Muscle Building

"Incline press Decline press Cable machine pec flyes No more than 2 minutes rest between sets You could also work the triceps (which already are assisting the chest in these lifts), to blow those out and reduce your overall sessions per week. (In that case, you’d do biceps with Back Day, and voila, no Arms Day needed.) Should you exercise when you're sick? How to Lift Weights to Get Strong For big muscles, your focus isn’t to move max weight. That’s where strong muscles come in. “The best way to encourage your body to get stronger is to show it that it needs to do so,” Adam says. “Ergo, lift really heavy stuff to failure, rest, and repeat.” Successful strength routines will have heavy weight for fewer reps with longer rest periods, all to tax the muscles but also to overload the neuromuscular system, or the brain-muscle connection. “With strength training, it’s nervous system fatigue, not muscular fatigue—you just can't lift it again,” Gochnour explains. Typically, this puts rep ranges of just 3 to 6, with a weight you physically cannot move for even one more rep. To recover from that much work, your rest period is longer, too: 3 to 5 minutes between sets to allow your muscles and your brain to recover for the next one, for 3 to 5 sets. “So while in a size workout you’re doing 50 reps overall for a squat, in a strength program, you’re looking at just 20-25 reps,” says personal trainer Chris Cooper, co-owner of Active Movement and Performance (AMP) on Long Island, NY."