30 minutes for mass Fast training sessions that are not for wimps

If each of your training sessions lasts longer than an hour, then you're not training, you're treating your workout more like a get-together with friends. 60 minutes in the gym is more than enough time for hard and effective workouts.

But what if you have to cut that time in half? Is it even worth going to the gym then? The answer is yes, and here's what you should do.

Use an intelligent training split

Anything that isn't a full body workout during a single training session is a split - and splits are ideal for anyone who's past the beginner stage and wants to maximize their development.

There are many possible splits, but if you can only train for 30 minutes, then it's best to focus on just one or two muscle groups per session. How you divide it up exactly is ultimately up to you. First think about how many days a week you can train and organize your training sessions based on this. Here are a few templates you can work with based on the number of training days per week you have available.

3 days per week

• Day 1: Quadriceps and hamstrings
• Day 2: Chest and back
• Day 3: Shoulders and arms

Okay, on day three you're basically training three muscle groups, but you can do some brutal training for your biceps within 3 minutes. Don't believe it? Then try 100 reps of bicep curls with an empty bar.

4 days per week

• Day 1: Quadriceps
• Day 2: Chest
• Day 3: Back and hamstrings
• Day 4: arms

Note that the leg flexors are trained together with the back on day 3. This means that your legs are trained twice a week. However, you can consolidate back and leg curl training to save time - we'll come back to this later.

5 days per week

• Day 1: Quadriceps and hamstrings
• Day 2: Back
• Day 3: Chest
• Day 4: Shoulders
• Day 5: Arms

Did you notice the order of the muscle groups? We start with the legs, which will probably be your hardest day of the week. And day 1 often falls on a Monday, which is International Chest Day. So you should have leg machines and squat racks all to yourself.

The other part of sequencing is that as the week progresses, you might be a little more fatigued. You'll get the two biggest areas done during the first two days of the week. From then on, you'll only have chest, shoulders and arms ahead of you. If you plan your chest day correctly, you can minimize the training that needs to be done on days 4 and 5.

How? Emphasize progressive overload on chest day. Aim for new bests in terms of reps as well as heavy strength training on certain exercises. Use shoulder and arm day as a training day with an emphasis on metabolic stress. Just do some training with ultra high reps and isolation exercises. This can also serve as a restorative stimulus after the hard and heavy chest press, giving you some local recovery.

Shorten your warm-up training

Since you don't have a lot of time, you need to compress your warm-up sets and work sets in a way that maximizes what you get out of them.

Warm-up sets are important to prepare the nervous system and working muscles so that they are efficient during the work sets. When you warm up the working muscles, think of it as waking up the nervous system and telling it to activate the target muscles for the movement pattern you're going to use during that training session, i.e. what exercises you're going to perform.

But there's another type of set you need to think about: preparation sets - the sets you do straight after the warm-up that pump some blood into the working muscles. If you do these sets, you'll get a better groove for the exercise you're about to perform.

These sets should be quite heavy and completed a few reps before reaching muscle failure. But what's the difference between these sets and your work sets? Work sets are the sets that you perform to muscle failure, or where you use intensity techniques to extend the time under tension during the set. Here's an example of what this might look like:

Warm-up sets:

• Empty barbell: 20-40 light reps
• First set: Perform 15 reps without weight, pause for 90 seconds
• Second set: Add weight, perform 12 reps and rest for 90 seconds
• Third set: Increase the weight, perform 10 repetitions and pause for 90 seconds

Preparation sets and work sets

• Fourth set: Increase the weight again, perform 8 repetitions and pause for 120 seconds
• Now start your working sets, whatever the repetition range for these sets may be

Use set-extending intensity techniques

At this point, effort and time are consolidated. You can either train hard or long, but you can't do both - at least not continuously. And in the context of this article, you have 30 minutes.

Here are a few set-extending methods that are very productive in terms of both pain and hypertrophy (pain and hypertrophy often go hand in hand).

Rest/Pause

Once you have reached your first work set, perform it to muscle failure. Then pause for 20 seconds and continue the set. When you reach the point of muscle failure again, pause again for 20 seconds and then perform another round to muscle failure.

