I'm Steve — MiniWorkoutDad!
The Finisher: Add Extra Muscle-building To Your Workout
“The Finisher” is a new way to tackle the last three cycles of your 9 cycle workout. Do your last 3 rounds this way to boost the muscle-building potential of your 25 minute workout at the same weight.
Same exercises, extra challenge…
It’s a sad fact, but your workouts are never going to get easy. They can’t. Your workouts must challenge your body. When things get too comfortable, you should “move the goalposts” and make your workouts difficult again.
When you were young, failing to push your capabilities just meant you would reach a level of sufficiency at which all progress stalls.
As you get older, it gets increasingly likely that your strength, fitness and muscle mass will decline unless you push hard the other way. And, if you are going forwards, you know for sure you are not going backwards!
You bring two things to your workout:
- Cardiovascular capacity and endurance, which is how much ‘go’ power you can generate and for how long
- Muscle strength and endurance, which is how much lifting/ holding power you can generate in specific muscles and for how long.
If you want to improve your cardiovascular capacity and endurance, then you need to make it harder to get through the workout — without stopping frequently or collapsing in a heap! Even adding a very small extra amount of weight to your ‘bag’ will acheive that.
To improve muscle strength and endurance, you need to build more muscle fibre. That requires what lifters and bodybuilders call “progressive overload”. They simply add more weight and/ or more ‘reps’, so their muscles struggle to complete their sets.
But, in our workout the holds are the primary muscle-building exercises, so you don’t have ‘reps’ to play with. What you have instead is weight and duration; more weight and/ or longer holds.
If you just add more weight, you make the whole workout harder — including the cardiovascular aspect. And, it’s very difficult to push cardiovascular endurance and your muscles at the same time. You tend to run out of ‘go’ before you exhaust your muscles!
So, I developed The Finisher to deal with this problem. It’s a way to unpack the two ingredients of progress temporarily, because it enables you to focus on muscle/ strength as the limiting factor.
Using The Finisher means you can still struggle through 9 cycles in just about 25-mins. This will maintain cardiovascular fitness, because it’s still challenging to sustain the required work rate. What it pushes much harder is your muscles.
Just like adding reps in the gym, The Finisher is a volume change. Doing more reps or sustaining an isometric ‘hold’ for longer both drive the same processes that lead to hypertrophy (muscle growth):
Extra metabolic stress, muscle damage, and mechanical tension, which signals muscle protein synthesis (MPS) and adaptation, leading to larger, denser, stronger muscles.
Basically, The Finisher helps you push your muscles closer to exhaustion and failure. For a bodybuilder, in the gym, this means not being able to complete another rep. For you and I, it means not being able to hold that position for another second. That’s what The Finisher is all about!
How you do The Finisher
Okay, enough of the why — how do you actually do it?
Part 1: do 6 cycles of the normal workout
This can be 6 forward or 3 forward then 3 reverse — it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you push hard to get these done with minimal stoppage time. Do that and you can tick the box for cardio fitness (your ‘go’ power). And, you can take a breather to reset before The Finisher!
Part 2: do the 3 cycles of The Finisher
Catching your breath first will stop your ‘go’ power limiting your efforts in The Finisher. You’re now going to do 3 different variations on a standard forward cycle. In each cycle you are going to make two exercises longer and skip some exercises to keep to our workout time limit.
I’m going to produce another Follow-me workout for The Finisher, so it’s less thumb in the air and you don’t have to think (or get to ease off!). But, you can try it in your next workout using these instructions…
Please note: the #numbers are the Phase numbers of a normal forward workout cycle. You follow them in numerical order, but skip a few each cycle.
The Finisher Cycle 1
#1 Squat to Over Head Press
#2 Front UPPER Isometric – 30 seconds
Ignore lowering into Phase 3. Use those 15 seconds to sustain this hold. Then lower slowly through Phase 3 to your waist. Bend the knees to put the bag down ready for the Pendlay
Elbows just above shoulders. Hands above elbows
#4 Pendlay Isometric
#5 Romanian to Rear Over Head
#6 Isometric Squat – 30 seconds
One squat held across both counts!
Bottom just above knees, head up, squeeze those biceps!
#7 Over Head Isometric
#8 Tricep Extension to Shrugs
#9 Lunges
The Finisher Cycle 2
#1 Squat to Over Head Press
#3 Front LOWER Isometric – 30 seconds
Lower slowly through the usual Phase 2 hold and straight into the Front Lower Isometric. Hold it for both counts. Don’t forget to push up and away!
Elbows free from your sides. Push the bag away and upwards.
#4 Pendlay Isometric
#5 Romanian to Rear Over Head
#6 Isometric Squat – 30 seconds
One squat held across both counts
#7 Over Head Isometric – 30 seconds
Start your Over Head Isometric as usual but don’t stop! Keep holding for 30 seconds and then launch your bag up into the tricep extension (killer!), before lowering on to a shoulder for the lunges
You can march on the spot too! Don’t forget to launch the bag upwards in a throwing motion at the end.
#9 Lunges
The Finisher Cycle 3
#1 Squat to Over Head Press
#2 Front UPPER Isometric
#3 Front LOWER Isometric
#4 Pendlay Isometric – 30 seconds
Hold the Pendlay Isometric through 30 seconds. If you’re using the Workout Video, exit on the 5 second count at the end of the first squat. Then hit your usual Phase 5 and catch the second squat…
Draw your shoulders back and keep pulling hard
#5 Romanian to Rear Over Head
#6 Single Isometric Squat – 15 seconds
#8 Tricep Extension to Shrugs – 3 x 10 seconds
Come out of the squat with a tricep extension, launching the bag high into the air until your arms are straight. Then lower it slow into the shrug position and start do your 3 shrugs with longer holds.
Shrug shoulders, roll back and then pull the bag hard into your belly.
#9 Lunges – why not finish with 10 good ones?!
The Finisher – 🏁Finished!
I hope you’ll try it! You probably won’t like it, but you will be able to feel the benefit!
I’m going to be doing these in each of my 3 workouts a week to see where they take me. I treat ticking off my 3 tough 25-minute workouts a week as the goal. How my body changes and adapts I can’t control — genetics, lifestyle factors, illness, life events and more will play their part in that. So, making this change is part experiment and part adventure into the unknown!
If you don’t feel The Finisher is for you, have you heard about Reverse Cycles?
Reverse Cycles flip the order of the exercises. This means you’re not always doing the same ones at the cycle end — when you’re most tired. And, important muscles get a back-to-back hit from different exercises.
The result is more progress!
Part of the only workout I do at 53
I’ve been doing the same 9 exercises since I was 51½, but that doesn’t mean every workout is the same.
In fact, every workout I try to focus on doing something better, like:-
- Not cutting a millisecond off my holds (which is why I always workout to my own videos)
- Taking fewer, shorter breaks between cycles. (I find the videos keep you moving and limit stalling for time)
- Lowering the weight more slowly from Phase 2 into Phase 3 and from Phase 7 into Phase 8.
- Doing all the squeezes, push aways and pull into yous that really make the difference in this workout (the videos don’t let you forget them!)
- Incorporating the add-ons I share via the free Workout Success emails
- Have I mentioned always following my workout videos?! Seriously, after switching to using these every single time, I’ll never go back. It’s simply a better workout when you stick to the videos.
Remember: there is no physical progress in your comfort zone; your body only responds to struggle!
Steve – MiniWorkoutDad
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