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Powerbuilding + Cardio for Supreme Strength!
Supreme Strength, So with all of that in mind, what is the very best way to go about triggering
hypertrophy?
Well, as you can see – it very much depends on your muscle and it very much depends on your goals. If you only care about strength, then you need to lift very heavy and use explosive movements.
You’ll want to use ‘functional’ movements that involve lots of compound, multi–joint exercises and you’ll need to focus on your mind muscle connection and your technique/practice (practice is actually one of the most important ways to strengthen the connection).
If you only care about size though, then you’ll probably use more isolation movements and you’ll likely combine that with higher rep ranges and lower weights, designed to flood the muscles with metabolites that will trigger growth via sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.
You might also use slower eccentric portions of each move in order to further cause the right kind of muscle damage that will stimulate growth.
But what if you don’t have to choose? What if you can train for both size and strength at the same time? And what if this was actually the most effective way to accomplish both of those things?
This is where ‘powerbuilding’ comes in and actually, it’s possibly the best approach you can take to your training unless you’re a competitive athlete.
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Supreme Strength – What is Powerbuilding?
So what is powerbuilding? Simple: it means that you’re training half for size and half for strength and thereby using both types of training method to trigger both types of result. You’ll be lifting heavier weights, while at the same time also using higher rep ranges.
This is going to actually trigger the most strength and size compared with any other training methodology. For starters, when you combine both types of training, it simply means that you are going to get both kinds of results.
That effectively means your results can ‘double up’ and when you combine both, you see even more impressive growth.
In other words, why would you only thicken your muscle fibers or only swell your muscle with sarcoplasm when you can actually do both?
Why would you only train your fast twitch muscle fiber, or only train your slow twitch muscle fiber when once again… you can do both!
Likewise, it makes a lot of sense to use this kind of approach when you aren’t sure what kind of training your body is going to respond best to.
Because while you might not think you’re someone who can build muscle, the reality is that you probably are – you’re just not doing it in the most efficient way.
If you normally train with heavy weights and low volume, then you may notice that you hit a plateau and your muscles stop growing. What many people find is that when they use lighter weights and really slow down their repetitions, this is then what results in a sudden increase in gains.
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Conversely though, other people find the exact opposite thing: they find that when they increase the weight and even when they increase the speed, this triggers the biggest changes.
This might be to do with their ratios of fast twitch to slow twitch muscle fibers, or it might be to do with their metabolic makeup and their hormones.
Either way, the only way to find out what is going to work is to try every method. When you combine multiple types of training into one routine such as powerbuilding that is exactly what you are doing and that is exactly what you are going to see.
If you are using every type of training, then you are going to see results across the board.
And of course this will also result in strength that is in truth the most functional. Because sometimes it’s functional to have great explosive strength.
Other times it’s functional to have great muscle endurance…
So why not just combine both and have great power across the board?
That’s how you really maximize your potential and accomplish that ‘general preparedness’.
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Supreme Strength – How This Looks in Practice
So that’s the theory and the principle behind powerbuilding but what does it look like in practice?
How can you really combine these two very different training modalities into one form of training?
How can you train for two different things at once?
That actually depends and there are a lot of different ways people go about this. One answer that people use is to train using one modality on one day and then to train using another modality o another day.
So for instance, this might mean that their training regime includes a traditional bodybuilding split for focussing on each major muscle group but that it then also includes a couple of days dedicated to more traditional powerlifting training with the ‘big lifts’.
Another option is to use compound moves at the start of a workout and then to use lighter weights and isolation movements toward the end. This way, you can recruit maximum strength for your big lifts right at the start and then fatigue the individual muscles at the end afterward.
This will work even better too, because you’ll have ‘pre-exhausted’ the muscle prior to going into that training. This therefore means that the muscle you’re focussing on will be much easier to damage and much quicker to respond to an isolation routine.
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Drop Sets – The Secret to Incredible Size AND Power (Supreme Strength)
Or you can go one step further and combine powerlifting and bodybuilding methods into single sets. The way you might do this is with a ‘drop set’ or with a ‘giant set’.
A drop set simply means that you are consistently lowering the weight in order to ‘go past failure’. Often in bodybuilding, this will take the form of ‘running the rack’.
Here, a weightlifter will start with a heavy weight that they can lift using their chosen exercise for about 8 reps. They will keep lifting until they reach the point of failure, then they’ll simply put those weights down and pick up the next lowest from the dumbbell rack.
They then repeat this again and again and again as they move further down the rack to lower weights. Each time though, they are starting from failure on the previous set of exercises, meaning that even very light weights will pose a challenge.
This technique is used in bodybuilding largely because it allows the lifter to increase their time under tension while simultaneously using heavier weights.
But you can actually take this concept even further by using a much heavier lift. Here, you might start with your 3RM (three rep max) as your starting weight and then drop down from there to something slightly lower and still going.
