Everything you ever wanted to know about isolation exercise but were afraid to ask
7 November 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Recovery time between weight training sets varies. The amount of time required to morph back to normal depends on the severity, the harshness of the exercise. Severe, harsh progressive resistance exercises are the most effective progressive resistance exercises. Machines make the movement they mimic easier and easier in progressive resistance training is exactly what we dont want. The reason weight training works is because it is harsh and severe and the harsh severity causes an adaptive, stress-induced response to occur inside the cellular structure of the target muscle. The hypertrophy switch can not be triggered with a gentle nudge; it takes the equivalent of a cellular nuclear explosion to trip the growth switch. The more effort exerted the more likely youll trip the switch. The rate of recovery from any exercise is related to how difficult and taxing the effort: it takes a lot less time to recover from an all-out set of 10-reps in the preacher bench curls done with an E-Z curl bar and 100-pounds than an all-out set of 10-reps in the deadlift with 400. Compound multi-joint (CMJ) exercise requires groups of muscles to work together to complete an assigned muscular task. It takes a lot of muscles more time to recuperate than a single muscle. Exercise that zeroes in on a specific muscle to the purposeful exclusion of its neighbor muscles is called an isolation exercise. The savvy weight trainer starts off the body part de jour by beginning the session with the biggest, heaviest, most difficult exercise he/she will face that day. Dont zap energy and piss away available strength by starting off with curls and lateral raises before you deal with power cleans, overhead presses or high pulls. Best hit the toughest exercise when fresh, at the beginning of the workout.
Once the 1st killer exercise of the session is completed, the usual procedure is to finish off that particular body part with an isolation exerciseor two or threetime permitting. You have about an hour to work before the point of diminishing returns sets in. When that happens, energy fades, strength nosedives and further training is downright counterproductive. Most trainees want to train two body parts per session so lets reverse engineer the construction of a session template: start with two big exercises, one for each body part. Allow four to five sets for the two CMJ exercises that start off each body part and allow three sets for each additional isolation exercise. Two CMJ and two follow up isolation exercises require 12-14 sets. Add a second isolation exercise for each muscle and were talking 18-20 cumulative sets. We know from past experience that energy plummets drastically after 60-minutes so we need establish and maintain a good workout pace. Too much rest allows muscles to grow cold and moving too quickly zaps poundage-handling ability. A classical chest/tricep routine would be structured as follows. The two CMJ mainstays would be flat barbell bench press for chest and dips for triceps. The respective isolation exercises for pecs and tri’s could be flat dumbbell flyes for chest and nose breakers. Follow with a second isolation exercise, an uber-isolation move such as cable crossovers for pecs or reverse grip tricep pushdowns for the triceps. This is a very thorough chest/tricep workout.
You can compress the amount of time required to do the isolation exercises by using super-sets or tri-sets. Treat isolation exercises differently than the lead CMJ exercise. Lets say its leg day: start with squats, 135×12, 185×8, 225×5, 255×1 then 275×8 for a new personal best. Now its time to do leg isolation work: super-setting and tri-setting work on legs on arms because youre able to work muscles that lie on the opposite side of a bone. After straight sets of killer squats, we stack leg extensions, lying legs curls and calf raises. Start off with a set of leg extensions. Once you finish the leg extension set perform a set of lying leg curls right away. Immediately move to seated calf raise. One-two-three exercises done in a row without pause: now rest a few minutes until breathing normalizes. Kick the poundage up and do a second tri-set. Rest until normalized and once again increase the poundage before performing a third and final tri-set. On to shoulders: legs are likely a little shaky at least they should be after 5-sets of squats and 9-sets of isolation exercise. Start with 4-5 sets of progressive seated dumbbell presses. Follow with a shoulder tri-set consisting of dumbbell side lateral raises followed by dumbbell front lateral raises and finally dumbbell bent-over rear deltoid raises. Bip, bang, bing! Start with dumbbells that allow you to do 15-reps on the first round, increase the bells and struggle for 10 on the second set. On the final set shoot for 8-reps.Youve completed 28 sets in this leg and shoulder workout. Thats a lot of exercise stuffed inside a compact timeframe.
Isolation exercises are far less taxing than CMJ exercise. I would never super-set squats and deadlifts. That would be suicidal. Nor overhead barbell press with heavy rows, too heavy and dangerous to attempt. When seeking ways to construct super-sets or tri-sets consider grouping muscles lying on opposite sides of a limb or the torso; these are prime candidates for super sets/tri-sets. The time saving is amazing and there is no degradation in performance as long as you allow time to recover between the coupled-sets. If you are smart you can cram an awful lot of sets into an hour without compromising strength and poundage-handling ability.
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