Here are sev­eral good tips for those who want to train with­out the drain. Credit to Vince Del­monte — the quin­tes­sen­tial no non­sense mus­cle build­ing guru.

• Never per­form more than 4–12 TOTAL work sets per work­out. Yes, this is far less than per­form­ing the body­builders’ sug­gested 12–24 sets per mus­cle group! Unless you are in a con­test to see how many sets are pos­si­ble per work­out, then your focus should be to spark the mus­cle into growth and then go home.
• Never fol­low a pro­gram out of a pop­u­lar body­build­ing mag­a­zine – unless you are on steroids. Chest on Mon­day, Back on Tues­day, Legs on Wednes­day, and so forth. I ques­tion the work­out inten­sity and recov­ery abil­ity if any­one can make weekly gains from this con­ven­tional approach –that clearly reflects a bla­tant accep­tance of tra­di­tion with­out any thought applied.
• Never train con­tin­u­ously for longer than 12 weeks. Hardgain­ers will actu­ally ben­e­fit from tak­ing a half week off every sixth week of hard train­ing to allow their mus­cu­lar, neural, hor­monal and immune sys­tem to FULLY recharge. Try this one tip and watch your strength go through the roof!
• Fol­low­ing 3 sets of 10, 3 sets of 12, 3 sets of 8 – any pro­gram that begins with 3 sets of what­ever was clearly copied from some­one else and, again, clearly reflects the his­tor­i­cal mis­take of copy­ing tra­di­tion with­out any thought applied. Doing 3 sets of what­ever for each exer­cise in the work­out is a sure­fire way of overtraining.
• Never train more than two days in a row. I ques­tion anybody’s recov­ery abil­ity to train more than two days in a row. It typ­i­cally takes up to 24 hours to fully replen­ish your glyco­gen reserves so by tak­ing a day off every two days you are allow­ing your energy reserves to be replen­ished and optimized.

Want more awe­some tips from Vince Del­monte? You can check out his site here.

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