my theory on working out and staying lean year round (besides the obvious nutrition) is to keep the body guessing. shock the system! what i mean by this is each time you go to the gym do something different. there are so many different exercises, techniques, and workout splits that you can do. training this way will also help to keep you from getting bored and keep the progress on track and not hitting a plateau. each time i hit the gym i do a lot of the same exercises for that particular day but i either switch the order up, do drop sets, do light weight high reps or heavy weight low reps. supersets, tri sets and giant sets are also a awesome way to keep things interesting. rep tempo, negatives, and rest pause are good too. i’ll go into detail now of a quick definition of what i mean by these if you don’t know. it’s going to be broken into 2 parts i’ll post the second part tom.

by Joe Opedisano

• switching up the order is key. for example if one week you do 1.incline bb,2.flat db, 3.incline fly,4.hammer incline press. the next week try 1.hammer flat press, 2.incline db press,3.pecdec,4.pullovers.
• the workout split i’m using currently and i’ve see the most progress i ever have is day 1 chest, day 2 back, day 3 shoulders, day 4 arms, day 5 legs, and day 6 i repeat..so week to week my days switch that i do particular muscle groups on.
• i do drop sets every workout. its a way to get that extra squeeze and absolutley go to failure and fill up with as much blood possible. example of a drop set would be db curls start with 30 for 12 immediatley drop to 20s for 15 then drop to 10 for 20 reps. i do dropsets on any exercise whenever i feel its needed.
• light weight high reps and heavy weight for low reps. i train for the feel of the muscle contractions and chase the pump sosometimes i’ll do a exercise for 20-30 reps but or i’ll go heavyier and the least amount of reps i ever do is 8. anything under 8 i feel is too much weight your putting yourself at high risk of injury and in my opinion your using a lot more stuff then the actual muscle your trying to target. but if your training for power and strength more power to you!
• supersets,tri-sets,giant sets - i almost use supersets everyworkout. a superset is just 2 different exercises done back to back for one set. i’ve tried it doing to different muscle groups or the same muscle group targeting two different areas of that muscle. for example yesterday i supersetted deadlifts with reverse grip pull down. one hitting mostly lower and the other hitting mostly upper. a tri-set is a step up…which is three ormore exercises. and a giant set is four or more. give each a try sometime and see what you think.
• rep tempo is somthing i keep switched up all the time depending on the exercise. when you go slow and controlled you can really feel the muscle contraction and release once you really lean the mind muscle connection.
• negatives kind of go hand in hand with rep tempo. i always control the negative. i see so many people training and just letting gravity drop the negative instead of the muscle do the work. also you can do soley negatives for a set. put extra weightthat you normally couldlnt do on a positive and get someone to assist you on the positive and you control the negative fighting gravity the whole way down…killer burn!
• i typically don’t use rest pause to often but i do sometimes. for example if your doing a chest press put a weight on there that you can normally get 8 times or so and once you get to the 8th rep rest for 10-15 seconds then get another rep…rest for 10-15 seconds and so on till failure.

hope this post was helpful to anyone wanting to give a shock to the system with different styles and techniques.