time seems to be from 60-90seconds if you want to increase your intensity this way. Below is a video of a recent chest workout. For my first working set of flat bench I increased the repetition. For the rest of my training session for flat bench, I increased the weight as well as decreased the time between my sets. Feel free to mix or match these methods to increasing intensity, or pick one and see how your body to respond. Which ever poison you choose, I promise you it will give you that fire to increase the intensity of your workouts. Danny Quach is a senior at the University of Georgia and he’s studying Health Promotion and Behavior.  He’s a powerlifter at heart and has done it for over six years.  He just competed in his first bodybuilding show in Summer of 2011.  For powerlifting, he holds some Georgia records.  In his first bodybuilding competition, he placed 2^nd in Novice in INBF Southern States.  On his spare time he’s a part of the University of Georgia’s cheerleading co-ed squads; his favorite past-time? Throwing girls around and catching them.