Bodybuilding Tips and Tricks

I’m going to start off the discussion of this technique by making sure that you’re familiar with the negative and positive portion of a repetition. The positive (sometimes called the concentric) part of a rep is typically thought of as the “working” part, the portion where you are exerting more force and contracting the muscle. The negative portion is the part of the rep where you return to the original position for the exercise…in most cases, this is the easier part of the repetition. For example, when doing the bench press, pressing the bar upward is the positive portion and lowering the bar back toward your chest is the negative porton. When performing barbell curls, curling the weight upward is positive, lowering it back down is negative. And so on.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the Negative Reps technique. Like Forced Reps, Negative Reps will require you to have a training partner or spotter to help you out. Let’s take the bench press for example. To perform negative reps, you’ll load the bar up with a heavier weight than you’d normally use. Then, you’ll have your partner help you perform the postive (pressing up) portion of the exercise while you (and only you) will perform the negative (lowering back down) portion. Repeat this process for reps. What this allows you to do is handle more weight in the negative part of the rep than you normally would if you were performing conventional reps. Negative reps are great for building up ligaments and tendons quicker than normal reps and this will then enable you to lift heavier weights in the future and stimulate new growth. Give these a try and see what ya think!

Forced Reps are another great bodybuilding technique that you can use to break out of plateaus, kick your muscles into new growth and add some extra “oompf” to your workouts. This technique requires a partner to help you out so if you don’t already train with someone, you’ll need to ask someone at your gym to lend a hand. To perform forced reps, you should rep out on an exercise as you normally would. Once you’ve reached a point where you can no longer perform another rep, your training partner should help you do one or two additional reps. Even though your partner is helping you, you’re still making your muscles work past the point of fatigue which is a great way to shock them into some new strength and size gains. It’s very important that your partner only helps you just enough for you to complete the rep…you want *your* muscles to be doing as much of the work as possible. You can utilize the Forced Reps technique with a multitude of bodybuilding exercises; some of my favorites include the bench press, barbell curls, and skull crushers. Give ‘em a try!

Partial Reps are a great way for advanced bodybuilders to shock their muscles into new growth. If you’ve never given them a try before, try adding them into your bodybuilding workout when you want to particularly fry a certain muscle group. These are intense enough to only be used sparingly (perhaps every second or third workout for one of the sets within that bodybuilding workout); if used too frequently, you’ll end up overtraining.

To utilize the partial reps technique, you should perform reps for an exercise as you normally would. However, when you are fatigued enough that you can no longer perform a full rep, you should continue with partial reps. For example, if you’re doing bicep curls, you’d rep out with the full motion of the curl. Then, when you can perform no more with the full movement, you would do half reps, quarter reps, and so on until you can’t even move the weight an inch. Needless to say, your muscles (in this case, your bi’s) will be screaming for mercy by the end of this set. Give these a try and enjoy the burn!

They say variety is the spice of life. And, varying your workouts is one of the best ways to ensure that you continue to achieve gains from your bodybuilding program. Building muscle is all about adaptation: forcing your muscles to adapt to increasing and varying stresses and challenges by increasing in size and strength. One problem that many people I’ve encountered have is that they’ve never changed the original workout plan they initially received, whether they obtained it from a book, a video, online, or from a personal trainer. As a result, they end up doing the same bodybuilding workout over and over (sometimes for months and years at a time) and their gains stagnate. Once they’re no longer making gains, they lose their motivation and often end up quitting their fitness routine entirely.

There are nearly an infinite number of ways to keep your workout program fresh and mix things up. One of the easiest (and simplest for beginners to understand) methods I’ve found is to take the typical training split that most people start out with and turn it on it’s head a bit. (Incidentally, a training split refers to when you work which bodyparts and which are grouped together throughout a particular training cycle–usually a week). The typical pairing of muscle groups in a workout plan is back with biceps and chest with triceps. There’s good logic behind this because each of the pairings are grouping like with like: biceps and back exercises typically involve pulling motions while chest and triceps exercises usually involve pushing motions. In addition, most back exercises utilize your biceps as an accessory muscle and most chest exercises utitlize the triceps in the same fashion.

