Today we are only going to talk about three different ways to spice up your hypertrophy set and reps schemes.

All three of them are going to add time under tension in their own respect.

These applications will be added to whatever it is that you are already doing with your training. So I am going to be very specific into how you can use these three methods, whether it be worth one of your lives in your training program, or all of them.

To start off, a standard set and rep scheme includes sets (which is how many rounds you do) and reps (which is how many repetitions you perform within each set). And then we also have tempo. And load. You also have rest periods but we won’t be discussing those today.

That could look like seven sets of three, or five sets of four, or three sets of 15. Your rep scheme could also be wave loading, or some thing a bit more complicated. It could be four by four and increasing weight by 3% each set. It could be a pyramid scheme, where you either increase reps and decrease load on the way up and then do the reverse on the way down. Or like I said wave loading, which could be 642642, using appropriate weights at each of those. Which we won’t get into the specifics of right now.

Just know that those sets and reps will be assigned for every single exercise that you do with an work out. Now let’s get into what you can do or tack on in addition to your normal sets and reps.

Number one and number two go hand-in-hand, in adding specific time under tension in the bottom half of a movement. Or where the extent of the eccentric contraction is happening more often than not.

3 ways to spice up hypertrophy set & rep schemes:

Pauses

You can technically put a pause at any portion of a movement. They are commonly seen at say the bottom of a squat, or at mid shin during a dead lift, or at the top or middle of a pull up.

Adding a pause can be for a single second, or 10 seconds. Or anywhere in between and or beyond that. Point being, to add that time under tension during a specific area of the muscle contraction. And that will be determined by yourself or your coach.

How you might implement this could look different depending on the lift. I’ll use hip thrusts as an example. The pause here will happen at the top of the thrust, with full glute max contraction. You could do this at the top of each rep for say two seconds, or you could add a big contraction on the last rep of each set for 10 seconds. That isometric contraction briefly increases the intensity of the lift, and certainly the demand on the muscle fibers at that point of the movement.

For something like a bicep curl, you could add a pause halfway down. I would curl all the way up, lower halfway down pause for a second or two lower all the way down and then straight back into the next rep. This would be adding extra tension in the mid range of the lift. You could also pause near a sticking point of a lift if you wanted to work on strengthening the muscles within the degrees where are the sticking point happens.

Again, the basics of a pause is that it’s an isometric contraction of the muscle with in either the E centric or the con centric contraction of muscle.. It’s a fun, simple way to spice up your training if you feel you need it. Or if you were looking for a way to spice up PROgramming for your clients, without altering other factors like exercise selection.

Pulses 

I first experienced using pulses in a bodybuilding phase when I was probably 20 years old or so. And I’ve never been so sore in my entire life up to that...