Escalating Density Training Revisited

ESCALATING DENSITY TRAINING REVISITED

After using Charles Staley’s Escalating Density Training for a couple of weeks, I have a suggestion or two for some small modifications.

I don’t like making many modifications to programs unless they become absolutely necessary. But for some of you, these little tweaks may help.

First, if you are able to schedule your workouts during slow periods at you gym, have a complete home gym or work out in a smaller private gym where most people there will understand how programs like this work, I wouldn’t change a thing.  This program will work. So stick with it.

However, if you are stuck with working out in a big box gym along with a lot of newbies and little old ladies (and gentlemen), the other members might not understand. Or, if like me, you work out in more than one gym, you’re going to run into some logistics problems.

One of the benefits of Coach Staley’s program is called “reciprocal innervation”.

That simply means that by doing supersets with antagonistic pairs the muscle not being worked at the time is actually recovering faster than it would if you were simply resting. That’s because the inactive muscle is forced to totally relax while the opposing muscle is being worked.

You don’t want to lose the benefits of reciprocal innervation. But you also don’t want to get stressed because you feel like an equipment hog and have a line of people staring at you with arms crossed and feet tapping while you’re on piece of equipment for20 minutes.

Rather than scrapping a very good protocol, I’d rather see you make some minor modifications.

One suggestion; Stick to the program as described when possible. When necessary, switch to 8-10 minutes doing maximum reps for one of the exercises then switch to the antagonist muscle for 8-10 minutes Instead of supersets. Not as effective as supersets but gets the job done.

Let me hear from you in the comments below or email me if come up with other suggestions.