10 methods for more muscle mass and strength

If you've hit a lifting plateau, you know how difficult it can be getting over the top and continuing the climb for more muscle gains. That's why Men's Fitness asked me to open the vault and pull out my heaviest hitters: 10 training techniques designed to ensure you won't fail again in the pursuit for more muscle.

What to do

Incorporate any of the following techniques into your workout regimen with virtually any exercise you perform—but only for four weeks at a time. Since each is so effective, you'll be tempted to stick with the first one you try. Don't. Instead, trade one method for another every four weeks. This will help prevent plateaus and take your size and strength levels to an all-time high. The added bonus: You'll never get bored. Whether you're stuck in a longtime lifting rut or you simply want to add another weapon to your workout arsenal, these methods will help you make the fastest gains ever, in the quickest time possible.

1. The 5% method

How to do it:
Choose the heaviest weight you can lift eight times (your eight-rep max) and do four sets of seven repetitions, resting three minutes between each set. Do the same for your next two workouts (do one workout every five days), but increase the weight by 5% each session and decrease the reps by one. In your fourth workout, do seven-rep sets again, but use the weight you used in your second workout. You'll be 5% stronger than when you started.
Here's an example:
> Workout 1: Do four sets of 7 reps with 100lbs.
> Workout 2: Do four sets of 6 reps with 105lbs.
> Workout 3: Do four sets of 5 reps with 110lbs.
> Workout 4: Do four sets of 7 reps with 105lbs.
Why it works
By always increasing your weights or the reps, you'll improve a little each workout for a dramatic cumulative effect.

2. Diminished-rest interval training

How to do it:
Time the rest you take between sets in your current workout. In each subsequent session, try to perform the same total number of sets and reps, but reduce your rest periods by five to 10 seconds each time.
Why it works:
This forces your muscles to recover faster between sets, which stimulates growth.
 

3. The patient-lifter's method

How to do it:
Find your two-rep max and do six sets of two repetitions, resting two minutes between each set. In your next workout, try to perform six sets of four. You may be able to get only three sets of three, or three sets of two, but keep repeating this workout until you can perform four repetitions for all six sets. When you do, your two-repetition maximum will now be your four-repetition maximum, so you'll be able to lift more at any repetition range.
Why it works:
Most guys hit a plateau because they train with the same weights and reps for too long. This method shocks the body to trigger fast results.

4. Back-off sets

How to do it:
After performing 2-4 sets with your six-rep max, perform a higher-repetition set with lighter weights, known as a back-off set. Drop the weight by 40% and do as many reps as possible, performing them as quickly as you can. For example, say your first and second sets were six reps with 100lbs. Do set No.3 with 60lbs for as many reps as possible. (You'll be able to complete more repetitions than you'd usually get with 60lbs.)
Why it works:
The nerves that stimulate your muscles are already "excited" from your heavy sets, so they're psyched up to do more work than usual. Doing the back-off set forces your muscles to work harder than normal, sparking muscle growth.

 

5. Partials

How to do it:
Choose a weight that's about 10-20% greater than your six-rep max. But instead of doing a full repetition, lower the weight about one-fourth of the way down before lifting it back to the starting position. Do 3-4 sets of 4-6 repetitions, resting three minutes between each set. (Use a spotter.) Follow that up with 1-2 regular sets of 4-6 repetitions using a weight that's a little heavier than the amount you could normally lift for 4-6 reps.
Why it works:
It preps your body for heavier weight because it allows you to overload the part of the lift where you're strongest, without being limited by the portion of the movement where you're weakest.

6. Waveloading

How to do it:
Find your five-rep max and follow these guidelines:
> Do four repetitions.
> Rest for three minutes.
> Increase the weight by 5% and do three reps.
> Rest for three minutes.
> Increase the weight by 5% and do two reps.
> Rest for three minutes.
> Repeat the process, but start with a weight that's about 5% heavier than the one used in your first set.
Why it works:
In the second set, your muscles' nerves are highly activated from the heavy load of the first set. This allows them to recruit more muscle fibers than usual, allowing you to lift even heavier weights.

 

7. Cluster repetitions

How to do it:
Choose a weight you can lift at most 2-3 times (about 80% of your one-rep max). Then perform 10 sets of one repetition, resting 30 seconds between each set.
Why it works:
It allows you to perform 10 repetitions with a weight you can usually lift only two times. So it works more total muscle fibers than is typically possible. Combine this with Diminished-rest Interval Training for maximum muscle-building effect.