While this is certainly a logical training split, a good way to change things up is to reverse things and work back with triceps and chest and biceps. In addition to providing a welcome variation to your muscles, it also will allow you to lift heavier and work harder when it comes time to train those accessory muscles (biceps and triceps). This is because the larger muscles (back and chest) which, incidentally, are normally trained first, have not weakened those accessory muscles yet. So, once you’re through with your chest workout and are ready to blast those bi’s, they should be nearly totally fresh and ready to be blitzed. You should notice how much stronger you are in these accessory muscles almost immediately.

One item of note: you should be sure to allow 24 hours of rest between training days when using this split to avoid overtraining your biceps and triceps. Performing a back/triceps, chest/biceps workout on consecutive days should be avoided as the biceps and triceps will be hit to some extent on both days. There are a ton of other ways to vary your workout and keep those gains coming. I’ll address some in future articles…for now, try mixing things up with the split I mentioned and keep training hard!

The two best times to perform cardio are:

- First thing in the morning before you’ve eaten anything
OR
- Immediately following your weight workout

In both cases, you are more likely to burn fat because your glycogen energy stores are depleted, in one case by a night of sleep (and lack of food) and in the other by your weight training routine. If you’re concerned about not having enough energy or about possibly burning muscle when performing cardio at these times, supplement with 20-25 grams of whey protein, 3-5 grams of L-Glutamine, and 3-5 grams of L-Carnitine beforehand.

Simply put, L-Carnitine promotes fat burning. L-Carnitine encourages the body to burn stored fat for energy rather than carbohydrates. It does this by forcing fat into the muscular cells. Carnitine is the only nutrient that can transport fat to the part of the cell that will burn it, the mitochondria. If you can’t get fat into the mitochondria, you can’t burn it. So without carnitine, no fat burning can occur. Optimal carnitine levels, on the other hand, allow the body to burn fat at an optimal rate.

In addition to it’s help with fat burning, benefits of supplementing L-Carnitine include:

- More energy to exercise and increases endurance and performance
- Increased energy levels
- Decreased cholesterol and triglycerides
- Reduced food cravings
- Better heart and liver health
- Promotion of healthy circulation

Dosage: In order to maximize the fat burning capabilities of L-Carnitine, take 3-5 grams before and after your workouts. Here’s the brand I’m currently using:
NOW L-Carnitine, 1000mg/100 Tablets

Interval training refers to varying the intensity of your workload during cardio sessions. This can be done by upping the speed or the level on the machine at regular intervals throughout the workout. For instance, on a treadmill, you might try a brisk walk or jog for a minute followed by sprinting for a minute and then go back to the jog, etc. You can also apply this technique to a stair stepper, an elliptical, or a cross trainer. Proceed at a moderate pace for a prescribed period of time (typically 1-2 minutes), then kick things up to a fast and furious pace for another prescribed period (typically around 60 seconds), then return to moderate pace. Rinse and repeat. Research shows that not only does training in this manner burn more calories during the actual cardio session, it also increases your calorie-burning during the hours following your training.

The pre-exhaust technique involves working a muscle group using an isolation move before moving on to a heavier compound joint exercise. This goes against a basic rule of beginning bodybuilding which tells us that a good rule of thumb is to perform heavy multi-joint exercises first, then move on to the lighter isolation moves. There is a method to the madness though. The pre-exhaust technique allows us to fatigue the targeted muscle group so that when we perform the heavier compound joint movement, the targeted muscle will be the first to fail as opposed to the secondary accessory that are used in the exercise.

