drtbear1967
Musclechemistry Board Certified Member
What does intensity looks like?
What do people mean when they talk about intensity? Let me give you an example.
Several years ago, I had a friend ask me to run him througha good leg workout. Now I don’t have good legs at all. After years of back problems and then back surgery, I have permanent muscle and nerve damage to my legs. To the point that I have to focus on them not atrophying on me. Anyway, I agreed to train my friend but only after he agreed not to curse me. That didn't work!! LOL
My friend had stated over and over that he trained his legshard and that he just wanted to do something different. So that is what we did. We increase the
intensity, beyond anything he had ever done. What we did was increase the intensity of each and every movement and pushed the muscle to failure on each and every set. However, we worked both slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fiber to completely devastate the entire muscle.
My friend had nice sized legs, I had seen him squat up to450 pounds for reps on numerous occasions but he always worked in the 5 to 10rep range and I knew that for him to go beyond what he normally did, we were going to blow those numbers out of the water. I had him to focus on squeezing the muscle on each rep and we started off on light leg extension to warm up the knee and quad. 1 set of 100 reps, by thetime he was finished he was screaming. Next were leg presses where we load 600 pounds. His target reps were 50, he had to stop and rest a few times but he made it. The next several sets never dropped below 20. When he hit failure, I would strip off a couple of 45’s and he would go meet the goal. This went on for all 4 sets. Hack squats were next and we hit them with the same manner as mentioned before, except that 1 rep was all the way down, half up, then down and back tothe top. So 1 and ½ rep = 1 rep. After we completed hacks, came his favorite exercise, squats. I put 315 on the bar and he grinded out 5 reps, that was all that he had left. We did 5 more sets with me stripping the bar until he could get the 5 reps. The last set, we were down to 135 pounds. He said that he never had 135 feel so heavy before in his life. His quads were so pumped his poor legs were starting to turn purple. He was soaked to the bone and he did drop a few F bombs my way. The last and the most brutal exercise was left. I walked him over to the smith machine and told him to grab the bar to keep his balance. He looked at me like I was crazy, then Iexplained my madness. We are going to do tabata squats. The timer on my phone was set at a 20/10 split for a total of 8 rounds or 4 minutes. 20 seconds of as many air squats and you could do, followed by 10 seconds of restand then repeat the process. After the 4[SUP]th[/SUP]round, we were looking at a total of 4 reps per round. He grinded out a few reps on the remaining sets but at the end of the session he was done.
When we competed the entire workout, I looked at the clock and the entire session from start to finish had been 45 minutes. In 45 minutes, my friend was soaked with sweat, stretched out on the floor and his muscles were shaking from the CNS stimulus that they had just received. He said that he had never been through a workout like that he even though it was the most pain he had even felt, he loved it. He let me know later on the next time I saw him that he was sore for over a week.
That is what intensity looks like.
I had an IFBB pro from back in the day tell me years ago, you can train for hours without intensity, but you shouldn’t be able to train over an hour with it.
What do people mean when they talk about intensity? Let me give you an example.
Several years ago, I had a friend ask me to run him througha good leg workout. Now I don’t have good legs at all. After years of back problems and then back surgery, I have permanent muscle and nerve damage to my legs. To the point that I have to focus on them not atrophying on me. Anyway, I agreed to train my friend but only after he agreed not to curse me. That didn't work!! LOL
My friend had stated over and over that he trained his legshard and that he just wanted to do something different. So that is what we did. We increase the
intensity, beyond anything he had ever done. What we did was increase the intensity of each and every movement and pushed the muscle to failure on each and every set. However, we worked both slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fiber to completely devastate the entire muscle.
My friend had nice sized legs, I had seen him squat up to450 pounds for reps on numerous occasions but he always worked in the 5 to 10rep range and I knew that for him to go beyond what he normally did, we were going to blow those numbers out of the water. I had him to focus on squeezing the muscle on each rep and we started off on light leg extension to warm up the knee and quad. 1 set of 100 reps, by thetime he was finished he was screaming. Next were leg presses where we load 600 pounds. His target reps were 50, he had to stop and rest a few times but he made it. The next several sets never dropped below 20. When he hit failure, I would strip off a couple of 45’s and he would go meet the goal. This went on for all 4 sets. Hack squats were next and we hit them with the same manner as mentioned before, except that 1 rep was all the way down, half up, then down and back tothe top. So 1 and ½ rep = 1 rep. After we completed hacks, came his favorite exercise, squats. I put 315 on the bar and he grinded out 5 reps, that was all that he had left. We did 5 more sets with me stripping the bar until he could get the 5 reps. The last set, we were down to 135 pounds. He said that he never had 135 feel so heavy before in his life. His quads were so pumped his poor legs were starting to turn purple. He was soaked to the bone and he did drop a few F bombs my way. The last and the most brutal exercise was left. I walked him over to the smith machine and told him to grab the bar to keep his balance. He looked at me like I was crazy, then Iexplained my madness. We are going to do tabata squats. The timer on my phone was set at a 20/10 split for a total of 8 rounds or 4 minutes. 20 seconds of as many air squats and you could do, followed by 10 seconds of restand then repeat the process. After the 4[SUP]th[/SUP]round, we were looking at a total of 4 reps per round. He grinded out a few reps on the remaining sets but at the end of the session he was done.
When we competed the entire workout, I looked at the clock and the entire session from start to finish had been 45 minutes. In 45 minutes, my friend was soaked with sweat, stretched out on the floor and his muscles were shaking from the CNS stimulus that they had just received. He said that he had never been through a workout like that he even though it was the most pain he had even felt, he loved it. He let me know later on the next time I saw him that he was sore for over a week.
That is what intensity looks like.
I had an IFBB pro from back in the day tell me years ago, you can train for hours without intensity, but you shouldn’t be able to train over an hour with it.
Last edited:
