When it comes to strength training and muscle-building, one of the best ways to ensure you don’t plateau is to expose your body to gruelling workout routines. Introducing a steady dose of intensity in your workout sessions can help make your body immune to repetitive routines and provide consistent results, especially when it comes to lifting more weights as you get stronger and leaner.

It’s also pretty common to hear bodybuilders and trainers saying that you need to increase weights for every muscle group in every workout, which is known as progressive overload. Technically speaking, this can be a sound strategy to help subject your body to new levels of stimulus, pushing it to lift a certain amount of weight that it can’t at the moment. However, this is just one way to intensify your workout. And in some cases, progressive overload achieves absolutely nothing – especially when you unintentionally max out on what you are capable enough to do.

The solution? Introducing several forms of high-intensity training regimens throughout your workout.

How Can You Intensify Your Workout?

Gradually increasing the total level of intensity throughout your workout sessions is going to help you with two things. It is going to help maintain your weight. You see, you’ll be burning calories left, right, and centre. Secondly, you will also be pushing your cardiovascular and muscular systems to their limits, continuously enhancing your overall health, increasing your size, and boosting your strength.

In light of this, here are some excellent ways you can maximize your intensity.

Try to Go Heavy

One of the key factors that determine your level of fitness is your overall rep range. If you’re looking to build strength, it’s optimal to stick to 3-7 reps. If you’re looking to build muscle stamina, endurance and hypertrophy, stick to the 10-12 rep range. But remember, for hypertrophy, the last two reps you perform should take the life out of you.

Focus on Maximizing Your TUT (Time Under Tension)

Simply put, if you want to grow your muscles, you’re going to need to destroy your muscle fibres continuously so that your body can rebuild more mass. One of the best and often, very difficult ways to do this is to subject yourself to extended TUT sessions. Time under tension is best described as lowering the time per rep by a couple of seconds, allowing for full muscle activation.

Don’t Take a Break for Too Long

When it comes to maximizing your intensity, you need to consistently reduce your overall resting time between sets. For example, if you rest for 90 seconds per set, decrease it by 5 seconds, every week. Resting for shorter time frames is excellent for hypertrophy and pushes your body to the limit, allowing for faster calories and fat burning.

Perform Supersets

This is not to suggest that straight sets aren’t effective. Doing 10-12 reps per set per for 3-4 sets is a great way to build muscle and endurance. However, there comes a point where the body naturally starts to get used to the same routine, which is what eventually leads to a plateau. There are numerous ways you add a high degree of intense routines to your workout. Supersets are one of those techniques.

Supersets involve doing two different exercises without taking a break. For example, if you’re doing arms, you’ll be performing 10-12 reps of bicep curls and after the set is complete, you’re going to start performing preacher curls for 10-12 reps. Yup, that is going to burn like hell!

Incredible Advantages of Adding Intensity to Your Workouts

Intensity exercises can provide you with a dearth of excellent health advantages. For example:

•  It’s Great for Improving your Mood

According to research, intense exercise can have a great effect on your mood and may even possibly reduce symptoms associated with depression.

•  May Decrease the Risk of Mortality

According to research posted in 2019, medical experts were able to identify that people performing high-intensity exercises, of any form, may live longer.

•  Helps Burn a lot of Calories

According to a report published by the American Council on Exercise, introducing intensity exercises in your regular workout sessions helps burn more calories by enabling the body to get higher levels of oxygen. In turn, this helps you achieve a process known as EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption), allowing your body to continue burning calories even after you’re done with your workout.

•   Helps with Weight Loss

Intensity exercises and routines can help burn calories at a much faster pace.

•   Enhanced Cardiovascular Health

A 2012 research identified that individuals performing high-intensity exercises (moderate to high) showed fewer signs of suffering a heart attack or cardiovascular decline.

Best Types of Intense Workouts for Building Muscle and Strength

The 5 X 5 Program

If you’re looking to gain muscle mass and strength, then going with the 5×5 program will be great for you. This intensity program involves performing any three primary exercises for a specific muscle group (both upper and lower) and doing 5 sets of each exercise with 5 repetitions. You can increase the weight per set and/or exercise depending on your fitness levels.

Moreover, you can also choose to perform other isolated exercises right after you complete the workout.

German Volume Training

When it comes to intensity exercises in bodybuilding, it doesn’t get any better than German volume training. This process involves doing higher reps and sets per muscle group. You can say that it is a bit similar to the 5×5 methodology, but GVT involves doing twice as many sets and repetitions for inducing incredible muscle stimulus and activation.

German volume training involves performing two main exercises for any muscle group, for example, chest and back, alternating between these body parts. It is recommended that you do GVT three times a week.

Splitting the Lower and Upper Body

The lower and upper body split methodology involves selecting and dividing exercises between your upper and lower body, hitting each body part 2-3 times a week with one day off in between. Body split exercises can be excellent for beginners who want to build strength and achieve decent levels of hypertrophy.