So you're basically packing three work sets into a short period of time. If you are keeping a training diary or trying to break personal bests, try to do more reps each week on each work set than you did the previous week.

So if you do dumbbell bench presses with 45 kilos and with one rest set you do 14, 8 and 5 reps, that's a total of 27 repetitions. So in your next training session, try to do more than 27 repetitions of this exercise.

There are a few exercises, such as squats and deadlifts, where I don't like rest pause. They put too much strain on the lower back. Use classic straight sets for these exercises. For this reason, you should never go to muscle failure when deadlifting. There is no need and it prolongs recovery too much

Descending sets

Try the 8/8/8 method or the 6/12/20 method. These work as follows: A descending set using the 8/8/8 method is one set of 8 reps to muscle failure, followed by a reduction in training weight to a weight that allows you to do another 8 reps, followed by another reduction in weight that allows you to do a final 8 reps. (But don't reduce the weight so much that you could have done 15 reps each time).

In the 6/12/20 method, you perform 6 repetitions until muscle failure, then reduce the weight so that you can perform a further 12 repetitions (performed until muscle failure) and then reduce the weight again for the final 20 repetitions.

None of these methods is inherently better than the other. The best method is the one you can use on a consistent basis with the highest intensity.

Supersets with multi-joint exercises

Supersets are usually performed using an isolation exercise in combination with a multi-joint exercise. In the variation of supersets described here, however, you will perform two multi-joint exercises one after the other without a break.

This is nothing unusual when you combine antagonistic muscle groups such as chest (push) and back (pull). However, there is no rule that says you can't destroy a muscle using two multi-joint exercises in a superset for the same muscle.

Examples would be...

• Leg presses and squats
• Dumbbell incline bench press and dips
• Pull-ups and lat pull-downs
• Overhead press and upright rowing

If you use one of the splits described above, where you train one muscle group per day, then these exercise pairings are excellent for the same muscle group. For the 3-day split, however, supersets of chest and back, quadriceps and hamstrings and biceps and triceps are a good choice.

Here are a few examples

• Bench presses and pull-ups
• Leg presses and lunges (a gluteus destroyer)
• Tricep dips and pull-ups with an underhand grip

Mega sets/circuit training

Do a whole truckload of sets in a row without rest until you have completed all the exercises. I like this variation with isolation exercises rather than doing a series of multi-joint exercises. You can do a really vicious training session focusing on metabolic stress for specific muscle groups without compromising your recovery on the big multi-joint exercises.

Pre-fatigue

Use an isolation exercise for one muscle group before moving on to a multi-joint exercise for the same muscle group. The idea behind this approach is that all multi-joint exercises have a weak link in the chain that prevents the primary muscle you want to train from being trained as hard as it should be.

For example, with squats, the lower back gets quite a bit of stress and fatigue, while the quadriceps could handle more training. If you use pre-fatigue, you can create equal conditions for both muscle groups by starting with leg extensions and then immediately moving on to squats. The quadriceps should then be fatigued and the lower back is no longer the weakest link in the kinetic chain.

Other examples would be performing flying movements before bench presses or incline bench presses, side raises before shoulder presses and pull-ups before pull-ups or rowing. This is an excellent way to give a muscle group the rest in the shortest possible time.

Choose economical exercises

Pay attention to overlaps - you want them. If you're doing bench presses, you're working your chest, shoulders and triceps. If you train dips, the same applies. However, you can emphasize the triceps more by using a tighter grip on the bench press and you can emphasize the pecs more on dips by leaning forward at the bottom of the movement.

Both are multi-joint exercises that basically train the same muscles, but the way they are performed determines which areas are trained a little more.

By "overlap" I mean that you can train all of these areas several times a week if you're one of those exercisers who freaks out when they can't train the chest enough during the week. You don't need to worry about this if you train chest with bench presses one day and triceps with dips a few days later. This means that you train chest, shoulders and triceps at least twice a week.

Let's put it all together

I'm giving the busy exerciser a lot to work with here. There are literally a million ways to combine all of these ideas to concoct some productive workout splits. Here are a few examples:

If you train 3 days a week:

Day 1: Quadriceps and leg curls

• Superset of multi-joint exercises: Perform Hackenschmidt squats and lunges. After warming up, perform 3 rounds of 20 Hackenschmidt squats in superset with 20 lunges.
• Leg curls: Perform the 8/8/8 or 6/12/20 descending set.

