Rest Pause Training Protocol

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Do you want to know what is Rest Pause Training Protocol? How to Perform and Progress with it to keep building muscle? Then you want to read this article.

The primary reasons why lifting heavy weights and taking long periods of rest, as seen in the Renegade Workout and in the Anarchy Workout, is effective, is because for each and every rep you utilize alot of muscle fiber recruitment.

Lifting at your absolute 5-8 rep max, you’re most likely to use every last muscle fiber that you have got for a particular muscle group, each and every rep.

In traditional bodybuilding workout routines you will notice that you will be told to do 10 to 12 reps and you really truly reach your muscle’s maximum strength potential only towards the last few reps.

So you will have to do more and more sets with lightweights to trigger muscle gains, but most people don’t even reach their true strength potential to trigger muscle growth.

So lets pull out the numbers and compare it with reverse pyramid training (RPT).

If you were to do RPT, i.e, 6 reps of 1st set and then 8 reps on the 2nd set, you just did a total of 14 reps. The number of reps that fully triggered muscle development is all 14 reps.

If you were to do the traditional 5 sets of 10 reps, with 60 second of rest. You just did 50 reps but out of the 50 reps only 10 or maybe 15 reps really did trigger muscle growth.

Thats just a very poor ROI on your time and sweat investment.

Using Rest Pause Training Protocol you can trigger muscle development with lightweights with much less work and much less time. How?

How to follow the Rest Pause Training Protocol?

Pick a weight you can do for 12-15 reps before reaching failure. You will perform one set of 12-15 reps. This will your activation set.

Towards the end of the 12-15 reps, when it gets really tough you will start to use the most amount of muscle fibers which means at this stage you’re able to get the most amount of muscle growth.

At the end of the activation set, you will maintain this state for about 20-30 seconds.

If you were to rest of a very brief 15-20 seconds rest and then rep out a few more reps, you’ll still be utilising the same amount of muscle fibers as you did towards the end of the activation set or even more.

Doing 3 or 4 mini sets like this, will yield you the same benefit of doing 5 full sets of 10 reps. Less work, less time more output That’s a pretty awesome ROI, if you think about it.

Doing those mini sets will allow you to train with greater focus and intensity.

If you take a closer look at Reverse Pyramid Training and Rest Pause Training, you will find that they both work hand in hand to build maximum muscle growth.

Lets put all the theory explained above into action.

  • Activation Set: 12-15 reps
  • Rest 15-20 seconds and perform 3-5 reps
  • Rest 15-20 seconds and perform 3-5 reps
  • Rest 15-20 seconds and perform 3-5 reps
  • Rest 15-20 seconds and perform 3-5 reps

How to Progress with Rest Pause Training?

The starting point for the rest pause training is to do 15 reps on the first set which is the activation set and then do 4 mini sets for 5 reps with 20 seconds of rest between sets with the same weight as you did for activation set.

The smaller the rest duration between the mini sets, the more muscle fibers you will be able to recruit and higher the intensity.

Once you have reached this level, you must increase your weight and start at the top end of the activation set rep range, which is 12 reps and then do an additional 4 set of 3 to 4 reps with 20 second rest in between the 4 sets.

As you get stronger, work your way up to 15 reps of activation set and 4 sets of 5 reps with 20 seconds of rest or less between sets.

Unlike most fitness gurus or bodybuilding junkie suggests, you shouldn’t be focusing on increasing the weight every time you do rest pause training.

Focus of the quality of each rep for a specific weight. Once you dominate or in it’s rawest form, once you make rest pause training your bitch for a specific weight, then you can increase your weight.

By dominating or “making your bitch”, i mean 1 activation set of 15 reps and 4 mini sets of 5 reps with 20 seconds of rest between mini sets.

Your Opinion of Rest Pause Training Protocol

So what do you think of Rest Pause Training. Do you use it in your workouts? Have you read a faulty version of Rest Pause Training in a certain bodybuilding website? 😉

By | 2018-01-07T01:21:17+00:00 December 29th, 2017|Training|0 Comments

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