3 Steps to Slash Muscle Building Barriers

3 Steps to Slash Muscle Building Barriers

Opening the door to the muscle-building vault can be a struggle. Without the right combination, the door gets locked. You find yourself standing outside, looking in. If you’re still looking for the combination of training and recovery techniques that garners uninterrupted results—listen up!

It happens to all of us––we follow the standard rules of muscle building, we train heavy on basic exercises but progress comes slowly—if at all. Can you end the confusion, frustration and jolt your progress? Yes…

How? Heavy training covers one factor responsible for muscle growth. To slash through training barriers and open the vault to the muscle growth zone, you need a radical approach. Can you relate to one of the following scenes?

Scene one: You’ve been training for a while and made good gains and them bam… your progress hit the brakes like you’ve been super-glued to the tracks. That was six months ago, and you haven’t made appreciable progress since.

Scene two: You’ve made good progress throughout ‘most’ of your physique, even built a good amount of size but one or two body-parts are lagging way behind the rest of your physique. You don’t get a good pump in those muscle groups, and you don’t feel the muscle working very well.

Scene three: You find building muscle nearly impossible no matter how hard or heavy you train. You classify yourself as a ‘hard-gainer’ or someone who got short-changed when they handed out the muscle building genetics.

The Secret Bag of Tricks: Muscle Building Made Easy

So what’s missing? For optimal progress you also need to: develop the capillary network to give you an explosive pump; ignite the nerve supply so you can feel your training better and contract each muscle more forcefully; amplify you’re body’s natural anabolic mechanisms, namely testosterone and growth hormone. Standard approaches to building muscle work the muscle fibers. That’s a good base but not optimal.

To enter the muscle growth zone, you need more control over the muscle and the capillary network to transport nutrients more effectively for muscle growth and repair. Pull the trigger on new muscle growth and unleash a surge of new gains. Here are 3 techniques to fire-up muscle growth factors that may have been lying dormant for years.

First up–shock supersets! This is a crazy type of superset done to shock new muscle growth.

Here’s how to apply it: Let’s take back training as an example. After a week or two of heavy training for your back, you’re primed for growth. A week of shock sets is the ‘tip of the day’. Perform shock supersets by doing a set of 15 to 25 reps of close-grip pulldowns and with no rest go directly into dumbbell pullovers. Rest only 30-seconds, then do another cycle of those two exercises. Perform three supersets. Now take wide grip pulldowns and shock superset them with two-arm bent dumbbell rows again for 3 sets of 15-25 reps each.

Next on the agenda, 10 sets of 10. This one has been responsible for even seasoned trainees gaining 10-15 pounds of muscle in 2 to 3 months. It causes a crazy pump, floods nutrients into the muscle and causes a release of growth hormone and testosterone.

How to apply it: Take one exercise on a body part and try to pick a weight that allows you about 20 reps. Instead, perform 10 sets of 10 reps with only 30 seconds rest between sets. Do the same for all body parts.

Okay, last technique, Constant Tension. Wow, I can’t understand why this technique fell out of favor. Probably because some exercise purists didn’t understand that time under tension has a profound effect on natural anabolic mechanisms. The technique was popular in the ’60s and ’70s among trainees with freaky development.

How to apply it: Let’s say you’re doing incline bench presses. Stop the bar about a half an inch before it touches the chest on the downward motion and press up stopping again about an inch or even 2 inches short of locking out. This keeps the tension on the chest muscles throughout the set and eliminates the short rest that you get at the top and bottom of a movement. It’s effective for any kind of press, pull, squat, curl or extension. Warning: This fast muscle building technique causes a burn like you’ve been poked with a branding iron. The results are worth it.

Try cycling these techniques into your workouts for about 2-to 3 weeks each and set yourself up for a surge in muscle growth.

Newbies: If you’re a beginning bodybuilder, coming back from a layoff or a trainer who trains beginners, the new e-book by Holman and Lawson, Quick-Start Muscle-Building Guide, is for you.