HIT (or High Intensity Training) is designed to give you an incredible workout in the least amount of time.  The idea is to do a workout in a short period of time that absolutely bombards the body.  In my case, I am doing a full body routine 3 days a week.  At first glance, this sounds extreme.  However, when you really examine what is going on, it is not extreme at all, it is effective.

I train with a 3-3 cadence.  3 seconds on the positive phase of the lift and 3 seconds on the negative phase of the lift.  This makes it more difficult to get alot of repetitions out of the exercises I am doing.  The weight I can lift is dramatically less as a result of this cadence. At the same time, this cadence really stresses out the muscle.  I take each set to momentary failure.  The muscles actually shake and shiver after a set.  It is an intense feeling. 

By working the body in this way, with just one set taken to failure, your body recovers better and you can work the same muscle groups more often each week.  This spurs on more growth. 

If you think it through, you could manipulate the sets and weights to get to the rep range you want to hit.  However, when you use HIT and you use measured reps (3 seconds up, 3 seconds down) in a methodical and controlled fashion you are getting honest by taking the muscle to the point of temporary fatigue.  This results in the muscles revealing the truth.  They can no longer fake it.

This leads the body to expose itself and the repetition inroad principle.  The body will reveal to you that your biceps can only handle a maximum of X repetitions.  Just go with it.  Keep adding weight when you hit that number of repetitions.  You will see continual progress by doing this.

As far as honesty goes, remember, too, that you cannot squeeze your body into a man-made system.  It does not know that it is working on a 7 day cycle.  The body will recover when it has recovered.  You cannot train again until your body is recovered.  If you choose to train again before the body has recovered, it will not respond.  The key here is really listening to your body.  It is going to tell you what it likes and does not like.  It will tell you when it is ready to workout again.  Anyone can claim that you need to workout every other day or some other scheme, but only your body, involved in the Experiment of One, can tell you what you need to do for it to grow.

Remember, recovery, rest, fuel…these are the things you must have in order to achieve success with your bodybuilding.

One goal I am after right now is hypertrophy  (the growth of the muscle).  To this end I am working on eating enough, resting enough and lifting with High Intensity Training.  One interesting aspect of this is the "repetition inroad" principle. 

The repetition inroad principle is the idea that a given muscle group will determine its own repetition range.  No matter what you do, this cannot be changed.  The body sets its own repetition limits. This is the flaw in alot of published exercise programs.  They ask you to perform in a certain repetition range and alot of the time the muscle group being worked is incapable of working in that repetition range.  There is no sense in pounding your body trying to get the muscle group to respond by giving you more repetitions.  Instead you listen to your body and work within the repetition range it has set for itself on that muscle group.

This is part of what I always preach about listening to your body.  You have to listen or you will attempt to make it do things it is not capable. of.

Today I had to do several interviews for some developer positions I am trying to fill.  That's why I'm all dressed up in my picture.  I also figured that I haven't shared alot about how I look when I go to meetings, etc., so I decided to share today.  I am going to start sharing more and more of the environment I live in and the things I am doing.  I am going to tie this all in to the release of my eBook.