A good coach can keep the tense out of intense training
Q I keep reading about strength training with intensity to build more muscle and lose more fat. What is intensity? Should I be lifting more? A South Africans should have no trouble dabbling in a little intensity. I often look at our news cycle and wonder how we survive emotionally. Wait, we don’t.
A colleague was chased down to a filling station this past week because of an altercation at an intersection affected by load-shedding. The frothing maniac physically attacked him. The intensity on our shores resides as a kind of potential energy, like a string on your old guitar being tightened daily.
Intensity at the gym is not, and should not, be of this variety. Forget the “inspirational” memes. The Collins Dictionary defines intensity in both British and American English. The former is probably how everyone reading this column understands the word, literally, while the American English definition reads:
“1. The quality or condition of being intense. 2. Great energy, strength, concentration, vehemence, etc, as of activity, thought, or feeling. He went at the job with great intensity.”
This is helpful. Techniques to increase the intensity of exercise, for aerobic or anaerobic activity (which is what you’re asking about), are designed to tax the body more, to have a greater physiological effect.
To use saccharine business speak, intensity techniques are “levers” one uses to “move the dial” on muscle-building and fat-loss results. If we “circle back” to the premise of actually wanting to see results, increasing the intensity makes sense.
More intense workouts work the muscles and cardiovascular system more vigorously. Training like this burns more calories, is said to improve insulin sensitivity, increases your lactate threshold (so you can train longer and harder), and more. It’s like turning things up a notch in the hope of going from lacklustre to meaningful results.
Intensity can be measured and altered within individual repetitions of an exercise, during the sets of an exercise, throughout the day’s workout and even over the entire programme. It’s not just relevant for strength training, consider walking, versus jogging, versus fartlek, versus hill sprints.
This is where it can become dangerous. Many weekend warriors have trained themselves into battered wrecks, while reckless trainers push their clients to breaking point — and beyond. Intensity should be carefully managed, and is very closely related to your level of strength and conditioning, and your own periodisation.
If you increase the intensity of your workouts, then the volume should decrease, depending on your own personal circumstances. A good coach will know how frequently you should train, and at which intensity, to allow for another crucial aspect of exercise: recovery.
There are various strengthtraining techniques to increase intensity. Rest-pause reps are where you perform an exercise to near failure, pause and then do a few more reps, pause again and do a few more reps, until you reach total muscle failure.
Drop sets are where you perform an exercise to near failure, and then immediately reduce the weight and perform more reps until you can’t any more, then reduce the weight again and perform the exercise until you can’t any more, and so on.
Slow negatives, or a focus on the eccentric phase of the lift, are where you perform an exercise to the level of exhaustion described above, and then do forced reps where a training partner helps you lift the weight and you lower it as slowly as you can, for a few reps until you can’t any more.
Supersets are where you train two exercises back to back without rest. Giant sets build on this premise by including more exercises. Advanced trainers use preexhaustion techniques before they perform their main lifts, but that really should not be the goto technique for a beginner or intermediate lifter as it can become dangerous quickly.
When you understand these techniques — and there are many more — it becomes clear that they’re often not appropriate for free-weight compound exercises unless you have a good coach guiding and helping you.
Similarly, it is clear that training at a higher intensity necessitates fewer sets. I incorporate this style of training on a regimen with radically reduced volume but increased training frequency. A good coach will determine what’s right for you.