Get Tweaked: Small Adjustments for Massive Gains - Part 1

If you haven’t figured it out yet, the human body is a marvel of creation. Not only is it beautiful and resilient, but it’s also an energy-conserving, self-preserving organism that does all it can do to adapt to the demands that are placed on it. 

For example, each time you lift a certain weight, fewer muscle fibers are recruited to perform the lift. Your body doesn’t like stress, so it quickly gets good at lifting the weight. It goes without saying then, that you have to make changes to your routine every now and then if you want to activate new muscle fibers and create new growth and strength.

It only takes small modifications, or “tweaks”, to turn the old exercises you’ve been doing for months without results into effective mass makers. I’m going to show you how to create a variety of completely new exercises that will bring major changes in your overall performance and gains in the gym.

Training for hypertrophy, or increased muscle size, can be very confusing for with so many “experts theories” circulating in the different magazines. My suggestion is to not get too hung up on any one of these programs for too long. Many are valid and have helped countless people gain size and strength, but variety is the spice of life and is also the key to a successful exercise program.

What follows are some of the various tweaks I’ve learned over the years to power up my workouts. Try them for yourself and use them as a foundation to create other small changes that will lead you to the big results you’re looking for.

Get A Grip
One of the simplest alterations you can make to any exercise that requires you to wrap your hands around a bar is to change your grip. When you’re doing barbell curls or performing bench presses, for example, moving your hands closer together or farther apart will stress your muscles in different ways.

Similarly, most triceps press-down and lat pull-down machines come with a variety of different handles that allow you to hit your muscles from different angles. Be sure to take advantage of these different handles from time to time. If you’re doing triceps press-downs, for instance, one day you can use a straight bar, one day you can use an angled bar, and another day you can use a rope handle.

You can even surprise your body by changing your grip for dumbbell exercises. Have you ever gone to a different gym and used a different type of dumbbell? The first thing you probably said to yourself was, “Man, this feels weird!” That’s because your body was used to the size and shape of the dumbbell handles at your old gym.

Now, I realize that most gyms don’t change their dumbbells every few weeks, but here’s an easy way to change your grip: Take a small workout towel and wrap it round each dumbbell handle. By creating a larger surface for your hand to wrap around, you’ll cause your body to recruit new muscle fibers to perform the lift. Trust me, this works great — on dumbbell and barbell exercises. Try it for a few weeks, then go back to the normal handles and see what happens.

No Rest For The Rugged
Another very simple alteration you can do to boost your gains in the gym (and reduce the effects of lactic acid buildup) is to cut down your rest time between sets. This requires some concentration — I know all too well how easy it is to get caught up in some stupid conversation with someone after a great set and wait way too long before hitting the weights again.

The next time you go to the gym, put on your Walkman or simply avoid making eye contact with chatty Cathy and get down to stimulating some serious fast-twitch muscle fibers. If you work out with a partner, use the “I go, you go” method. You do your set, he immediately does his, then you go again right away, etc.

10 X 10s
Many people get stuck in the mentality that you have to do three sets of ten repetitions for each exercise. Now don’t you think that after all these years in the gym, your body — the incredible organism that it is — has figured out your boring routine and is basically asleep at the wheel? I’m telling you that you’ll never activate any new growth if you get stuck in this rut.

It’s time to increase the number of sets you do! Take any given exercise — let’s use the bench press as an example. Choose a weight that’s 80% of your one-rep maximum (1RM). Do 10 sets of 10 repetitions on the bench press with a rest period of no more than sixty seconds between sets and get out.

That’s it! Your body will freak out and have to respond differently than normal. You obviously won’t do this every time you hit chest, but throwing this tweak in the mix every now and then will force you to grow. Try it with leg extensions sometime, too!

In Part Two, we'll go over four more awesome tweaks that will get your muscles growing! Stay tuned!