As you can see from Marcella’s routine below, she has been busy! Marcella’s program is based off a template she found in Muscle and Fitness Hers magazine, with some things changed or rearranged to better suit her needs. Her main goals right now are losing bodyfat and building up her lagging muscle groups for her September debut, so the bulk of her program focuses on circuit training and lots of cardio. The tweak I made to the program was making her upper body day that is not circuited focus more on heavy compound lifts, and giving her an entire day to just work shoulders. We’re trying this because her upper body needs to come up to even out her proportions, with extra emphasis on her shoulders.

Some intensity techniques she’s using are…

FST-7: Doing 7 sets of an exercise with 30 sec rest in between for a great pump!

Drop Sets: Going to failure on an exercise, then lowering the weight and continuing until failure is reached again, and again, and again…

Rest-Pauses: Taking an exercise to about 1-2 reps from failure, putting down the weight for about 15 seconds, then trying to get another 3-5 reps before failing.

Forced Reps: Continuing to lift past failure by having a spotter (me!) help lift the wait for a few additional reps.

All these techniques really up the intensity of the workout and help force the muscles you’re working to grow. Marcella has really been pushing herself using these techniques and the results are already starting to show!