Pyramids for muscle growth

What’s a pyramid?

You can apply a pyramid to any exercise actually. You can do all the same exercises you’re doing now; you will just change the number of reps per set. Starting high and work your way down. Thus, building a proverbial pyramid.

It’s a very basic but effective way of training with many benefits.

Benefits

· Great to build strength.

· More strength is more muscle.

· Easier to recover due to less total reps.

· Able to get you over strength plateaus.

Example

I usually do five sets. That will look like:

Set 1: 12 reps.

Set 2: 10 reps.

Set 3: 8 reps.

Set 4: 8 reps.

Set 5: 6 reps.

If you’re really looking to build more strength you could also do something like this:

Set 1: 10 reps.

Set 2: 8 reps.

Set 3: 6 reps.

Set 4: 4 reps.

Set 5: 3 reps.

You get concept, the lower the number of reps the more weight you can put on. Over time your body will just get adjusted to pushing or pulling more weight and you’ll be able to do more reps. Good job, you just got stronger.

Whenever I hit a strength plateau, I start playing around with the pyramids actually. Usually lowering the number of reps first.

You don’t necessarily have to this for all your exercises. It’s perfectly fine to just use it for an exercise where you’re trying to build strength. Let’s say you start your leg day with squats and want to improve you’re max. Just do the squats based on a pyramid and the rest anyway you like.

Any questions please feel free to send us a message at contact@essentialrecovery.info or start a thread on the forum.