The Fever Lever Center

Weight lifting programs and bodybuilding are based around the
idea of progressive resistance or overload. The idea being that
in order to build muscle and increase your strength you must
constantly increase the stress on your muscles.

Then you must give your muscles adequate time to recover and
rebuild so that you can again increase the overload and continue
to build muscle.

The following weightlifting workout won’t do you a darn bit of
good if you don’t adhere to the overload principle of
progressive resistance.

Overload doesn’t necessarily have to mean an increase in your
training poundages. You can also do more reps on a set with the
same weight. Another way to bring about overload in these
weighlifting workouts is to decrease the amount of time you rest
between sets.

Doing more work in the same amount of time or doing the same
work in less time is a great way to overload your muscles
without increasing your workout poundages. This is the
cornerstone of Escalating Density Training by Charles Staley.

Clearly, to make great muscle building gains, you can’t get
complacent in your weight lifting workouts. You need to
constantly strive to do more. And, as stated above, this does
not mean working out more often or making your workouts longer.

You must make your workouts progressively harder and more
intense.

However, this type of weight training routine is very hard on
the recovery process so you must make sure you get enough rest
between workouts to allow the muscle building process to take
place.

Otherwise, you end up overtraining and instead of bigger
muscles, your muscles will get smaller and weaker.

When training this intensely, it’s very important to take time
off from your workouts. You should consider taking a week to ten
days off every four to eight weeks to keep your mind and body
fresh.

If you don’t recover from these weightlifting workouts you
overtrain. And if you overtrain, you don’t get stronger and your
muscles don’t get bigger.

The core of these power-mass workouts is the big compound weight
training exercises like the following:

Squat

Deadlift

Bench Press

Chin ups

Dumbbell Press or Upright Row

Shrugs

Following is a sample weighlifting workout for developing power
and building muscle.

Day 1

Chest, Triceps, Shoulders

Decline Bench Press 3 x 10, 8, 6

Decline Flyes 2 x 8 - 12

Incline Flyes 2 x 8 - 12

Dips 3 x 12, 10, 8

Tricep Pushdowns 2 x 8 - 12

Dumbbell Upright Rows 3 x 12, 10, 8

Incline Dumbbell Laterals 2 x 8 - 12

Day 2

Back, Biceps, Abs

Curl Grip Pulldowns 3 x 10, 8, 6

Machine or Dumbbell Pullovers 2 x 8 - 12

One Arm DUmbbell Rows 2 x 8 - 12

Incline Dumbbell Curls 1 x 8 - 12

Dumbbell Concentration Curls 1 x 8 - 12

Barbell Curls 1 x 8 - 12

Weighted Crunches 2 x 15 - 20

Reverse Crunches 2 x 15 - 20

Day 3

Legs

Squats 3 x 10, 8, 6

Leg Extensions 2 x 8 - 12

Stiff Legged Deadlifts 2 x 12 - 15

Leg Curls 2 x 8 - 12

Standing Calf Raises 2 x 12 - 15

Seated Calf Raises 2 x 12 - 15

This routine involves working each muscle group once per week.
The idea is to keep the overall training session short but
intense to avoid overtraining.

If you can recover from it, you may want to replace the Curl
Grip Pulldowns and the Pullovrs with 4 sets of deadlifts instead.

If you feel you recover sooner than that, you may want to change
up the split to something like the following:

You definitely don’t want deadlifts on the following split
because you would find yourself doing deadlifts and squats on
consecutive days.

Monday: Chest, Triceps, Shoulders

Tuesday: Legs

Wednesday: Back, Biceps, Abs

Thursday: Off

Friday: Chest, Triceps, Shoulders

Saturday: Off

Sunday: Off

Monday: Back, Biceps, Abs

Tuesday: Legs

Wednesday: Chest Triceps, Shoulders

Thursday: Off

Friday: Back, Biceps, Abs

Saturday: Off

Sunday: Off

Monday: Repeat at the top

If you haven’t been training, or haven’t been training very
intensely lately, you’ll want to start out by avoiding training
to failure for the first week or two. This will help you build
up some momentum, as well as avoiding extreme soreness that will
keep you out of the gym.