The gym is full of machines and various exercises.
Nothing wrong with most of them.
The problem is how most people train a muscle group.
Too many exercises per workout.
Here’s a common chest workout I see.
- 4-5 sets of bench presses for chest
- 3-4 sets of dumbbell presses for upper chest
- 3-4 sets of dumbbell flyes for inner chest
The idea is to do several exercises to “hit the muscle from all angles”.
You are looking at 10-13 sets for one muscle group.
This spreads out the intensity over too many sets.
Workout get watered down.
Or it is simply too much work for a natural lifter to recover from.
There’s a better way.
*My physique drastically improved as soon as I focused on gaining strength in key lifts. This is what gave me a chiseled physique.
Instead of spreading efforts across 10-15 sets to build a muscle group…
I highly recommend just 2-3 sets per muscle group.
You will focus on just one key exercise per muscle group.
And since you are doing just 2-3 sets?
Intensity and recovery are maximized.
This is how you get incredibly strong at a lift.
*I’m doing incline dumbbell presses here using 120-pound dumbbells for 11 reps.
I’d go heavier, but these are the heaviest dumbbells in the gym.
I put incline dumbbell presses as a foundational chest exercise.
I only do 2 work sets (more on that later).
And each time, I come back a little stronger.
This builds the upper chest to give you that even armor-plated chest look where the chest is thick all the way up to the collarbone.
Next exercise…
To build a V-taper, you can’t do better than weighted chin ups.
*I’m doing 270 lbs chin up for 8 reps (180 + 90 lbs attached).
These are so effective that I sometimes have to cool it on this exercise.
My back gets too big.
But I would definitely put weighted chin ups as a key exercise.
Get strong at these, and you will become strong at any “pulling” exercise (like rows for instance.)
Really builds up your biceps as well.
Another exercise I recommend focusing on is the seated dumbbell shoulder press.
*I’m using 110-pound dumbbells for a set of 9 here.
I prefer to keep the bench at a high incline instead of completely upright.
I feel much more stable in this position, and still hits the delts hard.
My shoulders grew substantially when I switched to this variation.
Finally, I’d say the Bulgarian split squat is a key exercise.
*I’m going light here in this clip. I hurt my knee trying to dunk a basketball, lol.
This is a killer leg exercise to get strong at.
This unilateral exercise translates well to sprinting and jumping.
Builds powerful athletic legs without bulk.
So I consider Bulgarian split squats another key exercise.
I like to follow this exercise with Romanian Deadlifts to work the posterior chain and glutes.
Keeps the lower body balanced.
You are going to do other exercises besides these…
I just recommend coming back to these exercises on a regular basis.
*Here are the 4 key lifts to focus on.*
- Incline Dumbbell Presses
- Weighted Chin Ups
- Seated Dumbbell Shoulder Presses
- Bulgarian Split Squats
Remember, you will only want to do one exercise per muscle group in a workout.
The idea is to stick to an exercise until your strength plateaus.
This is when you would switch to something like barbell flat bench in place of incline dumbbell presses for 6-8 weeks.
After getting stronger at the flat bench for 6-8 weeks, I’d come back to incline dumbbell presses and you will make progress again.
This is how you become strong and build muscle as a natural lifter.
You don’t want to do several sets of 4 different exercises for a muscle group in each workout.
You will never recover.
Which means you won’t gain strength and add muscle.
One last thing I want to mention here is RPT (Reverse Pyramid Training.)
This is where you do your heaviest sets first.
This approach builds strength at an unbelievable rate.
You do need to warm up.
Let me quickly describe how to warm-up and how to perform your work sets using RPT.
*Here’s my typical RPT warmup.*
- Set 1: 5 Reps at 60% of your 5-rep max
- Set 2: 3 Reps at 75% of your 5-rep max
- Set 3: 1 Rep at 90% of Your 5-rep max
So let’s say your 5 rep max work set is 200 pounds. You would want 5 reps of 120… 3 reps of 150… 1 rep at 180.
This shouldn’t feel challenging at all.
Rest 1-2 minutes in between these warmup sets, but extend the rest to 3 minutes for your work sets.
*Your 2 RPT Work Sets would look like this.*
- First work set: 200 pounds for 5 reps
- Rest 3 minutes
- Second work set: 180 for 6-8 reps (you simply reduce the first work set by 10% for the second work set).
Note: When working smaller muscle groups like biceps, for instance, you don’t need as many warmup sets.
Okay, I hope you give this a try.
Don’t make the mistake of doing endless sets.
You need to focus on getting stronger, and this absolutely does the trick.
Talk Soon,
Greg O’Gallagher