8. 6-1 principle

How to do it:
Take your seven-rep max, and do six repetitions. Then rest for 3-5 minutes. Then increase the weight until it's about 90% of your one-rep max. Do one repetition, and rest 3-5 minutes. Repeat the procedure, but this time do six reps with a weight that's about 2-3% heavier than your six-rep max. For your one-rep set, choose a weight that's about 2-3% heavier than your max. (Congratulations, you set a new personal record.)
Why it works:
In the one-repetition set, your muscles are expecting to do six repetitions, so it doesn't seem as hard. In the six-repetition set, your muscles are expecting a heavier load, which makes the weight seem lighter. The end result is a plateau-busting effort.
 

9. Inverted sets and reps

How to do it:
Use this scheme if you've been doing three sets of 10 reps or a similar workout. Take your current set and rep scheme and flip it, so the number of sets you're doing becomes the number of repetitions, and vice versa. Instead of doing three sets of 10 reps, you'll do 10 sets of three reps. Since you're stopping at three reps instead of 10, you need to rest only about 20-30 seconds between sets.
Why it works:
Inverting your workout allows you to do the same number of total repetitions, but increases the average amount of force your muscles apply to the weight.

10. Half-volume

How to do it:
Cut in half the number of sets you normally do.
Why it works:
If none of the other muscle tricks work for you, your muscles are probably overtrained. By reducing the demand on them, you'll allow them to recover. Another option: Take a week off.

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Body Composition and Flexibility

These 2 areas help remind us that children are different from adults and each other. It may seem ridiculous to speak about body composition and flexibility in kids because we all know they are mostly made of Play-Doh. However, it is important to discuss the general changes in body tissues that occur during growth and the various effects these changes have on exercise and sports participation.

Girls and boys can play together until about the third grade. After this point, it is a good idea to start the transition of separating boys and girls in contact-type sports. This gives plenty of time for puberty to start and not have a 4'2", 70-pound boy playing against a 5'9", 130-pound girl. Remember, the average ages that puberty begins is much different for girls and boys. Even from early childhood, girls in general have more body fat than boys. That is just the way the cards are dealt. Differences in body fat stay throughout childhood and then increase in girls once they hit puberty. Boys have a more dramatic change in body composition because new levels of testosterone from puberty start to add muscle mass. Kids who are already overweight tend to remain overweight into adolescence and adulthood.

The changes in body composition are important because they may have an effect on sports participation and performance, especially in sports in which center of gravity and weight are important like gymnastics, diving, figure skating, and wrestling. Puberty is a time of multiple adjustments that can have an effect on your child’s participation in sports. Understanding the reality of the physical and chemical changes of puberty can enable you to support your active child during and through that period of development.

Children are also more flexible than adults. Who do you think was the model for Gumby? It had to be a child. But as usual, many good things must come to an end or just slow down. During the rapid growth of puberty, kids often become temporarily less flexible than they were prior to puberty. Let me paint a visual for you here.

Some children have a slow growth spurt, while others grow so fast they need a speeding ticket. Essentially, their bones are growing more quickly than their muscles and tendons can stretch to keep up. Most boys get more muscles and lose some body fat, but often lose flexibility.

Girls can also become tighter during the rapid growth of puberty if they cannot stretch to keep up with their growth. However, the increase in estrogen usually allows girls to maintain or improve their flexibility once they slow down their speed of growth. Having good flexibility may help some athletes self-select into certain sports such as swimming, diving, gymnastics, tennis, figure skating, wrestling, or martial arts. Understanding these changes in body composition and flexibility can prepare you for their potential effect as you watch your child exercise, train, or compete while going through puberty.

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How Physical Fitness May Promote School Success

Children who are physically fit absorb and retain new information more effectively than children who are out of shape, a new study finds, raising timely questions about the wisdom of slashing physical education programs at schools.

Parents and exercise scientists (who, not infrequently, are the same people) have known for a long time that physical activity helps young people to settle and pay attention in school or at home, with salutary effects on academic performance. A representative study, presented in May at the American College of Sports Medicine, found that fourth- and fifth-grade students who ran around and otherwise exercised vigorously for at least 10 minutes before a math test scored higher than children who had sat quietly before the exam.

More generally, in a large-scale study of almost 12,000 Nebraska schoolchildren published in August in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers compiled each child’s physical fitness, as measured by a timed run, body mass index and academic achievement in English and math, based on the state’s standardized test scores. Better fitness proved to be linked to significantly higher achievement scores, while, interestingly, body size had almost no role. Students who were overweight but relatively fit had higher test scores than lighter, less-fit children. 

To date, however, no study specifically had examined whether and in what ways physical fitness might affect how children learn. So researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently stepped into that breach, recruiting a group of local 9- and 10-year-old boys and girls, testing their aerobic fitness on a treadmill, and then asking 24 of the most fit and 24 of the least fit to come into the exercise physiology lab and work on some difficult memorization tasks. 

