Before you begin this 8-Week Muscle-Building Trainer, you should take pictures of yourself and determine your body fat percentage. These are both much better gauges of your progress than your shifting bodyweight. Keep in mind that I was 214 pounds when I began this program, only slightly less than my peak muscular weight of 224. Yet there was a radical difference in my physique between these two similar bodyweights.

I highly recommend that you measure your body fat with an InBody body composition machine because they’re very accurate. Do this every two weeks or so to keep track of this essential metric of your success.

Today’s workout emphasizes chest and lower abs. I’ll be including chest moves that allow me to train around my shoulder injury, but you can make some substitutions if you want so long as you follow my set, rep, and rest-pause strategy, which I introduced for Day 1. I provide specific guidance on how to perform each exercise in the videos.

At this point, I want you to begin to visualize the pain you’re feeling with my rest-pause strategy. You should connect with the experience, and give in to the concept that this short-term pain is the signal of your long-term success. As you get further into this program, I’ll provide more details about the rationale for my exercise selection and how that shifts from week to week, especially in the daily videos. You’ll never perform the same workout twice in this program.

Decline chest press Sets: 3 Reps: 20 Strategy: Rest-Pause
Decline dumbbell Flye Sets: 3 Reps: 20 Strategy: Rest-Pause
Machine incline flye Sets: 3 Reps: 20 Strategy: Rest-Pause
Pec Deck Sets: 3 Reps: 20 Strategy: Rest-Pause
Hanging leg raise Sets: 3 Reps: FAILURE Strategy: Rest-Pause
HIIT Sets: 1 Reps: 3 Strategy: 4 minutes easy/1 minute full intensity for a total of 15 minutes

POST WORKOUT

The goal after two days of intense training is recovery, recovery, recovery! I put an extra scoop of fermented BCAAs in my RE-KAGED to help boost my insulin spike for greater muscle protein synthesis (MPS). You should also add Creatine HCl and Glutamine.