Gain weight and lose weight efficiently

I prefer complex ones, but I can find room for single-joint exercises. Regardless of the choice of exercises, you must also choose an appropriate strategy for adding load.

It's hard to make progress if you can't get your body to do things it's not used to. A workout is only as good as its scheduled progress, adding. The problem is that this adding is often missing from training plans.

I make the plans. And I understand why some coaches don't include load-adding in their programs.

1. Individuality

In an ideal world, I would know exactly how your body will respond to load. Unfortunately, I don't. Even if I did know, another person will react completely differently again.

2. Lack of experience

Many trainers write interesting programs. Sometimes I wonder how many people such a trainer probably actually trains. Some internet training programs seem designed really only for the internet.

3. Laziness

Training sequences are not easy to plan. You need to have a good idea of how people normally respond to each phase. It's much easier to tell you to do X reps and hope the results come.

The easiest sequence is to add weight to the barbell. It works great for beginners, but eventually it stops working. Maybe you have a lot of strength and lousy training capacity. Or maybe you respond better to adding reps while your sparring on adding weight. Maybe you're just losing weight and adding weight to the barbell would be pointless.

I'll summarize my best practices for gaining muscle and losing fat here. The purpose of this article is to show you my methods and explain why I use them. The factors are many and some you may not know about.

Do it with gusto!

Goal 1 - Increase the volume of muscle mass

I may have missed the mark. Is there anyone here who reads bodybuilding sites and doesn't want bigger muscles?

In the volume part of your training, you need to eat more calories each day than you expend. This will give you the opportunity to go wild in your workouts because you are sort of well fed. In other words, it won't be easy to overtrain at this stage. I suggest the three most intense loading protocols.

Strategies for adding weight

Adding load every workout is the most effective and challenging way to load. It puts the most strain on your joints and nervous system. The key is to add small chunks. It makes the muscles work harder, but it doesn't overload them.

Many trainers recommend adding 2% of the load in each workout. However, many people are not exactly ecstatic about this system. Let's say you're doing triceps extensions and you have 40 pounds loaded. Next workout, you'll want to load 0.8 pounds more. I probably don't even need to explain this anymore. Basically, what happens to everyone is that the gym equipment won't allow them to load that little bit extra and they'll be forced to add many times more than 2%.

That's why I like multi-joint exercises. If you choose a close-grip bench for your triceps and load 225 pounds, you'll be adding 4.5 pounds the next time. Five pounds you can add at any gym. If your next move should be 7.5 pounds, always round down. Add 5 and not 10 pounds.

I like to increase the weight in two percent increments. But the application of this is limited to complex exercises. It can be helped with magnets that add to the one-arms, but it doesn't completely solve the problem.

The strategy of adding reps

For lighter, single-joint exercises, I like adding reps. You can overload the muscles and don't have to add miniature pieces of weight. There are two ways to do this effectively.

If you go with a traditional scheme, like 5x5, you can simply add one rep to each set in your next workout. If you've already come close to failing today, you may not be able to add one rep to each set. It doesn't matter. The important thing is that the total number of reps be higher in each subsequent workout.

Keep adding reps until you get to 5x7, add weight, and repeat the process.

The second way of adding reps counts the target number of reps. Let's say you want 25 reps with a weight that you can do a fresh 4 or 6 reps per set. Next workout, add on 2 or 3 reps to your total and continue doing this each workout until you reach 35 reps total.

At that point, add weight and start again. I use this system most often because I find that athletes focus too much on a given number of reps in a set, when they should be more interested in the total number of reps of an exercise in a single training unit.

Strategies for adding frequency

Adding training units of an exercise is the best recruitment strategy I've ever tried. However, it's not for everyone. You need to be able to train more frequently and you need to understand the planes of motion.

Let me simplify. I break down the movements as follows: upper body deadlift and push in the horizontal plane, upper body deadlift and push in the vertical plane, and deadlift or squat. If you don't know what muscles are involved in which plane, this information is probably not useful to you. If you know that the wide grip push-up primarily trains the lats and upper back muscles, read on.

Adding frequency isn't complicated until you complicate it. If you're not good at the hunches and want a bigger back, you should practice the hunches more often. If you only added volume to the workout, you would only stretch out the time it takes to recover. Start with three workouts of crunches, then add one the next week. The third week, add a fifth set of crunches.

By the fourth week, train six more push-ups. The fifth week, keep the frequency at six pushup workouts. Week six, practice hunches once and you can go back to anywhere between three and six hunches workouts in week seven. This is what it would look like.

Week 1: Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Week 2: Monday morning, afternoon, Wednesday, Friday.

Week 3: Monday morning, afternoon, Wednesday, Friday morning, afternoon.

Week 4: Monday morning, afternoon, Wednesday morning, afternoon, Friday
morning, afternoon.

Week 5: Monday morning, afternoon, Wednesday morning, afternoon, Friday
morning, afternoon.

