Published at 15:55, Wednesday, 16 February 2011

LAST night I watched one of the UK’s top bodybuilders blast his body with an intense shoulder session. It wasn’t your conventional shoulder workout by any means but the results were there to see.

Intensity is a term that is sometimes overused in the fitness world and everyone has their own definition of what it means. To me, intensity is the only way to gain results. There is no half way house, you get down to that gym, blast your body for an hour, then go home. If you are serious about train-ing, then intensity should be the only concept you know.

Intensity can be different, dependant on the exercise you perform. I consider drop setting in weight training to be some of the intense techniques out there at the moment. If you consider cardio fitness, then high intensity intervals are amongst some of the best. Both are different in their ideas and benefits but both have a major advantage over anything else.

If you are looking to build muscle then intensity can stimulate growth hormone long after the workout has finished. From a cardio perspective it can stimulate your metabolism to fuel fat burn for days.

Spending an hour on treadmill might seem like hard work but I could easily give you a four-minute workout that would create a calorie furnace like no other.

Intensity doesn’t mean all over body workouts either, it can be performed through isolation to brilliant effect. Straight setting is a conven-tion that gym instructors use for beginners. It doesn’t promote anything after the beginners’ muscles have got used to that process. What it needs is a spark, something to tell the muscle ‘it’s time to work harder’.

Different techniques were introduced including drop setting, super setting and pyramids. These days there are even more you could include in that list.

A few years ago I spent a majority of my training performing a combination of super sets and drop sets and it generated some of the best results I’ve had in building muscle. I concentrated solely on performing a good number of reps so the body had less time to recover.

One of my favourites was what I called the top shelf workout. In the sports centre they have two racks of weights, the top one going up to 22kg dumbbells. I would pick a particular exercise like side lateral raises and perform six reps on 22kg dumbbells and work down until I got to 8kg. The aim was to remain consistent throughout. At the end of that workout my shoulders were crying out for a rest and the lactic acid was tremendous, but it pro-ved important in building better sculpted deltoids. The same technique was applied for bicep curls, front deltoid raises and kickbacks.

If I compared this to performing a heavy set of six reps then I could recover a lot easier than performing drop sets. This is what training is all about, your body knows what a tough session it has been through then, when you tell it to do it again in its weak, fragile state, the eventual result is beyond what you believed you could do.

I can’t go without ment-ioning the versaclimber. This machine will work you to the point of failure. With its varied resistance and training programs you will gain an intense workout very quickly. If you train on the treadmill then pick a distance and perform interval sessions. I complete one at the moment which allows me to walk or jog for 0.1 of a mile then sprint for 0.2 of a mile. I try and complete three miles in total and at the end my legs don’t feel attached to my body. More importantly my fitness improves dramatically.

I mentioned before about a four minute workout that will hit you hard and we all know I’m talking about tabata protocol. It doesn’t need to be an hour of pointless exercising, your body needs to work during this tabata session in order for you to see results. Twenty seconds of intensity for a rotation of eight times might not sound a lot but ask yourself that at the end.

Using kettlebells for this protocol will maximise fat burn and shape the body like no other. Whether it be tabata snatches, swings, cleans, clean and pressing, high pull, thrusters, squats, deadlifts and there is more, you will soon fatigue and challenge the body to work harder.

So start tonight, get down to that gym, forget what you know and work that bit harder, you might just get the results you want.

Published by http://www.whitehavennews.co.uk