Men's Health

Workout: strategic destruction of muscle fibres

It’s hard but not impossible to build muscle mass while you’re following a strict diet and limiting kilojoules. The key is to do as much as you can without compromising your ability to recover in time for the next workout. Lowery suggests splitting up your exercises so you’re rarely working upper-body and lower-body muscles on the same day.
Instead, push the targeted muscles to exhaustion, always working from “the centre of the body outward”. So he starts by training his chest and back (the centre), moves outward to his shoulders, and finishes up with arms.

To work your upper torso with his system, you’d begin with basic, heavy lifts – 3-4 sets of five reps of barbell bench presses and dumbbell rows, for example. Next, you’d perform three sets of 10-12 reps of dumbbell shoulder presses and lat pulldowns. Then you’d finish with one or two sets of 20 reps of biceps curls and triceps extensions.

Jun 27, 2012