Rest pause - one of my favourite advanced training techniques

[muskate]

The rest pause is one of my favourite advanced training techniques. It is fantastic to really increase strength gains by recruiting your central nervous system to fire maximally. It will also overload the muscle and lead to a huge hypertrophy response.

It's super easy to perform. Let's say you can bench 100 pounds for 10 reps. Once you hit failure at 10 reps, rather then rack the weight and be done with the set - rack the weight, take 3-5 deep breaths and then perform another set. You will most likely only be able to get 5-6 reps with such a short rest. Rack the weight again, take 3-5 deep breaths and perform one more set. This time you will probably only get 2-4 reps.

By training like that, you are teaching your central nervous system and creatine phosphate ATP system to be more efficient at recruiting muscle fibres for your lifts. It will directly improve strength and increase muscle size very fast. Give it a try.

Drop sets are another great advanced technique that is similar, but it doesn't produce the same strength gains because the weight used is reduced on each drop.

 

[WalkingBeast]

Agreed. I use them heavily, as shown in my journal. They are also a great fucking way to force volume training on the muscle. I bang out 50 sets typically in an arm session with no rest sets. Most of those are dropsets and alternating between tricep pressdowns and dumbbell curls, but similiar effect. I use a shitload of rest pause with dumbbell laterals and pressing movements on machines. I like to combine rest pause with dropsetting. I often mix several intensity techniques and some sets will last 10-20 minutes. Which I have some videos of.

Otherwise without using them, you can end up with way less volume by the end of the session. With a few minutes rest between sets. I train with a focus on strength first usually. First in the routines I mean. Though some bodyparts are just growth focused at this stage. When I start with pressing movements I usually go for my rep records first, as I pyramid up with each main set to failure and beyond (rest pause reps too). Then I finish off with a dropset to descend the pyramid quickly. Im not going for records by that point anyway, so theres no need for long rest, just tear the shit out of the muscle.

Combining dropsets at the end of a movement with rest pause reps on each set, is a great way to kill off a movement and move onto the next victim.

KEEP KILLIN THAT SHIT !!

 

[McSatan]

Cluster sets, are kind of in that group. For those who want to train heavy but don't want to leave their heaviest set at just 1 or 2 reps.

 

[muskate]

Cluster sets, are kind of in that group. For those who want to train heavy but don't want to leave their heaviest set at just 1 or 2 reps.

How do cluster sets work? I have heard of them but they aren't talked about much.

 

[McSatan]

How do cluster sets work? I have heard of them but they aren't talked about much.

It's a new/old principle. You're using 85-95% of your max. A set of 6 reps would look like 2×2×2 with 20-30 seconds of rest between each 2 reps. You might do 3 or 4 of those "sets". Something like that you could do for more than 4 weeks, I bet, because of the enormous amount of near max lifts.

 

[muskate]

It's a new/old principle. You're using 85-95% of your max. A set of 6 reps would look like 2×2×2 with 20-30 seconds of rest between each 2 reps. You might do 3 or 4 of those "sets". Something like that you could do for more than 4 weeks, I bet, because of the enormous amount of near max lifts.

Interesting. I'll look into it and give it a shot. Thanks for the tip!