its quite simple really and yet something i value highly, to me there is no point having muscle if your not strong, theres no point being strong if you don’t have muscle and shape, and theres no point being fit if you don’t have shape, strength or muscle.

so to me the clarity comes in the solution of going for all three, muscle, fitness and strength

so how do we go about it?

here are some ideas i came up with

first of all pick a body part that you either know you are weak in or is not currently in as good shape as the rest of your body

work on that first, so that you can focus and really put the intensity into it, work on stronger parts later on in the session as you will be able to keep the intensity up because they are your stronger points

for example my chest grows way faster and shapes up way faster than my arms do, so i will start with my arms first even though they are a smaller muscle group, or perhaps your abs and waist needs focus and you have powerful legs, the traditional way of training is to work on the biggest, most compound and most intense lifts, i don’t always agree with this because i don’t believe being stronger is always necessarily about adding more weight on to your lifts although it is a great indicator and a clear way to see this, another way to get stronger is to mix variables up and make old challenges new by changing the sequence or order in which you do things, also as humans we tend to leave the weak stuff as weak and leave it to the end, put little energy into it or completely forget it altogether.

so lets pick on arms and show you how you can apply this system, to get stronger we are going to use variables for each muscle or muscle group

lets say we are doing triceps

the system I’m liking at the moment is to pick

1 a compound barbell exercise
2 a compound or isolated dumbbell movement
3 a machine movement
4 a bodyweight movement

lets apply this to triceps

1 narrow grip bench press
2 dumbbelll skullcrushers
3 tricep pressdowns
4 narrow grip or diamond shape push ups

now heres the hard part, pick a weight that you can do 12 reps for on each exercise, so do a warm up set to work this out and tweak it, then do each of these exercises as a quadriset, that means consecutively without rest, than keep doing it until you fail to complete 12 reps on one of the exercise, then do it as a triset, a superset and then set by set with minimal rest until your muscle is completely blasted, you will get strong, fit and muscular doing it this way

when i next do shoulders, it will be

1 military barbell press
2 lateral raises
3 single arm cable reverse flyes
4 handstand push ups

so play around with it, send me over your ideas and if you need help you know where i am, come and find me or get some coaching, happy training and best wishes x