Learning is, of course, a complex process, involving not only the taking in and storing of new information in the form of memories, a process known as encoding, but also recalling that information later. Information that cannot be recalled has not really been learned. 

Earlier studies of children’s learning styles have shown that most learn more readily if they are tested on material while they are in the process of learning it. In effect, if they are quizzed while memorizing, they remember more easily. Straight memorization, without intermittent reinforcement during the process, is tougher, although it is also how most children study.

In this case, the researchers opted to use both approaches to learning, by providing their young volunteers with iPads onto which several maps of imaginary lands had been loaded. The maps were demarcated into regions, each with a four-letter name. During one learning session, the children were shown these names in place for six seconds. The names then appeared on the map in their correct position six additional times while children stared at and tried to memorize them. 

In a separate learning session, region names appeared on a different map in their proper location, then moved to the margins of the map. The children were asked to tap on a name and match it with the correct region, providing in-session testing as they memorized.

A day later, all of the children returned to the lab and were asked to correctly label the various maps’ regions. 

The results, published last week in PLoS One, show that, over all, the children performed similarly when they were asked to recall names for the map when their memorization was reinforced by testing. 

But when the recall involved the more difficult type of learning — memorizing without intermittent testing — the children who were in better aerobic condition significantly outperformed the less-fit group, remembering about 40 percent of the regions’ names accurately, compared with barely 25 percent accuracy for the out-of-shape kids. 

This finding suggests that “higher levels of fitness have their greatest impact in the most challenging situations” that children face intellectually, the study’s authors write. The more difficult something is to learn, the more physical fitness may aid children in learning it. 

Of course, this study did not focus specifically on the kind of active exercise typical of recess, but on longer-term, overall physical fitness in young children. But in doing so, it subtly reinforces the importance of recess and similar physical activity programs in schools, its authors believe.

If children are to develop and maintain the kind of aerobic fitness that amplifies their ability to learn, said co-author Charles Hillman, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Illinois and a fellow at the university’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, they should engage in “at least an hour a day” of vigorous physical activity. Schools, where children spend so many of their waking hours, provide the most logical and logistically plausible place for them to get such exercise, he said.

Or as he and his co-authors dryly note in the study: “Reducing or eliminating physical education in schools, as is often done in tight financial times, may not be the best way to ensure educational success among our young people.”

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The 5 Best Full Body Exercises

In the episodes How To Lose Fat Quickly and How To Build Muscle, we learn that there is one distinct similarity between both fat-burning and muscle-building goals: They each require the use of full body, multiple-joint exercises that activate many muscles at the same time.
When it comes to full body exercises, some are more effective than others, so in this article, you’ll learn the 5 full body exercises that get you the most results in the shortest period of time. (Each exercise below links to a video demonstration of the movement.).

The 5 Best Full Body Exercises

Full Body Exercise #1: Turkish Get-Up

I may be a fitness buff, but my history and geography skills aren’t quite up-to-par, so I’m not quite sure how of why this exercise is “Turkish.” But the “Get-Up” part is easy to understand once you’ve tried this move.
To complete a Turkish Get-Up, you lie on your side, with a dumbbell in one hand. The dumbbell should be held out at arm’s length. From this position, you simply stand, while keeping the dumbbell overhead at an arm’s length. This means you only have one arm and two legs to help you both stand and push the weight of that dumbbell up as you stand.

This exercise can be difficult to learn, but if you can do 3-4 sets of 5-10 Turkish Get-Ups per side, then you are probably in pretty good shape!

Full Body Exercise #2: Swing Squats

For this exercise, hold a dumbbell or a kettlebell down by your feet with one outstretched arm, then drop into a squat position with your butt pushed behind you, your back straight, and your heels firmly planted. Now, stand about halfway up as you begin to swing the dumbbell up, quickly reverse direction and drop down into a full squat position again, then powerfully stand as you swing the dumbbell overhead.
If you do this exercise as explosively as possible, which I highly recommend, you will find that your heart rate will get very high with just a few repetitions, making the swing squat both a cardiovascular and strength building exercise.

Full Body Exercise #3: Medicine Ball Slams

This is a great stress-relieving exercise, and also helps to build power and athleticism in the upper body, core, and legs. It is also a very easy full-body exercise to learn.
To do a medicine ball slam, you simply get a medicine ball (those big heavy balls you can often find in the corner of the gym), raise it overhead, then swing your arms down as you release the ball and slam it into the ground as hard as possible.
As you can imagine, this can be a loud exercise, so you may want to find a private area of the gym (like an empty group exercise room) and you will also need to be careful not to let the ball bounce back up and hit you in the face!
For an extra challenge, I sometimes finish a workout to complete exhaustion with 50-100 medicine ball slams.