Week 6: Wednesday.

Week 7: Choose one scheme from weeks 1 - 4.

Notice that I did not increase the number of training days. I raised the number of workouts by adding morning and evening. I found this worked better than practicing six days in a row. There should be at least six hours between morning and evening workouts.

In week seven, you have several options. If your back is still limping, you can jump back to six workouts a week. However, make sure you keep the frequency to a minimum every fourth week. Or you can go back to four or five workouts a week. But again, every fourth week, ease your body back into it.

Summary

Add 2% weight for complex exercises, add reps for single-joint exercises, and add frequency when training lagging areas.

Goal 2 - Burn fat

When you lose weight, you need to burn more calories each day than you take in. In training, this requires you to keep yourself more lean because it's easier to overtrain. That's why I prescribe routines that don't require adding load in every workout, but force the metabolism to speed up by increasing excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC).

Before I get to the actual procedure, let me explain what EPOC is.

After you finish your workout, your body needs more oxygen. When you train with weights or simply run around outside, your body uses a lot of oxygen. This debt must be repaid in order for the body to maintain homeostasis. The body must return to the state it was in before the workout. It does this by restoring energy sources, re-oxygenating the blood and restoring circulatory hormone levels, lowering the temperature and returning breathing and heart rate to normal.

All of these steps together are called EPOC and all require energy. Why

higher your EPOC, the more calories you'll burn after your workout. Alwyn Cosgrove calls this "afterburn." (afterburn)

So if you're training for weight loss, your training regimen should force your body to use more oxygen. Here are my routines.

Strategies for taking rest

Gradually shortening breaks and not changing the load is my favorite way to promote weight loss. Your muscles and joints don't suffer as much from lack of food because you're not adding weight. Instead, you're forcing your energy systems (especially anaerobic glycolysis) to work harder.

Before I get to the actual strategy, I need to reiterate the idea of exercise selection. There is no room in weight loss training for single-joint exercises!

That doesn't mean you should skip them altogether. But they will have nothing to do with weight loss. Put them at the end of your workout when you're done losing weight.

When we're not talking about exercise choices, taking away rest is simple. You'll start with short breaks, say 60 seconds between each exercise in a circle, and you'll take away five seconds in each subsequent workout. Here's an example.

Week 1, Workout A

1A) Shyb
Pause 60 seconds

1B) Barbell push-up
Pause 60 seconds

1C) Reposition
Rest 60 seconds and repeat

Week 2, Workout A

1A) Shyb
Pause 55 seconds

1B) Barbell push-up
Pause 55 seconds

1C) Reposition
Pause 55 seconds and repeat

Think about the initial pause first. If you're not even breaking a sweat at 60 seconds, you're doing too little for yourself. Try 60 in your first workout, and if that was too much, take 10 seconds off for the second instead of 5. From there, always take 5 off.

You can stick with this scheme for the entire weight loss period. I've had clients who started at 60 and got down to 10 second breaks, with the same exercises and weights and rep counts. They all lost a substantial amount of fat due to dramatically increased EPOC. Shortening the breaks can really work wonders with most people.

By the way, if you get nauseous while training, try BETA-7. It works for most people because it reduces proton buildup during workouts where there is a special emphasis on anaerobic glycolysis.

Strategies for adding sets

Another effective strategy is to add one series to each exercise in your workout. This is good because adding a series is not as challenging as adding weight or reps, but challenging enough to increase your training capacity.

There are two ways to add a series depending on how you have your workout put together.

If you're going at it normally, say a 5x5 scheme, simply add one set in your next workout and do 6x5. The load and breaks don't change. You will keep adding sets as long as it produces results. You can go from 5x5 to 10x5 and still see results.

If you are experienced, you will probably adapt faster. In that case, limit your adding to three weeks and opt for a larger load. For example, you can go from 8x3 to 10x3.

There is another way. If you have a target number of reps for each exercise, say 25, with a weight that you can do 4 to 6 reps with when fresh. And let's say your last pushup workout looked like this:

Series 1: 6 reps
Series 2: 5 reps
Series 3: 5 reps
Series 4: 5 reps
Series 5: 4 reps

Next workout, you'll add a sixth series in which you do as many reps as you can manage.

Series 1: 6 reps
Series 2: 5 reps
Series 3: 5 reps
Series 4: 5 reps
Series 5: 4 reps
Series 6: maximum reps

I generally prefer to shorten the breaks. The most most most people can do is three full body workouts a week. Shorten the breaks on Mondays and Fridays and add sets on Wednesdays.

Summary: Shorten breaks in two workouts a week, add sets in one, and stick to multi-joint exercises.

Words in conclusion

It doesn't matter if you're gaining muscle or losing weight. A strategy should always be in place. Use these methods and you will force your body to do more and more work. This will ensure that you will never be staggering in place.

Written by Chad Waterbury, translated by Jaromír Uhlíř