Friday, March 29, 2013

Celebrity Workouts Under The Microscope - The Rock

By Russ Howe


At one stage or another, almost everybody who uses the gym has gone online in a bid to search out the workout program of their favorite celebrities. After all, if you're trying to learn how to build muscle you'll probably find it easier if your favorite movie star is teaching you, right? That's the theory many fitness enthusiasts have and one of the public figures who is usually at the forefront of this trend is wrestler and actor Dwayne Johnson.

Of course, there is a booming fitness career for celebrities who wish to latch on the next big thing or fad diet and sell dvd's to the masses. This means many of these plans are not effective. Johnson, however, is a guy who trains simply because he loves working out. One look at his lower body routine is enough to see this.

Take one look at The Rock leg workout and it'll become obvious that your results are not going to come cheap.

One of the reasons for this is that Dwayne Johnson has achieved an impressive transformation in the last year. While his workout routine is something which anybody can do, of course, those results have also been achieved because of a strict diet and putting proven hypertrophy principles in place before hitting the gym.

As with most things in life, the best results are achieved when things are kept simple. This applies here, too. While many gym members get caught up in looking for the next big secret exercise to emerge, those who stick to the old proven principles tend to experience superior results overall. Exercises such as Calf Raise and Squat remain unchallenged despite the many advances we've made in sports science over the years. Likewise, adjusting something simple like intensity can yield excellent improvements from a fat loss perspective.

The workout plan itself looks quite simple on paper.

* Five sets of Box Squats, with 25 reps per set.

* Leg Press - Pyramid training with four sets of twenty five, twenty, eighteen and sixteen reps. Any remaining energy is then mopped up with a burnout set of twenty five repetitions.

* Smith Machine Lunges - Four sets of sixteen reps. That's eight on each leg.

* Lying Leg Curl - Like the Leg Press, this classic old machine is used for four sets of pyramid training. This time we have twelve, ten, eight and six repetitions in each set. Again, you should follow the final set with a burnout set of twelve.

* Standing Calf Raise - 6 sets of 16 repetitions with a burnout set of 20 to finish.

You may be looking at the routine and thinking it's a fairly standard workout and in truth you would be correct. The trick is to monitor your intensity level during the session, keeping rest times down to as little as 30 seconds in between each set and 60 seconds as you switch between exercises.

Furthermore, there are two classic bodybuilding principles here which will ensure muscular hypertrophy is accelerated. Those are the pyramid and burnout principles.

The pyramid principle allows you to consistently increase the resistance level on every set performed by slightly lowering the target number of repetitions involved as your progress with an exercise.

This works quite well with the burnout principle. Burnout sets are designed to clear out any remaining energy in the targeted body part following the last set. They get their name from the feeling of burning generated in the tissue by taking it to absolute failure. To use this technique simply lower the weight after your final set and push out up to 25 repetitions at this lower resistance. The only rest between your final set ending and your burnout set beginning is the amount of time it takes you to lower the resistance.

While Dwayne Johnson has certainly accomplished some incredible results over the last year or so, his workout is incredibly basic. Yet one quick look at The Rock leg workout is enough to see where most people go wrong in the gym. Don't be fooled into thinking you can just perform the same exercises and experience the same results because the key factor in this plan is intensity. While you have probably performed every single exercise on this plan before, the real trick to getting results is the fact that legs are trained with the same intensity as upper body. As much as the probably don't like to admit it, this is something most men do not do.




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