Secondary Attack – Reworking A Trained Muscle Later That Day

It should come as no surprise to learn that I love to workout with weights. There is something special about the feeling you get when your muscles have been fatigued from a lot of heavy lifting. This feeling is wonderful to me because I feel pain in places I don’t normally feel anything. It’s a strange masochistic awareness that lets me know that there is a lot more of me than what I’m used to knowing.

One of the best ways I’ve found to increase this awareness, to create delayed onset muscle soreness through working out, is to partially retrain a morning body part later on in the day. For example, I train chest, shoulders and back in the mornings and will work legs, arms and abs in the evenings. On a day when I’ve trained back in the morning I’ll sometimes follow DB curls with a few sets of narrow grip pull-ups with the goal of more complete fatigue of the biceps and to retrain the back muscles from the morning workout, I’ll finish off triceps training with dips if I’ve trained my chest earlier in the day. The goal is to complete fatigue both sets of muscles and force a second influx of recovery nutrients into muscles I trained in the morning.

I’ll always try to train biceps in the evening on the days that I train back and triceps on the days I train chest because the morning workout does impact the arm muscles to a fairly large degree. I say this because most people can’t get a good biceps workout when they train them with back. While this is a common split, it is not idea from a biceps growth perspective. The same applies to the triceps and chest split.

With a body part like the traps, after I’ve trained them in the morning, I’ll just pick a trapezius isolation exercise and do it in the evening.

Some people don’t like this approach. They say that it is too high volume and that it will lead to over training. I don’t disagree with them, but it you do it right, it represents a fantastic way to maximize training intensity without having to dramatically increase load. You do need to decrease the volume of exercise in the morning workout, eat more and increase the amount of recovery time before you train the body part again to help avoid overtraining. But this is also true for all high intensity shocks that you employ during your training and it is especially true to training to true failure.

I’d encourage you to give this secondary attack approach a try. It’s going to help you completely drain and fatigue your muscles and it will force a second growth-creating release of repair hormones.

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