Plan your Goals, Plan for Success

Plan your Goals, Plan for Success

Having a clear plan of what you want to accomplish before entering the gym can really make or break your session. Try to mix things up by altering your rest time between sets and changing up the way you "stack" or arrange the training of various muscle groups. Something as simple as this can really add to the intensity of your session as well as work on overall work capacity and recovery.

Stacking a lower body push and a lower body pull, like a squat variation with a reverse lunge or RDL, is a great way to give antagonist muscles a chance for recovery while keeping the workout moving and heart rate high. The same can be said for upper body, an example being a chest press variation stacked with a row variation.

You can keep a similar trend of push/pull, but allow for even more time for ample recovery by stacking a lower body push with an upper body pull. Here were are ensuring even attention to anterior and posterior chains, while again continuing to keep the workout tempo high and allowing for stabilizers and synergists to rest for the upcoming work set. An example of this is a squat stacked with a pull up variation.

It is important to keep in mind that volume and load will ultimately dictate whether this form of training is prudent. As the loads increase, so do the neuromuscular demand as well as stress on joints and bone structure. With such high demand, more recovery time is required between sets.

Utilizing the stacking examples listed in the beginning of this post, works well with more "athletic" movements such as single leg exercises and push up and inverted row variations that require dynamic stability to execute.  Keep in mind that when training on an unstable surface, we are actually losing the ability to increase force production.