Who ever said that fat loss is impossible without cardio? According to scientific research, no aspect of fat loss is more exaggerated and overrated than cardio – and it’s clearly evident that excessive cardio is detrimental to muscle mass. But why force yourself to do something you don’t enjoy when there are far more effective ways to burn stubborn body fat and boost your muscle gains at the same time?
The answer is intensity – specifically, the way you structure your sets. One study comparing high-intensity resistance training against a traditional weight training program found that the high-intensity group achieved 450% greater fat loss in the 24-hour post-workout window, even though their session was shorter and included less total volume. A separate study found that HIIT-based training produced around 9 times more fat loss than traditional endurance training. The same principle applies to your lifting: intensity of effort, not duration or volume, is the primary driver of fat loss.
The four techniques below are advanced intensity methods that can be applied to any set in your program – most commonly the final set of an exercise, but not exclusively. They are not “finisher exercises” in the circuit training sense. They are loading and rep-structure techniques that change how you perform a set to extract more muscular stimulus, greater metabolic stress, and more fat burning from the same exercises you already do. You don’t need to add extra work to your routine. You just need to make your existing sets more brutal.
#1. Rest-Pause
This advanced method is nothing new to the weightlifting world – it has been utilized by pro lifters and gym rats alike for many decades now. Rest-pause training is great for many things: it’s an ideal way to increase your strength and bust through training plateaus; allows you to lift heavier weight for more reps, thereby hammering the muscles and causing a great metabolic stress that contributes to better growth; it keeps you lean by promoting the body’s ability to burn off fat. In the bodybuilding community, the rest-pause method is considered as an effective way to fatigue the muscle fibers more deeply and stimulate a greater force production than you would during a straight set.
Rest-pause training is best used during accumulation phases when the goal is muscle hypertrophy and endurance gains. By incorporating this type of highly intensive training into your routine, you can easily tone your muscles while maximizing their strength and size. That being said, the use of rest-pause sets is most suitable on assistance lifts, not the main ones – the CNS fatigue it generates makes it too taxing to use on your primary compound movements every session.
Related: What Is Training to Failure – and How to Use It Without Destroying Your Gains
How to:
- Pick a weight where you can perform 10 reps with proper form.
- Go to failure on your last set.
- Take a 15-second break.
- Perform another set to failure (aiming to pull off 5 reps).
- Take another 15-second break.
- Perform a final set to failure (aiming to pull off 3 reps).
- As your training response improves, reduce the amount of rest time between the mini sets.
#2. Cluster Sets
Cluster sets are those sets in which the main sets are broken into several parts, divided by built-in, short rest periods (no more than 20 seconds), and they serve the purpose of upping the intensity of the workout and allowing you to achieve more volume in less time. Since they are more intensive than traditional straight sets, they promote bigger size and strength gains.
The short rest periods help you lift more total weight than you’d lift otherwise, resulting in an optimized anabolic stimulus. The resulting metabolic stress will not only trigger optimal muscle growth, but amplify fat loss as well. Compared to rest-pause training, cluster sets are known as more of a strength technique focused on building power instead of maximizing fatigue.
So for example, instead of doing a straight set of 12 reps, you would do a set of 4+4+4 reps with very short rest periods in between each intra-set. As you can imagine, this set up leaves room for many combinations of weight and volume, all of which offer multidimensional benefits. By manipulating rep pattern and rest duration, you can accelerate your progress and achieve the desired results a lot faster.
How to:
- On the last set of your main lift, instead of doing 10 straight reps, perform as many intra-sets of 3 reps as you possibly can, taking 20 seconds of rest between each.
- To make it more brutal, set a timer for 5 minutes and perform as many cluster sets as possible, dropping the number of reps per set when necessary.
#3. Drop Sets
Drop sets are a popular technique used by many bodybuilders to increase strength and maximize hypertrophy in a short amount of time. The technique essentially involves performing an exercise until failure, then reducing the weight by 10–30% in order to continue for more reps until you reach failure again. The process can be repeated as many times as you’d like, but studies show that 3 drops are all you need to achieve top results – pushing it too far can make you a victim of overtraining and even injury. Drop sets allow you to hit more muscle fibers than traditional sets, thereby inducing deeper hypertrophy and greater muscle growth.
By integrating drop sets into your regular program, you will be able to put on the size you dream about in a shorter period of time. A general rule of thumb is to perform drop sets with one exercise per body part.
How to:
- Take your final set to technical failure.
- Immediately drop the weight by 20–25% and perform as many reps as possible before reaching failure again.
- Drop the weight by an additional 20–25% and rep out again.
#4. 50-Rep Sets
The method of performing 50-rep and 100-rep sets of a compound exercise with a predetermined percentage of your bodyweight is a staple of old school bodybuilding programs.
This type of tough training increases the density of cells’ mitochondria and the oxidative capacity of fast-twitch fibers, enabling you to optimize the results of your workout and build killer mass while enhancing the metabolic rate and further accentuating the fat loss benefits of weight training. The main reason for this is that high-intensity high-volume work targets the red and grey muscle fibers that normally don’t get stimulated by weight training.
Basically, you’d want to start with a weight that’s 40–60% of your 1RM – enough to struggle through 50 reps with proper form. If at any point your technique or range of motion deteriorates, stop there and rest for 15 seconds. By the end of the 50 reps, you will be completely exhausted and feel your muscles tightened and full with blood.
Not only will this jump-start new growth and help you break plateaus, but it can allow you to train around existing injuries as the lighter weight won’t put as much pressure on the joints. Because of the high volume, perform 50-rep sets only once per week, while focusing on proper rest, recovery, and nutrition in the days between sessions.
How to:
- After finishing your last work set, reduce the weight by 40% and aim to perform 25 reps.
- Take a 15-second break.
- Perform as many reps as you can.
- Take another 15-second break.
- Continue like this until you get a total of 50 reps.
- As your training response improves, progress to 100-rep sets.
A word of warning on all four techniques: don’t use them in every session or on every exercise. These methods generate significant muscle damage and CNS fatigue. Used sparingly – on your final set of key exercises, rotated across sessions – they are powerful tools for breaking plateaus and accelerating fat loss. Used too frequently, they lead directly to overtraining.
You might also like:
- Supersets, Trisets and Giant Sets: Advanced Grouping Techniques
- 7 Common Mistakes Holding Back Your Gains
- German Volume Training: The 10 Sets Method
