Tri-set training might be the best workout for men over 40 looking to maximize muscle growth. It involves performing sets of three exercises targeting the same body part. This approach can boost workout intensity, increase muscle damage, and enhance the metabolic response to exercise.
Ready to Feel the Burn? Try This Tri-set Workout and Maximize Muscle Growth
If spending hours in the gym hoping to get big gains doesn’t sound appealing, there’s a quick and dirty training style that might be up your alley—tri-set training. Nope, not tricep training, tri-set. I’m talking about loading up a single muscle group to increase the training intensity and feel the burn. We’re taking volume to a whole new level to supercharge your gains.
So, if you’re short on time but don’t want to sacrifice results or have access to limited equipment in your gym, this one is for you. Let’s ramp up the intensity of your workout and get you the results you’ve been dying for.
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What Is Tri-set Training?
As it sounds, tri-set training is a training style that utilizes three exercises in a single set targeting a single muscle group with minimal rest between sets. It’s sometimes applied across different body parts, but in this workout, we’re applying it to only one to increase the intensity, maximize muscle breakdown, and increase blood flow to the muscle.
For men over 40, it’s one of the best ways to stimulate muscle growth in any area of the body by taking the muscle to complete fatigue and providing a unique training stimulus.
Generally speaking, the traditional tri-set involves performing an exercise that hits a single muscle group (for example, the chest) with 3-4 exercises in a row, followed by a rest period; between exercises, there is minimal rest to keep the intensity high.
Here’s an example of what a tri-set might look like:
- Exercise #1 + rest for 10 seconds
- Exercise #2 + rest for 10 seconds
- Exercise #3 + rest for 2-4 minutes
After your rest period, you’ll repeat the tri-set for the specified number of sets.
Tri-sets may be new to you, but they have quite a lengthy history in the fitness world. Larry Scott, the first-ever Mr. Olympia, used tri-sets almost exclusively in the 60s to build his guns of steel. Since then, it’s been a big tactic in bodybuilding to bust through hypertrophy training plateaus.
Hypertrophy is all about (Load) x (Time Under Tension), and if you want to build as much muscle as possible, you need to increase the volume using relatively heavy weights.
Research also suggests that tri-set training can increase the intensity of your workouts, induce more muscle damage, and enhance the metabolic response to exercise, making it the best workout for men over 40 to increase hypertrophy.
Benefits of Using Tri-sets
If you want to max out your muscle growth, tri-sets are a great way to do it. Here are some of the benefits of tri-sets as the best workout for men over 40:
- Reduces warmup time
Maybe you know someone who warms up for half an hour before training, but using tri-set training, a lengthy warmup isn’t needed. With this training style, you can do a 5-10 minute dynamic warm-up and jump into your lifts. These workouts involve a lot of stability and mobility work that can double as your warmup.
- Productive rest periods
If you’re doing heavy lifts, you probably have a two to five minutes rest between reps. Most people twiddle their thumbs, chat with their buddies, or scroll through their phones during that rest period. But what could you be doing? Rather than wasting time waiting for your energy stores to recover, make your rest periods useful—this is where stability and mobility come into the picture!
Automating your rest periods is incredibly useful for shortening and making your workouts more productive. Once you’ve finished your tri-set, there’s no need to calculate your rest period and watch the clock—just keep going.
- Greater volume
Studies show that increasing the volume during resistance training is more effective than doing lower-volume workouts if you want to maximize hypertrophy. And what better way to max out volume than with tri-sets? You’re overloading a single muscle group at once to maximize damage and muscle growth.
- Break through plateaus
Hitting a strength or hypertrophy plateau is never ideal; it can be frustrating when you are doing the work and not seeing results. Tri-set training is incredibly effective for breaking through a stall because it challenges the muscle at a greater volume and can kickstart muscular adaptations again.
Opting for a heavy tri-set can also maximize muscle growth. A heavily loaded set combined with greater tension triggers muscle growth.
- Greater fiber recruitment
Reaching overload on a specific muscle during a single exercise means you’re recruiting a portion of the muscle fibers in the muscle. Once you finish that exercise and move on to another that still targets the same muscle group, you recruit more muscle fibers in the same muscle belly. Simply put, a tri-set can increase muscle fiber recruitment more than a single exercise. More muscle fibers recruited means more tissue damage and better muscle growth.
Why Tri-sets Work
Tri-sets might sound like the death of your muscles, and they’re a phenomenal way to increase the burn and see quick results, which is why I think they’re the best workout for men over 40. But there’s one main reason tri-sets work: they increase how long a muscle is under tension. Time under tension is important if you want to build muscle and increase strength, so the longer a muscle is under tension, the more it can grow.
Single sets and supersets cause muscle tension, but for a much shorter period than a tri-set because you have fewer exercises. Although single sets and supersets effectively trigger muscle growth, we want to employ tri-sets to maximize time under tension and increase muscle growth.
VIDEO: 30-Minute Total Body Dumbbell Tri-Set Torture Workout: The Best Workout For Men Over 40
Perform each exercise for 30 seconds of work, one after the other, followed by 30 seconds of rest after for two rounds before moving to the next tri-set.
Each tri-set has three exercises that focus on a single body part.
- DB Goblet Close Squats
- 1 ½ Rep Squats
- Suitcase Squats
- 30 seconds rest
- DB Lying Chest Press
- DB Crush Chest Press
- DB Wide Press
- 30 seconds rest
- Racked Forward Lunge (R-L)
- Static Lunges (R-L)
- Goblet Reverse Lunge (R-L)
- 30 seconds rest
- Bent Over Rows
- Alternating Rows
- Reverse Grip Rows
- 4. 30 seconds rest
- DB Hammer Curls
- DB Alternating Curls
- DB Bent Over Concentration Curls
- 30 seconds rest
- Single DB Triceps Overhead Press
- Single Triceps Overhead Cross Press
- Triceps Kickbacks
- 30 seconds rest
- Single Shoulders Raises
- Single Rotational Press
- Clean and Press
- 30 seconds rest
- ½ rep RDL
- 1 ½ RDL
- Full Range RDL
- 30 seconds rest
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