Instinctive Weight Training
by Dave Draper

Having noticed sound muscular progress, feel free to form your own patterns of exercise. Begin as soon as possible to train instinctively. Recognize your own body feelings and needs. This can be the most enjoyable and productive time in your training life, as you begin to train for yourself and with methods and styles you've begun to develop.

You're maturing in your training and gaining a new level of mind-body coordination. Each of us has a different personality and style and it should be expressed in your training. Make a statement with each workout. Strive for quality and learn to use the entire body with each movement - like a Clydesdale draft horse pulling a heavy load. Look for full range for motion in each exercise, thereby involving the entire muscle to assure full development and strength.

At some point, you'll want and need to increase your pace to overload your muscles and to satisfy your increasing enthusiasm. The best way to accomplish this is to perform a combination of either two or three exercises the complement each other. With these vigorous supersets or trisets you condense your workout, intensify your focus, quicken your pace and gain a better muscle pump. The increased pace and muscle pump bring more nutrients and oxygen to the muscle tissue and force more blood into the finer capillaries. This causes finer tissue development and increased growth, while providing quality to the workout.

Superset training will improve your endurance, keeping your heart rate consistently higher through the workout. With the blood flow more constant to the muscle, I sense a greater purging of impurities, toxins and lactic acid from the system. Supersetting provides the capacity for greater output as your endurance increases. Almost aerobic, it's a more athletic way to train, allowing you to gain more physical fitness, and a more practical and useful body. I find my superset and triset workouts are more interesting, exciting and involving of the mind and body, and certainly more fulfilling than single set/rest routines.

The most common supersetting is the training of the same bodypart with similar exercises, for instance bench presses followed by flys. This type of intense training, though very effective, should only be done periodically and only for a couple of weeks at a time as it tends to cause burnout.

My favorite type of superset program involves opposing bodyparts, antagonistic muscle groups such as biceps and triceps. In this training, you allow one bodypart to rest while working another. I've trained this way for many years and have never burned out on it - as a matter of fact, for me, it's the most successful way to get a good workout and a fast and full pump.

With opposing bodypart superset training, you can move more quickly through the workout, exhausting the entire body, push to exhaustion one bodypart, but still having energy and endurance to work another. This provides momentum and rhythmic style, a greater burn in the muscles and less workout interruptions.

As you complete your first exercise, immediately shift into the next. After your second set, rest briefly ? the recuperation from both exercises leading to anticipation of the next superset. As you finish your first group of supersets, begin setting up the next pieces of equipment, allowing no idle time.