Consistency is one of the things that is hard to develop and even harder to hang on to.  You have to do things to keep yourself consistent.  I have personally discovered that I need to workout early in the morning.  If I don’t, life gets in the way and it doesn’t happen.  My way of keeping myself consistent in the morning is to set two alarm clocks, one that I have to get up and turn off.  Once I am up I am ready to hit the gym.

Most people do not get enough rest.  They compromise their ability to grow by not getting enough sleep.  I have found that taking naps is essential.  My body just makes me do it.  The harder I work in the gym the more my body demands rest.  I listen and give it what it needs.

Your muscles rebuild while you rest.  In addition, your body releases human growth hormone in the early stages of your sleep.  The two combined do wonders for keeping your body growing.

As you workout you will find the need to use progression in your program.  Progression comes in the form of either increased repetitions or increased weight being moved.  The fact is that your muscles get used to the amount of volume you subject them to.  Progression is a way to insure that you continue to challenge your muscles.

Another form of progressions is time under tension for the muscle.  This is one of the key concepts of the slow repetition.  You increase the time under tension to push your muscles harder.  This, in turn, causes growth to happen.

To me, the first key to growth is intensity.  Intensity is not just about how hard you work.  Intensity is about doing every repetition you have in you.  Intensity is about taking the set to failure.  Intensity is about overcoming the mental block that prevents most people from truly going to failure.  That’s right, most people quit before they hit failure because their mind tells them they are done.

Intensity means you have to overcome your natural tendency to quit too soon.  You have to make the muscle work extremely hard to get the results you want.  I personally believe that doing many, many sets of an exercise is counter-productive.  Why?  The answer is simple.

When you do many, many sets of an exercise you cannot possibly give everything you have to each set.  When you do every repetition you have in you on the first set, that’s all you can do.  The higher volume can easily lead to over training, something we all must avoid if we are going to grow. 

Instead of increasing the volume by adding a ton of sets, simply increase the intensity with which you workout.  Go to failure on every set.  Pay attention to the High Intensity Training principles because they are deceptive.  At first glance it appears that you are not working each muscle group very hard, but you are working each muscle group many times during a workout.  You are mimicking the higher volume workout, but you are avoiding over training by simply pushing the muscle to failure and not beyond.

You will stick with your program as long as you are enjoying yourself.  But how can you have fun while sweating and working so hard?  Read on!

One approach is to create a competition.  What I do sometimes with Matty is see who increases their total volume the most.  Obviously I lift heavier weights than him, but we calculate the total volume from the previous workout and the total volume of the current workout and determine our percentage of increase.  The competition makes us work harder and we laugh alot and give each other a hard time during the gym time.

Another approach is to make a bet as to who will lift the most repetitions on whatever exercise you choose.  Again, the competition will make it fun and you will want to go to the gym to see what happens.