Full Body Exercise #4: Burpees (also known as Squat-Thrust Jumps)

As an infamous exercise used by fitness bootcamp instructors, the burpee is one of those movements that you can love to hate. It will give you a full body workout in a matter of mere minutes, but also requires a great deal of focus and intensity.
Here’s how to do a burpee: from a standing position, squat down, put your hands on the ground, kick your legs out behind you, do a push-up (optional), then kick the legs back up into a squat position, stand and jump as you swing your arms overhead. If you’re an advanced exerciser or want to add even more “oomph” to this exercise, you can wear a weighted vest as you do your burpees.
Most burpee workouts involve doing a series of 10, 15, or 20 burpees as part of a full body weight training or body weight circuit, but you can do just 1-2 minutes of burpees in the morning as a fantastic metabolic booster to jumpstart your day!

Full Body Exercise #5: Deadlift-to-Overhead Press

The premise of the deadlift-to-overhead press is fairly simple: you pick a heavy object off the ground and lift it overhead. The object can be a dumbbell, barbell, kettlebell, medicine ball, sandbag, or, if you’re working out with a partner, even another person!
When you pick the object off the ground, which is called a deadlift, you’ll need to have good form: looking forward with your knees bent, butt out, and back straight.
You then stand, and as you stand or after you are in a standing position, hoist the weight overhead – using your hip and leg muscles to assist your upper body with driving the weight up.

A Full Body Exercises Workout

Want a fast and effective workout that gets you fit fast and burns lots of calories in a short period of time? Those last two exercises (the Burpees and the Deadlift-to-Overhead Press) are the key exercises for a tough but highly effective workout called The Burner.

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5 Simple Tips for Fitness Success

1. Exercise Daily

Exercise daily for at least an hour. You do not have to kill yourself from running, jogging, etc., but you should have some sort of moderate physical activity in your everyday life. If you're looking to shed a few pounds fast, do a higher-level intensity workout. For example, go on a walk at a brisk pace for an hour. Or, you can jog and set certain intervals to sprint during that hour. Make sure you're not in severe pain during your workout. Just a warning, your muscles will ache after a high intensity workout. It may be irritating, but that means your body is changing for the better. Be sure to stay hydrated, stretch, and eat foods with a decent amount of protein after each workout. The protein will help keep your muscles, not fat, rebuilding.

2. Eat the Right Foods and Portion Each Meal

No matter how bad your stomach is telling you to go for candy over healthy food, try to stay away from sweets. Sugar from candy will not help you get in shape. Even if it's just a single candy bar, one will eventually lead to another. Fruits and vegetables are the best thing to eat when getting into shape. Apples, for example, do a good job at making the stomach feel full for up to 3 to 4 hours. Green vegetables such as green beans and broccoli keep the digestive system clean and running.

Also, stick to lean meats like turkey and chicken. Seafood, such as, shrimp, and tilapia are also great alternatives. These foods are full of protein and healthy nutrients to help keep muscles fit and ready for workouts. In addition, be sure to portion what you eat. Having a good metabolism comes from portioning meals. Try to plan out eating six times a day and setting smaller portions, rather than having three large meals throughout the day. This will also help you find yourself breathing smoother when working out rather than huffing and puffing for air. This is because you will have less food in your digestive system, which means more energy is used toward your exercise.

3. Keep Track of Calories and Food Intake Per Day

Keeping track of how many calories you eat in a day will be helpful in planning out your physical exercising. Ever wonder why body builders' body masses are so big? That's because they plan out their meals and take in more (healthy) calories than the average person. On the other hand, losing weight and striving for a skinnier physique will involve more physical exercise than calories you ingest.

4. Be Sure to Get Sleep

Even though most of us have eight-hour jobs during the day or night, it is crucial to get enough sleep to recharge the body's batteries. Six to eight hours of sleep will keep the body going throughout the day, but if you happen to feel tired at any point after coming home from work, by all means take a small nap before exercising. You should only nap for about a half hour. This will prevent you from staying up later in the night.

5. Stay Motivated

An important key to being in shape is to set goals and keep a positive mindset. If you stay positive, you will be able to push yourself to get that fit body you've always wanted.Erie Cross Training Examiner Kyle Melerski, a music technology student at Capital University, is on the rise by using his creative writing skills to inform and entertain people. is the inside source for everything local.  Powered by Examiners, the largest pool of knowledgeable and passionate contributors in the world, we provide unique and original content to enhance life in your local city wherever that may be.

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