Day 2 - Chest and back

• Superset of multi-joint exercises: Perform dumbbell bench presses and pull-ups or rows (alternate these exercises from week to week). After warming up, perform 5 rounds of 8 repetitions of dumbbell bench presses and the same number of repetitions of pull-ups or rowing. If it's a rowing week, do 5 x 8 for rowing.

Day 3 - Shoulders and arms

• Circuits or mega sets: Perform 25 reps per exercise, do not rest between exercises and repeat this circuit four times with 2 minutes rest between circuits.
• Side raises
• Side raise bent over
• Tricep presses on the cable pulley
• Barbell curls

If you train 4 days a week

Day 1 - Quadriceps

• Pre-fatigue: Use leg extensions and squats with elevated heels. Perform 3 rounds of 15 repetitions of leg extensions and 10 repetitions of squats per round.

Day 2 - Chest

• Superset with multi-joint exercises: Dumbbell incline bench press and dips. Perform 4 rounds of 8 repetitions of dumbbell presses and as many repetitions as possible of dips.
• Flying movements on the flat bench: Perform 8/8/8 or 6/12/20 descending sets.

Day 3 - Back and leg curls

• Superset with multi-joint exercises: Deadlifts with legs extended from a raise and pull-ups. Perform 3 sets of deadlifts of 6 reps and 3 sets of as many pull-ups as possible.
• Leg curls: Perform 8/8/8 or 6/12/20 descending sets.

Day 4 - Arms

• Circuit or mega set: Perform 25 repetitions per exercise, do not rest between exercises and repeat the circuit four times with 2 minutes rest between circuits.
• Barbell curls
• Tricep presses on the cable
• Incline bench curls
• Overhead tricep presses with a rope handle

If you train 5 days a week

Day 1 - Gluteus, quadriceps and hamstrings

• Descending set with pre-fatigue: Start with leg extensions in the form of a 6/12/20 or 8/8/8 descending set, immediately followed by Hackenschmidt squats with sets of 20 reps to muscle failure.
• Superset with multi-joint exercises: Perform sumo leg presses and Romanian deadlifts with dumbbells for 3 rounds of 10 reps leg presses and 8 reps Romanian deadlifts.

Day 2 - Back

• Mega set (with pre-fatigue): Don't rest between sets, repeat this circuit four times and take 3 minutes rest between rounds:
• Dumbbell pull-ups: 10 reps
• Pull-ups: As many reps as possible
• Seated rowing: 10 repetitions

Day 3 - Chest

• Incline bench press: Perform the 8/8/8 or the 6/12/20 descending set.
• Superset with pre-fatigue: Perform flying movements on a flat bench or butterfly superset with bench press or chest press on the machine. Complete 3 rounds of 12 repetitions of flying movements/butterflies and 8 to 10 repetitions of bench presses/chest presses.

Day 4 - Shoulders

• Superset with pre-fatigue: Perform side raises and overhead presses (any variation) for 3 rounds of 12 reps side raises and 8 reps overhead presses.
• Superset: Perform face pulls in superset with side raises for 3 rounds of 12 reps per exercise.

Day 5 - Arms

• Biceps mega set: Perform 4 rounds of 12 reps of Scott curls with a SZ bar, standing Scott curls and incline bench curls.
• Tricep mega set: Perform 4 rounds of 12 repetitions of tricep presses with a rope handle, overhead tricep presses with a rope handle and dips on a bench.

The principle, not the plan

Instead of focusing on a specific plan, focus on the principles outlined here and become your own case study. Use these principles as loose guidelines to figure out what fits into your limited schedule and which training strategies suit you best.

This could be simply performing a few straight sets to muscle failure with one or two exercises. And if you enjoy this and are consistent, then you will make progress.

Remember that you don't have to ask permission if you want to try something new. Be your own explorer here. Plan exercises and intensity techniques for that 30 minute window and do what you enjoy while weeding out what doesn't work for you.

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/30-minutes-to-mass/

From Paul Carter