Let’s look, for example, at using the pre-exhaust principle for chest. To isolate the chest muscle, we’ll start off with a move that eliminates the accessory muscles often used in chest moves like the triceps and shoulders. Pectoral flyes are a good choice (I like to do these on the pec-deck machine for pre-exhaust work, but dumbbells work fine too). Once you’ve finished your flye sets, move on to a heavy compound lift like incline or flat bench barbell presses. Because you’ve already pre-fatigued your chest with the flyes, your chest should give out before your triceps and shoulders, thus ensuring a complete workout of the pectoral region. Often, in chest and back work, you may find some of the accessory muscles involved in the movement (triceps and biceps respectively) giving out before the larger muscle you’re trying to target does. The pre-exhaust technique is a way around this problem and a great way of busting through plateaus to boot. Give it a try!

Here are some other examples of pre-exhaust movements for various other bodyparts:

Back: Pre-exhaust with Straight-arm Pulldowns or Machine Pullovers, then move to Lat Pulldowns or Barbell Rows

Legs: Pre-exhaust with Leg Extensions or Leg Curls, then move to Squats or Leg Presses

Biceps: Pre-exhaust with Concentratrion Curls, then move to Barbell Curls

Triceps: Pre-exhaust with Dumbbell Kickbacks, then move to Skull Crushers

Shoulders: Pre-exhaust with Lateral Raises or Front Raises, then move to Shoulder Presses

Note: I recommend beginners avoid using pre-exhaust in their routines as it could possibly lead to overtraining. Intermediate lifters can use the technique, but should be careful of how frequently they employ it in their routines. Using it every workout can lead to overtraining.

One of the most important elements of a bodybuilding training regimen is variety. There are many ways to keep things fresh and prevent your gains from hitting a plateau (I’ll be adding more articles on these in the future). Today, let’s look at altering our workout routines over the period of roughly 4-6 months. Considering the following plans:

Cycle 1
Whole Body
Cardio
Whole Body
Cardio
Whole Body
Cardio
Rest

Cycle 2
Chest, Triceps, Shoulders
Cardio
Back, Biceps, Calves
Cardio
Hams, Glutes, Abs
Cardio
Rest

Cycle 3
Chest, Triceps
Back, Biceps
Cardio
Legs, Abs
Shoulders, Traps
Cardio
Rest

Cycle 4
Chest
Back/Cardio
Triceps/Cardio
Biceps/Cardio
Legs/Abs
Shoulders, Traps
Rest

Stick with each of these cycles for 4-6 weeks or until you feel that your gains have plateaued, then move on to the next cycle. As you can see, in each cycle the amount of bodyparts worked (and how often they’re worked per week) changes from program to program. So, we start with Cycle 1 working the whole body a few times a week and move onto Cycle 4 with only one bodypart being worked per day, once a week. In order to keep things logistically practical, you should alter the number of exercises you are performing per bodypart depending on which cycle you are following. Thus, when I’m doing a whole body routine, I will typically only do 1 exercise per bodypart while Cycle 4’s routine will find me doing 4 or even 5 sets per bodypart. These are of course just sample routines to illustrate the principle; you can make up your own combinations and decide where and when you’d like to fit in your cardio as you see fit.

“Running the Rack” is an advanced technique which will totally fry your targeted muscle group. To “run the rack”, you’ll perform multiple sets back to back with no rest in between. For each set, you’ll go to failure, then decrease the weight and immediately do another set to failure. You’ll repeat this process until you’ve completed your prescribed number of sets. As an example, someone doing alternating dumbbell curls might start with 50lbs (in each hand) and work to failure, go immediately to 40lbs. to failure, and then drop to 30lbs. and finally 20lbs. to finish up. You just need to determine how many sets you want to complete beforehand so you know what weight to start with and how much to decrease it by each set. This is an excellent technique to employ if you want to really “feel the burn” but, like most advanced techniques, running the rack should only be attempted by experienced lifters and should not be performed every workout (this will help you avoid overtraining).