Back when I first started training, I had no clue what was meant by the term 'intensity technique'. It was only a few years later, that I found out about these highly touted methods used by the most advanced athletes and professional bodybuilders to build crazy strength and huge muscle. Naturally, as I wager would have been the case with most young and impressionable guys wanting to get bigger, following what the biggest guys and girls were doing was the way to look like them, right? Not so fast, young padawan. There's more to intensity techniques than meets the eye, and people tend to bastardize their usage in their training.
What is an intensity technique?
Intensity techniques refer to training methods that are meant to elicit higher levels of stimulus from a strength and muscle development standpoint. The most common ones are drop sets, supersets, pre- and post-exhaust methods, forced negatives, partial reps, cheat reps, and rest pauses. One of their big draws, and why they're still so popular in many a bro's training programme is that the pumps they create are often second to none. Have you ever done 3 sets of bicep curls, and followed up your last set with a lighter drop set? You get a pump that will make you split the sleeve of your VEST (think about it). However, they're also problematic for 3 reasons, which I'll outline below.
They're difficult to quantify
An important factor in developing muscle or getting stronger is progressive stimulus or progressive overload. We need to produce greater stimulus each time we train in order to force our bodies to adapt favourably. Barring genetic freaks and heavily drugged athletes and bodybuilders, quantifying training in some way is imperative in order to be able to increase the dose of the stimulus in training.
It's as simple as this:
Week 1: 3 x 8 @ 100kg
Week 2: 3 x 10 @ 100kg
That's an example of progressive stimulus in a nutshell, where the dose is increased from one week to the next.
A common problem with intensity techniques is that their use is often not calculated or quantified in any meaningful way. Adding a drop set or performing forced negatives is usually a spur-of-the-moment decision, which often isn't repeated the following session with the same or even similar protocol. If we can't quantify things, it's hard to know what dose we need to administer the following time.
They create a lot of fatigue
It shouldn't come as a surprise that intensity techniques create a lot of fatigue given what they're called. Often, as in the case of rest pauses, drop sets, and forced negatives, they're used as a way to continue training past failure. Training at an intensity that leaves around 2 reps in reserve has been shown to be effective in building muscle, and I'm of the opinion that occasionally training to failure is useful both for its stimulating effect as well as for its usefulness in gauging your true training intensity. In either case, proper training is fatiguing enough as it is, whether or not you leave 2 reps in reserve, or go to failure. If going to failure, this will create even more fatigue, and sometimes is the reason that people don't progress as much as they'd like because it impacts their ability to recover.
Haphazard use of intensity techniques by individuals who already train with proper intensity is a surefire way to overreach, which may yield progress within a session but negatively impacts performance in the subsequent session. Saying that people who already train with proper intensity don't tend to use intensity techniques haphazardly, and that brings me to my last reason why they're often problematic.
They're often junk volume
There's a threshold of effective volume that muscles respond to, which differs between muscles and between individuals. Trial and error is the way to find out your own individual threshold for developing, maintaining, or regressing. The key term here is effective volume because not all sets are created equal. From both an observational standpoint as well as personal experience, using intensity techniques is often a poor excuse to make up for a lack of effective volume in a programme. Most times people are doing too much volume, but it lacks intensity. More rarely do people do too little volume because the human mind is almost conditioned to think "if a little is good, then more must be better."
For this reason, things like 'drop sets' and 'forced reps' amount to little more than junk volume, by which we really mean ineffective volume that serves only to stroke the ego because of the juicy pump we get. It's fun to do them from time to time, but focusing on good quality sets with appropriate load wins the race every time.
So how do we use them?
It wasn't until I read John Meadows' take on intensity techniques years ago that the penny dropped for me. He advocated using them sparingly at the end of a training cycle, and for no more than a couple of weeks in total, due to the fatigue that they lump on the system. Also, they should be quantifiable and repeatable in subsequent sessions so that the principle of progressive overload can be followed. There's also no need to run every single technique that exists during one single training cycle, pick one or two, apply them well and reap the benefits.
Comments