This program dispels the notion that lifting heavy is exclusively for strength gains. And while chasing one-rep maxes won’t pave the way to massive muscles, heavy lifting is important for two reasons: First, a stronger muscle can handle more reps and more weight. And since your muscles need a new challenge to adapt to grow—like more reps lifted or heavier weight on the bar—the ability to lift heavier weight for more reps will translate to more inches on your muscles over time. Second, hoisting serious poundage with compound movements like the deadlift, squat, and bench press triggers a greater release of testosterone, a key hormone that’s responsible for the growth and recovery of your muscles. The cluster sets we programmed will allow you to lift weight close to your one-rep max—and for more reps than you would normally be able to accomplish. How? By breaking up the sets into subsets (more on cluster sets below). The effect is a greater accumulation of volume and a bigger release of testosterone, which will prime your body to more efficiently build muscle and oxidize—nerd speak for burn—fat. Then we ramp up the reps and intensity for the accessory work, which targets your entire body each day.
The subsequent lifts will still be multi-joint movements, as these types of exercises give you the most bang for your buck when it comes to muscle recruitment and strength gains. They will also be supersetted with antagonist muscle groups—like a lower-body pulling exercise paired with an upper-body pushing exercise—so your body is working synergistically.
The supersets are added to simply ramp up the intensity of the workout and increase your heart rate, which is a key reason why you don’t see any traditional cardio programmed here. The point is not to be bothered by the lack of traditional isolation movements in the program; you’ll still build plenty of muscle. That being said, we realize that it’s beach season, so the fourth day will focus on pumping up your trophy muscles with high-rep supersets—we got you, bro!
CLUSTER SETS
Cluster sets are sets with built-in, intraset rest periods allowing for more weight, reps, and total tonnage lifted. For example, instead of doing three sets of three reps, you’ll do three sets of 1-1-1 repetitions with 20-second intraset rest between reps, for a total of three sets of nine reps. For the cluster sets below, work with 90% of your one-rep max.
DIRECTIONS
Every exercise marked with the same letter is to be performed back-to-back, as a superset, with no rest in between. Perform two workouts in a row, with a day of rest in between. For all accessory movements, ensure that you’re leaving two reps in the tank. This allows for proper nervous system adaptation and smooth progression week to week.
