I started out by publishing a "conditioning" training article that is excellent to get your body ready for hard and/or heavy training, then I followed with a description of intensity and an analysis of the squat. Assuming that you're an advanced lifter, I have a workout design that will push you to the edge of strength gain but incorporate high-level muscle work as well. These two goals: strength and work are mutually exclusive. Work includes "time under tension" whereas strength training utilizes more rest, less reps, and is geared toward one or a couple maximum effort sets in a very low rep range. Not many bodybuilders and certainly no powerlifters I have ever met, perform a high level of work in a higher rep range. There is a huge difference in using a 10-15 rep set as a warm up and using that same rep range to failure with more weight.

If you really want to get everything you can from your leg work, you must work the dominant slow-twitch fiber with hard work in the moderate rep range and still challenge yourself with progressive strength increases. I just finished an eight week meso-cycle of training to bring my body weight and strength up to off-season levels. My goal was obviously to get stronger, but without injury. I designed the cycle so that I squatted every other week with increasing weight and decreasing reps while the other week was leg pressing with increasing weight and increasing reps up to 25! These were the workouts that my partner was lying flat on his back and kind of greenish-white looking. Exept for the workout he left early leaving a trail of his previous evening's supper.

Having successfully brought my strength up with this eight week cycle in a very disciplined way- always sticking to the plan, I'm now ready to take the training wheels off and go all out with no boundaries. After such a strict style, it's always nice to switch to a more intuitive training method.

Are you ready? We warmed up on squats. I have described before how important warming up is. Even if you (mistakenly) think you don't need to warm up because you "feel fine," the extra blood flow and stretching will allow you to literally recruit more muscle motor units and have stronger contractions and get nutrients to the muscle faster. Its also part of conditioning for high levels of work. Here was my warm-up: 15 minutes bike bar x 25 bar x 25 135 x 20 135 x 25 185 x 20 225 x 15

At this point, 225 x15 was really a working set. I could have done more reps, but I knew I wanted to go heavy on this day. I continued with 275 for 10 (failure) and 315 for 5 (failure.) At this point I wanted to do something different than I have been doing for the last 8 weeks so I decided to do some eccentrics. We put the safety bars up from below parallel to just at parallel. I put 365 on the bar (more than I could get for one rep on my own right now) and I lowered it very slowly to the safety bar, stripped the weight and put the bar back up to the top for my partner. I did the same with 405 with great control until the last 2-3 inches. One rep done properly with eccentric training can go a long way. Most studies show tremendous strength advantages with eccentric training but are always quick to point out the overtraining aspect. If you only perform them on occasion and never over do it, you can incorporate them very successfully.

To finish squats we went to 200 lbs and did as many reps as we could tolerate with rest-pauses if necessary. I did 25 below parallel without a spot and could have gone on but decided this was enough for week one of this training cycle. We did one set of extensions (moderate weight) to failure and then 5-6 straight sets of seated curls. Fifty minutes and done.

I will continue this workout every other week for a couple rounds to continue rebuilding my offseason strength, carefully documenting my weight until I'm at 405 for at least one rep. Set your weight within the rep ranges I described and make sure you use perfect form. This is an advance strength workout with a high-level of conditioning built in!