Following on from my last post talking about what’s needed in your summer diet to get the body of your dreams, I thought I would talk about how to train your body to achieve these goals. Much the same as with your diet there are a few alterations needed to really move you're training away from the bulking, lift as much weight as you can training over the winter, so here we go.
Keep compound exercises in your routine!
Now in the off season I personally tend to really focus on the big three, (Deadlift, squat and bench) developing additional strength and often mass to the areas I'm targeting. Now often people believe when you're eating less calories you can't perform these so often as they put so much strain on your body due to muscle recruitment and prefer the more isolation exercises. Second to that you won't be able to hit the weight or reps you were when your calorie consumption was higher. This is all wrong!! You want to burn as may calories as you can in your sessions and what exercises recruit the most muscles and therefore burn the most calories, yes you guessed it, compound!! Don't go ludicrous with the weight and volume, but use things such as on the minute every minute for 10 minutes principle. I like using 80% of my 1rpm and perform 5 on every minute, performing 50 reps total. Now anyone who says this won't build strength, condition the muscle, burn calories and somewhat count for cardio is lying. The quicker you perform the reps the more rest you'll get ensuring your being explosive and powerful = strength. The sheer little rest you're getting ensures you're HR is through the roof for a considerable long period of time. Its just ideal when cutting as it ticks every box so keep compound exercises in your routine.
Use supersets and tri-sets in your programme!
Supersets are when you perform two exercises consecutively after one another with ti-sets being three. These can be for the same muscle group, opposing muscle groups or just a cardio based movement, I'll explain. First of all, supersetting can be done in a few different ways. You can do antagonist supersetting, which is the pairing of two opposite muscle groups such as biceps and triceps, chest and back, and quads and hamstrings. For example, you can superset bench press with dumbbell flies or squats with leg extensions. Usually agonist supersetting is a combination of a compound movement with an isolation movement. Pairing two compound movements could be too intense, the same way that pairing two isolation movements could lack the intensity provided by a combination of compound and isolation. Tri-sets are much the same in that a third exercises is just added. I like this third exercises to be a cardio based one, just to raise the heart rate slightly more. Mountain climbers, squat jumps, box step ups or even a quick sprint. These are not too taxing on the body and shall just increase the HR that little more making your workout a cardio blast as well as still focusing on muscle growth, two workouts in one.
Use HIIT!
HIIT is a training idea in which low to moderate intensity intervals are alternated with high intensity intervals. HIIT can be applied to running or to exercises such as squatting. HIIT is considered to be much more effective than normal cardio because the intensity is higher and you are able to increase both your aerobic and anaerobic endurance while burning more fat than ever before. This is my choice in cardio when I do it over LISS. Jump on the rower and perform best effort 10x250m rows, resting for 40 seconds between, really focusing on a maximum output. You can incorporate things such as Tabata into this which is the principle of 20 seconds work along with 10 seconds rest for 4 minutes, this is great for bodyweight exercises such as squat and press ups attempting to beat your score of reps for the 20 seconds prior.
So there you have it, three adjustments to your training in order to get summer ready. Any questions be sure to leave a comment below!!!
Train hard, fight easy!!
Jack
