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  • It's kind of like a pyramid. Train 3 times a week for a six week cycle. You start with a set of excercises for what you want to bulk up a bit. Presumably chest, arms, back for most. Not too many exercises since you just end up training the same supporting muscles several times over and wearing them out. Think practically, if a chest or shoulder exercise makes your arms go tired, there is little reason to train biceps separately afterwards.

    Find your ideal weight at 10 reps of any exerciese and note this down. This should be as heavy as you can do, but not to the point of you gasping for breath, struggling to get trough all 10 reps etc. OK, now you've got your number down for your ideal ten reps, then comes the calculations. In a six weeks routine, you go from training 3 x 15 reps of each exercise to 3 x 5 reps. Take your ideal 10 rep number. For the first exercise day of the first week multiply this by 0.65 and do your 3 x 15. Second exercise day of first week it's that number times 0.7. Third exercise day of that week it's times 0.75 and so on. Does this make sense? After two weeks of this you go for 3 x 10 reps, your weights will be heavier now, the exercises the same. After another two weeks you go down to 3 x 5 reps of the same exercises. The weights are now quite heavy for you, you're now multiplying with 1.25, 1,3 ..., but should be just about doable if you did your preliminary notes right.
    After the 6 weeks are up you have a week of rest before your next 6 week cycle. Reconsider your ideal 10 rep number, add a few kgs to the ones you got trough OK, other exercises might stay the same for another round.
    Reps should be done quite slow. 1 second on the up, 2 seconds on the down. Some say that it is the down bit that really exercises your muscle. When I was thaught this routine I was also given a fairly complex warm up routine for each muscle group, but I must admit I just skipped it. Once you've worked up a bit of sweat, most muscles should be ready to go anyway.

    If you are really interested I could rework my notes and PM them to you. Might take me a few days though.

    Sorry to be a pedant but that is completely wrong, chest and shoulder specific excercises hardly work your biceps at all, only pulling exercises such as:
    lat pull-down, close-grip row, wide grip pull ups, barbell rows etc will do that.

    If you want to add overall strength (regardless of bulk which will come naturally to a degree with increased strength anyway), you want to focus on compound exercises that engage multiple muscle groups in the same movement, you also want to use freeweights wherever possible as this again recruits more muscle fibres than certain machine exercises, which generally speaking tend to isolate muscles more and burn less calories, and also not recruit the muscles required to stabilize weight in the air.
    This is quite a valuable strength to have, as muscles used to stabilize the joint in this manner can often help protect you from more severe injuries in the event of a crash on your bike, not to mention improve general joint strength and overall strength more so than isolation exercises.

    Compound exercises include:
    Bench press
    Barbell squat
    Box squats
    Overhead barbell squat
    Front barbell squat
    Jump squats (only recommended with a very lightweight and when good technique has been achieved)
    Power snatches (essential this is done with good technique and a low enough weight to avoid injury)
    Full snatch (from the ground, again essential this is done with proper technique!)
    Barbell rows
    Close grip rows
    Wide grip pull-ups (good to combine with lat pull-down machine until lat/shoulder strength improves)

    Standing military press (much better than seated as recruits additional muscles to stabilize the weight whilst you lift, stand with both feet shoulder width apart not like those cheaters who stand with one foot in front of the other!)

    The above are all great compound exercises that will help build strength and power throughout the body, when combined together as a weekly routine, the above were pretty much the only exercises I did, apart from some occasional barbell curls, for 2-3 years of heavy training and powerlifting, and I did alright.

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