Fitness Affiliate Articles | Fat Loss | Muscle Building

At first I thought about just blowing off the whole workout but couldn’t since I was supposed to work chest & back the day before and blew it off. I couldn’t do that twice in a row. I just determined to work quickly and try to get in enough sets for both chest and back before the gym closed.

After a couple minutes warm up I grabbed a couple of 85 lb.

dumbbells and did a slow controlled set of 8 reps of flat dumbbell bench presses. 3 second negative, 2 second positive. That felt pretty good, so I rested about 60 seconds and managed to squeeze out 5 reps with the same dumbbells on the next set.

After only another 60 seconds rest, I decided that I wanted to do some higher rep sets. So I picked up a pair of 65 lb.

dumbbells and lowered myself to the bench. All of a sudden those 65 lb. dumbbells felt almost as heavy as the 85’s! I could only squeeze out 8 reps! What gives?

Still wanting to do at least 12 reps, I dropped down to the 55’s, once again after only a 45 to 60 second rest. I could only squeeze out 8 reps with the 55’s and they were feeling mighty heavy, too!

Ok, this was getting ridiculous. I dropped down to 45’s (normally I use these for my warm up) and finally was able to squeeze out a set of 12 reps but my chest was on fire during those last several reps. I was huffing and puffing like a steam engine.

Onto my back workout:

Same thing! Resting only 45 to 60 seconds was fatiguing my muscles rather quickly and making me drop to lighter poundages to stay in the rep zones I wanted to be in.

See, I usually do heavy sets of 5 to 8 reps with a good 2 to

3 minutesrest in between. Cutting my rest times to 60 seconds or less drastically increased the intensity of my workout.

The next day I was more sore than I’ve been in a long time.

Obviously I had imposed a stress that my body wasn’t used to.

If you’re going a little stale in your workouts, try reducing the rest between sets to 45 to 60 seconds and see what happens.

You might be pleasntly surprised!