This is Turk and we are back here at the Xtreme Edge Gym. Shawna is going to perform this high intensity chest workout with a total of 3 exercises. This will be a giant set, so each exercise will be performed back to back with very little rest in between. Her first set will consist of incline barbell bench press then she will move right into flat bench dumbbell press and finish up with cable crossovers.
On the first exercise, which is the incline barbell bench press, we will be doing a 4 count negative with a 2 count positive which means you will be going down (eccentric portion) in 4 seconds and back up (concentric portion) in 2 seconds for each rep. We will also be incorporating the “rest/pause” training principle, so after Shawna gets done with her first set, she will rest for 20 seconds and then do another full set of incline barbell bench press. The goal here is to get about half the number of reps that you did on your first set. So, if you were able to do 12 reps on the first set, then you will shoot for 6 reps on the 2nd set after taking that brief 20 second rest in between. This technique is used to totally exhaust the muscle group and force it to grow.
On the second exercise, we will be moving into the flat bench dumbbell press. You want to go heavy and intense on this movement, so you want to choose a weight that you can get up for about 6-8 reps.
The third exercise is cable crossovers. In the video, take a look at the impressive striations in Shawna’s chest when doing this exercise. She is getting ready for a physique contest and she wants to put on more thickness in the chest area so when she poses in the show, she will have that overall look of thickness in her pecs and will not look skinny. Make sure to actually crossover at the wrists since this is what really maximizes the contraction in the muscle. The training principle you want to include with this exercise is “slow reps” so you can really focus all of your attention on the chest muscles and really burn them out so they will be forced to grow!
High Intensity Chest Workout – 1st Exercise (Set #1):
Exercise:
Incline Barbell Bench Press
Workout Advice:
Your repetition range is determined by the weight you will be using. In this giant set workout routine, you will be going from one exercise to the next with very little rest between movements. On this exercise, we are doing the training principle called “rest pause” so after your first set, you will rest for 20 seconds and then do another set and your goal is to get up half the number of reps that you did on the first set.
High Intensity Chest Workout – 2nd Exercise (Set #2):
Exercise:
Flat Bench Dumbbell Press
Workout Advice:
Your repetition range is determined by the weight you will be using. In this giant set workout routine, you will be going from one exercise to the next with very little rest between movements. On this exercise, we are going heavy and hard so make sure to choose a weight that you can do for around 6-8 reps maximum.
High Intensity Chest Workout – 3rd Exercise (Set #2):
Exercise:
Cable Crossovers
Workout Advice:
Your repetition range is determined by the weight you will be using. In this giant set workout routine, you will be going from one exercise to the next with very little rest between movements. On this exercise, we are doing the “slow reps” training principle so make sure to focus on going down in 4 seconds and then back up in another 4 seconds.
The last exercise (cable crossovers) was a really good set for a couple of reasons. If you notice in the video, Shawna ends up doing a lot of reps on the exercise. She actually underestimated her weight. In this full workout, we included 3 training principles, which consisted of a rest/pause, a compound set and we did a negative count on the first exercise (incline barbell bench press). Then, Turk added “pauses” and “slow reps” on the third exercise (cable crossovers) and the reason why he did that is because after about 10-12 reps, he saw that Shawna had plenty of energy left and he wanted to get a little more of that extra energy out, so he instinctively made the set harder in the middle of the set. Now, this is a scenario where if you wanted to do a certain rep range, like 12-15 reps, and you underestimated your weight when you first starting doing this training system, then you might need to do something like this so that you are not doing a lot of overall reps. This is totally fine since there is a lot of fluidity to this training system, so feel free to adjust and modify it to fit your needs.
