This feeling when you think the muscle is tearing at any moment and the skin is tearing it up. This pain in the muscles that at the same time seems unbearable, but on the other hand is a certain satisfaction.

This pain is what we are looking for. We are looking for it to grow, true to the motto “ The pain of today is the strength of tomorrow “. In this article we will show you the 5 guaranteed most painful methods for solid muscle building.

intra-set stretching

The first method is a stretch variant. In itself, the principle is very simple: pump up the muscles, then stretch for what it takes. How exactly? Take a moderate weight that you can easily do 20-25 reps.

Now do as many reps as you can until you are no longer able to do a single rep, regardless however much you try. Let the weight pull you into tension in a certain way and hold this position for at least 30 seconds . Prepare for a nervous hellfire and a lot of pain.

The meaning behind it is easy to explain. Through the many repetitions, we pump the muscle properly full of blood. Metabolic end products such as lactate cannot be transported away and remain in the muscle. The cell milieu is pushed more and more towards the acidic area.

The high lactate concentration attacks the muscle and causes microtraumas. We notice this in the form of a burning sensation in the target muscle. These microtraumas ensure a strengthening of the muscle during regeneration. Our body doesn’t want something like this to happen again, so the damage is repaired and a little more musculature is packed on top for protection, to put it simply.

When we first pump the muscles full and then “tear it apart” by stretching, we increase the metabolic stress and force our body to adapt even more. Always hold the position and do not deviate from it, no matter how great the pain, this is the only way to prevent injuries. Clean technology and good form are essential here.

Drop-Sets

We come to the next variant. It is probably one of the variants par excellence when it comes to pushing the muscle to its limits and causing pain. We are of course talking about drop sets. There is no easier way to stimulate the muscle. You do repetitions with a certain weight until you are no longer able to do a repetition properly.

Now you reduce the weight and keep repeating until you fail can do more. Then the weight is reduced again and again repetition after repetition until you can no longer. As a rule, the “drop”, i.e. the weight reduction, should be around 20% of the initial weight. To achieve results, we recommend 2-3 drops .

But be careful, don’t overdo it. If you do drop sets, or general intensity techniques, you should know your body and be able to recognize when it makes sense to use them and when it would be more useful to leave them out and let your own body regenerate.

Small fun fact on the side : Make sure that when women are present, they roughly understand what you are doing. Otherwise, they might still think you’re weaklings if you struggle with a 5kg dumbbell at the end of a drop set. : D Even better : leave the ego at home and just do it!

half-repetitions

The third variant in the group are the half repetitions or also known as “partials”. Wait a moment! Half repetitions? Have they completely lost their minds ?! No, don’t worry, the half repetitions make perfect sense. For a better understanding, we are not talking about the ego-driven variant of moving as much weight as possible in the worst possible form, just to impress the lady next door. We always advise against such nonsense.

Used correctly, they can sometimes be very painful, but effective. So how now? Very easily. Half repetitions in this case mean a reduction in ROM, i.e. the Range of Motion .

Take a weight with which you just 10-12 repetitions creates. At the 12th repetition you have to bite hard and the ROM should be just about clean. Now just leave the same weight and speed and do more repetitions, but only go as far as you can. So you go on and on.

With each repetition, the ROM will shrink a little more until you can only do a few twitching repetitions at the end.

If you are as crazy as we are, then you do the following: Do a drop set with 3 drops. Instead of stopping after the third drop and hoping that the pain will pass quickly, you hang on to the last drop a few more half repetitions.

Iosmetric hold at the end of a sentence

Here we have a really painful representative of his kind. What is the point of hypertrophy training? Pump as much blood as possible and therefore as much nutrients as possible into the muscle and hold it for as long as possible in order to achieve the greatest possible metabolic effect. You could now be on Blood Flow Restriction Training (BFR) to get back on track to really get the body going and to provide sufficient growth stimuli.

But there is another way. By simply adding an isometric holding torque at the end of a sentence on half the movement. To make the whole thing really painful, you do it at the end of a drop set. But not at the real end, but at the end of every single drop. If that doesn’t cause any pain and makes even the toughest dog whine, then something is going wrong.

Here we recommend choosing exercises that require not too much stabilization of the body in order to on the one hand to concentrate better on the exercise and the contraction in the holding phase, the keyword here is muscle-mind connection, and on the other hand to minimize the risk of injury.

compound clauses and giant clauses

First a little clarification. Compound sets are sets in which exercises are performed for the same muscle group or muscle groups with little break . Supersets, on the other hand, describe sentences in which different, mostly opposing, muscle groups are addressed in one exercise block.

An example of a compound set would be the bench press in combination with dumbbell flies. While in a superset, for example, the bench press and lat pulldown are combined. Giant sentences are nothing more than compound sentences. It is only about the number of exercises that target the same muscle group or muscle groups. We speak of a giant set for more than 3 exercises for the same muscle groups.

Ideally, such a giant set consists of a heavy compound exercise, followed by appropriate isolation exercises. If you like, you can use one of the intensity techniques presented above at the end of such a giant sentence and let your own body beg for mercy.