I have several observations as I watch people train. Some are very new to the gym and follow Muscle & Fitness Magazine routines, some are well advanced and do specialized workouts from somewhere like Testosterone Magazine, and others have just found a niche and go through the same routines over and over. I hope it's redundant for you to hear me say that your body adapts quickly and to progress, you have to change your routine from time to time. But, what do we change? The biggest changes I see is just in exercise selection or perhaps exercise order. Do you ever change set/rep/weight structure, or tempo? Do you ever map out a program for several weeks with goals? Periodization is the science of training in a completely different style for long periods of time to accomplish a �peak,� typically for an athlete. Don't stop reading! I'm not going to suggest you train for three months at a time in one certain mode and then completely switch to another. Traditional periodization has it's place to take a deadbeat off season athlete into a level of conditioning, then to a period of growth, then strength, then power, and ultimately maintenance for in season purposes, but that's not for bodybuilders or even recreational lifters.

There is a huge amount of merit in cycling your training, however, to make sure you're not overtraining but also to make sure you're milking the most out of your effort. Non-linear periodization has been shown over and over to be the best way to get the best of both growth and strength worlds. I'll give a thorough explanation in this article, but I'll have to make it a multi-part series to show examples of workouts and to make sure I've done justice to the subject. It's vital that you get this concept down! First, let me change your thinking on one point. It's bad to use the same set scheme every workout for every body part. Most gym goers trying to gain muscle will start light, pyramid the weight up over the course of several sets, end up with a 1-3 rep max set and then go to the next exercise. Even if they use different exercises in the next workout, they use the same pattern. That's one mistake. The second mistake is to either never do core, compound movements or to do them every workout. You may never squat or deadlift or you may do them every leg and back workout. Both strategies (or lack of strategy) will not take you to your best results. Just because you're in the gym, you'll get some results, but not the best. If you're in the gym enough, you'll do enough things right by mistake to make some decent gains.

Have you ever heard someone say they do a heavy week and then a light week? Maybe they do a heavy day and a light day in the same week with the same body part? This is a weak version of non-linear periodization. I'm going to propose a functional definition and a plan for application that has yielded the best results over and over for those who want the most growth possible with the most strength possible from a single training program. This concept has been studied, by the way, to be the best at accomplishing just that. Don't mistake this for getting you the strongest possible; it's for getting the biggest possible. Strength is an added bonus. I'm a huge fan of the squat and deadlift as the best core lifts. I prefer dumbbell presses for chest as the third core lift, but that's because of long-term shoulder health, not because it's better than a barbell. These lifts will give you more size, strength, and functional capacity than other isolation exercises, no arguments. But, you can't do them heavy all the time or even each workout if you want to maximize the results. There are several viable strategies but I believe what I'm going to outline here is the best. The first would be simply having longer recovery times. If you don't recover fully from a heavy squat workout for nine days, don't squat again for nine days. This is fine, but you miss the opportunity to gain faster and fully work the muscle from other perspectives that different styles will give you. Another approach would be the heavy day/light day (or speed day) system. Many great power lifters do this very successfully, but success is defined within that sport without muscle size as a great emphasis. In a nutshell, you can get the best of both worlds by alternating heavy, core lifting days with higher intensity sessions using different exercises in between. Let me give you one example to get us on the same page. If you squat heavy one week and then repeat it week after week, it won't take long until you just stop progressing. If your next workout was with leg press and you still went heavy, at least you would be using the muscles a little differently, but you still would adapt quickly to heavy, low rep training. If you did the leg presses with moderate weight (not light!!) and did continuous reps to nauseating failure in the 15-20 rep range, now you're using a different exercise with a whole different training style with an entirely different physiological response and result. The good news is that even though this workout was harder and more intense, you'll actually recover faster because it doesn't come close to a squat in mechanical or hormonal stress. So, the next time you squat, you'll be fresher and stronger.

Each workout and body part has an incredible amount to plan and think about if you're going to maximize this training system. I plan to outline an entire protocol for each body part on a two-week rotation, but it's going to take a few articles to get all the detail into place. Hopefully you at least have something to think about as an introduction. I know you'll be skeptical as you get started. Some workouts will leave you thinking you didn't do enough and you may have some staunch ideas of your own, but the results will speak for themselves once you clearly know how to implement the entire training system. Stay tuned!