I came across this article this morning and it brings back some old memories. Memories I’d forgotten.

T-Nation.com | Bigger Muscles Through HFT

The article above is about High Frequency Training, or HFC. It’s a great way to kickstart muscle growth in body parts that are lagging. HFC works something like this.

Say your lats are lagging your chest. Start a routine where, every day, you do one set of pull-ups. Say you can do 6 good reps on Day 1. On Day 2, try for 7. If you can’t do 7, that’s okay. As you know by now, each training day is different and sometimes you can do 6, sometimes 7. But over the course of 4 weeks, you should be able to do 15-20 reps.

HFC will make your lats grow simply by stimulating the muscles every single day. You are not in danger of overtraining because you’re only doing one set per day. Do the set as far away from your normal workout each day. It doesn’t matter that you worked your lats earlier in the day, either.

Just do one set per day and always try to do one more rep than you did yesterday.

I think the reason this method works so well (and it does, I can personally attest to it – having gone from being able to do 12 chin ups to 25 in a few short weeks) is two-fold:

  1. Your body will try to adapt to anything you throw at it. By increasing the reps each day (or by trying to!), you force your body to continually adapt to a great load.
  2. More importantly, you are getting stronger every day. This increased strength will allow you to lift heavier in your “normal” workouts. For example, your lat pull-downs will get easier as your chin-up progresses. You’ll therefore add more weight and reps to your lat pull-downs!

So, give HFC training a try for lagging body parts. You’ll be glad you did!

T-Nation.com | Bigger Muscles Through HFT

Filed under: Hardgainer

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!