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The Shocking Principle

The Shocking Principle involves literally shocking the body, catching it by surprise by changing various aspects of your workout. The body is amazingly adaptable and can accustom itself to workloads that would fell a horse. However, if you always put the same kind of stress on the body, in the same way, it gets used to this, and even very intense training will yield less response than you expected. You can shock it by training with more weight than usual; doing more reps and/or sets; doing unfamiliar exercises; doing your exercises in an unfamiliar order; or using any or all of the Intensity Techniques listed here.
Change by itself tends to shock the body, even if the unfamiliar workout is no more demanding than the one you are used to. But you’ll get to a point where you’ll find it difficult to make additional progress without shocking your muscles into getting bigger and stronger, fuller, harder, and more defined. One way I introduced radical change into my workout was by training superheavy one day each week, typically on Friday. We’d overload the weights on a couple of sets of each exercise to really train for power, then take Saturday off to recover from the soreness.

Forced Reps

One method of forcing out extra reps is to have your workout partner supply a little extra lift to help you keep going. However, I have never liked this method because your partner has no real way of knowing how much lift to supply, what you are really capable of doing on your own, and how much help you actually need. I prefer a kind of forced reps which is sometimes called Reset/Pause training. You use a fairly heavy weight and go to failure in the set. Then you stop, let the weight hang for just a few seconds, and the force out an extra rep. Again, rest only a few seconds before forcing out another. This method depends on the fast initial recovery that muscles make from exercise, and you can use this recovery to force out extra reps. If you rest too long, however, too many of the tired fibers recover and you end up using them again instead of stimulating new fiber. For ultimate rest/pause forced reps, you can put the weight down for a moment, pick it up again, and force out additional reps. For exercises like Chin-Ups, you can do your reps, let go of the bar, rest momentarily, and then attempt to force out some more.

Partial Reps

Continuing to do partial reps when you are too tired to complete full range-of-motion repetitions is a shock method I have always used for almost any muscle in the body, and it is a particular favorite of Dorian Yates.
Dorian had done a lot of training where he forced his muscles past the point of momentary failure to almost total exhaustion, using techniques like forced reps and partial reps. Partial reps are most effective at the end of a set, when you are almost exhausted. For example, if you were doing Preacher Curls, you would have your workout partner help you lift the weight and then you would lower it a few degrees and the lift it as much as possible, even if only a few inches; then lower it some more and do some partial reps from that position, repeating this on the way down until your muscles are burning and exhausted.

Isolation Training

Isolation training involves focusing your efforts on a specific muscle or muscle group or even part of a muscle in isolation from other muscles.
Here is an example of how specific isolation training can get: When you do compound exercises like a Bench Press, the muscles involved are the pectorals, the triceps, and the front delts. An exercise like Dumbell Flys, on the other hand, works the pecs in isolation and lets you hit them with maximum intensity. As a further step, you can Incline Dumbbell Flyes as a way of isolating just the upper pecs. Carrying this to an even further extreme, you can perform Incline Cable Crossovers, making a special effort to cross your hands and get the maximum Peak Contraction of the test.
This would isolate and develop the inner area of the upper pecs.
Isolation training can allow you to develop every part of your physique completely, bringing up any weak areas and helping to archieve the degree of muscle seperation and definition necessary for that sculpted champion look.

Forced Negatives

To develop even more intensity in negative repetitions, have your workout partner press down on the weight as you lower it, forcing you to cope with greater resistance. This should always be done carefully and smoothly so that the muscles and tendons are not subjected to any sudden jerks.
Forced negatives are more easily done with machines or cables than with free weights.

The Cheating Method

The Cheating Method is an exception to the general rule that strict technique is necessary in bodybuilding. This kind of cheating doesn’t involve using sloppy training technique. It is a method in which you deliberately use other muscles or muscle groups to work in cooperation with the target muscles. This is not something you should do all the time, but it is very useful for archieving certain specific goals.
Say you are doing a heavy Barbell Curl. You curl the weight up five or six times, and then find you are too tired to continue to do strict reps. At this point you begin to use your shoulders and back to help in the lift slightly so that you can do another 4 or 5 reps. But you cheat just enough so that you can continue the set, and your biceps continue to work as hard as they can. By cheating, hou have forced the biceps to do more reps than they could have done without the help from the other muscles, so you have put more stress on them, not less.
Cheating is used to make the exercise harder, not easier. It is also a way of doing forced reps without the help of a training partner. But to make cheat reps work, hou have to concentrate on making sure that the extra effort being applied by the other muscles is just enough and not too much, so that the target muscles are still being forced to contract to the max.

Heavy Duty Method

Heavy-Duty Training is a name applied to different approaches to working out. For some, it involves a lot of extended sets–that is, following your regular repetitions with forced reps, negatives, forced negatives, and partial reps to exhaustion. I always used the term to mean going right to the heaviest weight you can handle (after warming up) rather than pyramiding up–that is, gradually increasing weight an decreasing reps. So if I could do strict Dumbbell Curls with, say 65 pounds, rather than slowly working up to that weight I would do two light warm-up sets and then immediately pick up the 65-pound dumbbells and do my normal amount of reps and sets with that heavy poundage, forcing my biceps to work to their maximum from beginning to end. The key to this kind of training is not to use a weight too heavy for you to do your normal amount of sets and reps–say 5 sets of 8 to 12 reps. if you can do only 6 or 7 reps, the weight is too heavy.