Some Bodybuilding Tricks

Here’s some tricks that bodybuilders use to build muscle fast, some of them are advanced techniques and shouldn’t be at all necessary for beginners. For most beginers a decent full body routine three or four times a week is sufficient. These are techniques used to really attack a muscle group and are best used as part of a split routine. Once you get serious come back here and pick something to spice it up a bit.

Negatives – Negatives involve doing exercises with weights so heavy you can’t lift them. What you do instead is have your friend help you and then let go. Your job is to lower the weight in as slow and controlled a manner as possible.

Supersets – Supersets are time savers. Rather than resting while you wait for one muscle group to recover, in supersets you work a different, preferably complimentary, muscle group. Then you go straight back to the first exercise. For example 1 set of ???

Drop Sets – This is a way you can squeeze out more reps. Basically, once you’ve reached exhaustion on a certain exercise rather than give up you just lower the load and carry on. Then do it again. Keep going until you’re on a ridiculously light weight.

Pyramid Sets – Pyramid sets are sort of like drop sets. The difference is you start low and then work up to a higher weight and fewer reps. Then you work back down again. Like a pyramid see.

Cheats – Cheats are another way of squeezing out those last few reps. Here, instead of lowering the weight, you start cheating. For example on a bicep curl you might start swinging your arm up to help. This isn’t as good as doing proper reps but if it means you can go for longer that’s still better than nothing. Remember: cheating is a good thing.

Forced Reps – With forced reps you are cheating as well, but here you get a friend to help. Offering just enough support to enable you to finish the repetition.

Burns – Burns are the most evil and beautiful thing in bodybuilding. You’ve worked to failure, you’ve done some forced reps and there’s no way you can do anymore. Now you just kind of ‘bounce’ the beginning of the movement. So if you’d just nuked yourself on the bench press you hold the bar and just kind of bob it up and down slightly on your chest until there’s completely nothing left.

Static Contraction – Static contraction is a slightly controversial way of exercising. Here you just push or pull against an immovable force. Some people claim this is the fastest way to increased muscle mass. Bruce Lee was one of those people.

Offset exercises – This is just a way of adding a bit of spice to your workouts. Basically if you’re doing bicep curls for example you take one heavy dumbbell and one slightly lighter one. Do half your reps then swap over. It makes things a bit more interested and involves your core in accounting for being off-balance.

Bizaro exercises – I created these. You can tell by the way in which they’re named after a Superman character. Basically here you put yourself in an unusual position. For example – stand on one leg, kneel or squat – while doing your exercise. You isolate the muscle as well as involving your core even more than in offset exercises.