Now what’s happening? Simply, you are pushing yourself as hard as you can go by using the most challenging weight available to you and this is going to do all that stuff we talked about to increase strength recruiting the fast twitch muscle, creating microtears and strengthening the mind muscle
connection over the neuromuscular junction.
But then, instead of stopping as you normally would, you’re keeping going. Now you’re entering into time–under–tension territory because you’re not giving the muscle a chance to rest but rather, you’re flooding it with blood and metabolites.
And then you do it again, and again.
And actually, this technique will help you to recruit even more fast twitch muscle fiber than simple power lifting.
That’s because new muscle fibers will need to kick in each time you tear and fatigue the previous ones. So to start with, you recruit as many fast twitch fibers as you can to lift the weight.
Then you reach failure and can’t do any more, but you’re keeping going. So on the lower weight, your body now needs to find more muscle fiber to continue doing its job.
Thus it’s going to recruit more of those slower twitch fibers and any remaining fast twitch fibers. And when they give out, it’s going to look for even more.
This process will keep going and going until you’ve exhausted nearly everything you’ve got!
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Then Add CV!
And then, on top of all this, you’re also going to add CV. Or at least, that’s my advice.
Why?
Because once again, we don’t have to choose between functions here. The body abides to the rule of SAID and if you combine cardio challenges with strength challenges, then it will become strong and fit which is of course beneficial.
Now a lot of people are moving away from steady–state cardio at the moment and preaching the benefits of HIIT. The claim is that steady state cardio isn’t good for anything except breaking down muscle, tiring you out and taking much longer to burn less fat.
But the people saying this are those same people who don’t understand that bodybuilding muscle isn’t ‘fake muscle’. Actually, using CV still has some very useful advantages and you should still incorporate it into your training in a big way.
Let’s quickly overview the difference between CV and HIIT, look at the history and assess why this is a useful type of training for a powerbuilding type workout.
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HIIT vs CV (Supreme Strength)
Traditionally, CV (cardiovascular exercise) meant going for a run for an hour, using an elliptical machine, or generally just exerting yourself for a long period of time at an intensity that you’re capable of maintaining.
The idea was that this form of exercise would keep you in the ‘fat burning zone’. This is 70BPM because at that speed, the heart is still able to keep up and provide energy to the muscles from the fat stores.
Go faster than this though and you reach the ‘anaerobic threshold’, meaning that your body now doesn’t have time to burn fat for energy and can only rely on glycogen stores, blood sugar and ATP in the muscles.
Seeing as we want to burn fat, maintaining continuous exertion at 70BPM seems to make sense.
Then came HIIT. This is ‘High Intensity Interval Training’ and the idea was to exert yourself to a massive degree for a short period.
That would mean running or even sprinting for 1 minute and then recovering by jogging slowly for 2 minutes before starting again.
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This means you are now alternating between aerobic and anaerobic energy. What that means is that you’re testing both energy systems in the body and forcing your body to create more mitochondria and to become more energy efficient.
What’s more, is that you’re using up all the blood sugar and glycogen during the anaerobic periods, thereby forcing your body to look for energy elsewhere the rest of the time.
This causes what’s known as the ‘afterburn effect’, where the body has to run on fat for a long time after your training because of all the sugar it has burned already.
Although steady state cardio burns more fat in the short term then, it was found by research that HIIT would lead to more fat loss in the long term.
And what’s more, is that it doesn’t take as long seeing as you’re pushing yourself so hard.
But before you get carried away and throw out steady state cardio, consider a few factors.
The first is that steady–state cardio is good for your heart. Really good in fact. Only steady state cardio (not HIIT) is able to increase the size of the left ventricle in the heart.
In turn, this makes it more effective at pumping large amounts of blood around your body and therefore means it doesn’t have to pump as fast. In other words, this is how you can lower your resting heart rate so that your body is better at resting and staying calm when you’re not training.
And as we’re going to see in a moment, this is great for muscle building. With a lower resting heart rate you will sleep much better and that results in much more anabolism and muscle repair during that time. It’s when we rest that our muscles repair.
This also means you’ll be better able to deliver nutrients and oxygen to the muscles while you’re training and while you’re recovering, which will result in more muscle growth.
This also means you’ll have much more energy both in order to start training and in order to make sure that those training sessions are highly productive and allow you to exert yourself fully.
And on top of all that, jogging is still a great way to burn a lot of fat and to get a more ripped and lean physique. As much as it’s not in vogue right now, it’s the form of CV that was used by Arnie, by Franco Columbu and by Sergio Olivia (all famous bodybuilders).
So guess what my advice is here once again? Combine both.
Use a combination of HIIT and steady state by using the former as a ‘finisher’ at the end of a workout to burn more calories and by using the latter once a week for 4–7 miles in order to increase your cardio fitness and help you rest more.
Once again, the law of SAID means that you’ll this way see the most extensive results as you’ll adapt to both shorts spurts of exertion and longer,continuous stints. The result is the better body and the more powerful physicality.