How to Correctly Perform Pyramid Training

Pyramiding your weights is a great way to build muscle size and strength. Working up from relatively lightweight to a heavyweight over multiple sets ensures you stimulate your muscles with the right amount of volume to stimulate growth and at the right intensity to produce strength adaptations. It’s best used on compound barbell exercises, but it can be used with machines and dumbells as well.

Unfortunately, most programs don’t properly explain how to perform a pyramid correctly. I used Pyramid training when I was in high school bulking for football. I gained approximately 30 pounds of muscle during those years, despite performing them incorrectly. Like most people, I over-taxed myself on the early sets, and couldn’t progress in weight as well as I could have.

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Jeff EmblenMay 15, 2021May 16, 2021Leave a comment

Building Muscle, Building Muscle and Strength, Building Muscle mass, Building Strength, effective strength training, mass training, optimal strength trainining volume, Optimal Training Volume, strenght training, strength trainining volume, Uncategorized, Willpower is like a muscle

Optimal Training Volume Made Simple

“Exercise to stimulate, not to annihilate. The world wasn’t formed in a day, and neither were we. Set small goals and build upon them.” Lee Haney

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Determining optimal training volume is not a straightforward proposition. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. I will simplify the process and provide some parameters, but you will have to discover what is optimal for YOU. Scientific studies should guide our training, but ultimately, we must decide what works best for us through trial and error. The primary factor to consider is your ability to recover.

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Jeff EmblenMay 7, 2018January 15, 2024Leave a comment

Building Muscle and Strength, Building Muscle mass, Building Strength, effective strength training, mass training, RPE, strenght training, strength training circuit, Strength Training Intensity, Strength training RPE, training to failure, Uncategorized

Strength Training Intensity – How Much is Optimal

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The latest issue of Muscle & Fiction and all the High-Intensity zealots would have you believe that if you don’t take a set to absolute muscular failure, you are wasting your time. That just isn’t true. On an effective strength training program for the natural lifter, most sets should stop 1 or 2 repetitions short of failure. We should avoid going to failure on all but the last set of each exercise. A simple, yet effective way to evaluate your rating of perceived exertion (RPE), is using this table developed by respected strength coach and competitive powerlifter Mike Tuchscherer.

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Jeff EmblenMay 1, 2018July 15, 2019Leave a comment

Building Muscle and Strength, Building Strength, rest between sets, strenght training, strength training circuit, Uncategorized

Rest Between Set – What You Need to Know

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Forget those 1-minute rest intervals in the muscle magazines. Your performance from set to set will decline quickly. Short rest intervals and training to failure repeatedly will increase human growth hormone levels, but I have not found any studies that correlate it with long-term increases in muscle mass. I have found studies that have concluded just the opposite. [i] [ii]Countless studies have demonstrated that progressive overload is the key to muscle and strength gains.

If you want to build strength and muscle, it is best done naturally by resting 3 to 5 minutes between working sets. The only time I recommend one-minute rest intervals are between low-intensity warm-up sets. A study conducted by the Kennesaw State University found that subjects that rested 2.5 minutes between sets made substantially greater gains in muscle mass than the subject that only rested 1-minute between sets.[iii]

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Jeff EmblenApril 30, 2018July 11, 2019Leave a comment

Building Muscle, Building Muscle and Strength, Building Muscle mass, Building Strength, lifting, mass training, Uncategorized

Training to Failure doesn’t Trigger Muscle Growth. Progressive Overload does!

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Countless studies have demonstrated that progressive overload is the key to muscle and strength gains. The most effective approach to building muscle focuses on becoming progressively stronger by subjecting our bodies to more mechanical tension over time. Each training cycle should focus on improving performance on the basic exercises that build the most muscle.

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Jeff EmblenJune 18, 2017January 18, 2024Leave a comment