As I stated in a recent month’s article, you must ultimately find out what works best for you. We all vary genetically in respect to recovery ability, tolerance to exercise, allocation of muscle fibre type, and a host of other variables which will all have an effect on your rate of progress, and the type of program that you will ultimately need.

As you progress through your training career, you may find that it is best to include constant variety in your workouts, such that every workout for a specific body-part is different from the last in terms of such things as rep range, speed of exercise execution, order of exercises in the workout, type of movement used,.. ad infinitum.

As a rank beginner, just the stress imposed on the body by training with weights is enough to stimulate growth, but as time passes, your body will tend to adapt more and more rapidly to a given training stress, and so it becomes very important to include variety in your training to continue to make gains.

Of course, some people would argue that constant change in your workouts gives you no point for reference if you find that for some reason, despite everything that you try, you have hit a plateau in your training that seems unbreakable. If this happens to you, and it will at some stage, the first thing to do is to go back to basics in your training; cut out any fancy isolation movements that have crept into your routine and concentrate on compound movements using heavy weights for 8-10 repetitions per set.

You may be over trained, so ideally you should take one to two weeks off from the gym before implementing this change. You will also need to look at your rest, recuperation and dietary regime at this time. In the rest of this article, I will cover a variety of variables that you may wish to include in your training at various stages as you advance and climb up the ‘ladder of intensity’, and the concept of periodization in your training.

Training Strategies: Intermediate And Advanced Levels
It can’t be denied that, in general terms, a given muscle will increase in size and strength if it is forced to handle increasingly large loads in terms of weight and/or reps from workout to workout. However, you simply can’t push your body forever like this without an occasional change of pace in your training without something pretty serious happening.

At best, you’ll hit a plateau, but you’ll more than likely sustain a serious injury of some nature. If you want to take an example of a pro-bodybuilder, look at what happened to Dorian Yates. If you read his articles, these state that he was constantly going for greater poundages with little or no change of pace in training – until the bicep tear, quad tear and rotator cuff injury happened virtually all at once – his body had quite simply had ‘the shit kicked out of it’, and something gave. He still handles very big weights in his training, but trains more intelligently and with restraint as far as massive poundages are concerned, which is the way to go.

Targeting different components of the muscle for greater growth
Therefore, if you want longevity in the sport, periodization is the technique to use i.e. intersperse periods of heavy training with periods of using lighter weights while still training hard. This will allow your muscles and connective tissues to recover from the use of heavy poundages in mass training, while developing different components of the muscle cell. A human being basically has three different types of muscle fibre:

a) Slow-twitch (or red) muscle fibres with high oxidative capacity that are involved in long-duration activity e.g. aerobic-type training. These have a relatively low capacity for increase in size (hypertrophy).

b) Fast-twitch (or white) muscle fibres with low oxidative capacity, but tremendous capacity for very high intensity, anaerobic work for short periods e.g. in heavy lifting. These have the greatest capacity for growth and are the fibres primarily targeted in mass training.

c) Intermediate fibres, which have moderate capacity for aerobic and anaerobic work, which can be targeted with moderately high reps (15-20) with heavy weight (for that rep range). These have greater capacity for growth than red fibres.

So, as you can see, going through periods of lighter training will probably cause increased growth through training different aspects of the muscle, and the very act of training hard using these reduced poundages will probably still produce sufficient stimulation of your white fibres to prevent them from atrophying (shrinking) during this period.

You may lose a tiny bit of limit strength, but you’ll find that strength levels you’ve had previously will be gained back very rapidly when back on a mass program. Overall, you’ll probably grow, your condition will improve and you’ll be more cardiovascularly fit at the end of a stint with lower poundages.

This will mean you’ll gain mass faster when you go back to a program with heavy weights – for one thing, the higher reps will have increased the density of capillaries (tiny blood vessels) in the muscles, so that you’ll have better blood circulation to the working muscles.

This means that greater amounts of oxygen will reach the tissue, leading to a delay in the onset of fatigue (more reps with heavy weight), an enhanced ‘pump’ – which means more blood in the muscle bringing in greater amounts of nutrients for growth, and you may see an increase in surface vascularity (if you’re body-fat is low enough).

If you’re not using periodization now, can you see what you’re missing?

Mick Hart

Founder of Mick Hart Training Systems and
the No Bull Collection Magazine.

“For anyone considering steroid use” this is a must read…
Layman’s Guides to Steroids I and II

WARNING: Do not read this unless you are ready to gain some serious lean muscle…
Layman’s Guides to Steroids III (new)