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Small Change for Big Gains Program Overview

Small Change for Big Gains Program Overview

Written By Jim Stoppani, PhD

Updated August 30, 2024

In this article I'm going to teach you a workout technique that I have been using that I call Small Change for Big Gains.

I've been using this myself for a while now and seeing great results. But instead of posting it as a Train Like Jim series workout, I decided to post it as a training article. The Small Change for Big Gains technique involves changing up the exercise on every single set. With most workouts you may choose 3 or 4 exercises and do 3 or 4 sets of each exercise for a total of 12-16 sets for each muscle group. As you can see in the example of Workout 1 below, with Small Change for Big Gains you basically do 12-16 exercises for one set each! But a lot of the different exercises will simply be variations of the same exercise. For example, with shoulders you will do 5 variations of the smith machine shoulder press.

These small changes in the way you do the exercise literally lead to bigger muscle gains, because you are changing up the muscle fibers that you're targeting.

Remember, a muscle such as the deltoid is not only composed of three different major heads, but each head is composed of thousands of tiny muscle fibers. And there is no way to involve every single muscle fiber on every exercise. So making these small changes on each exercise, such as grip width or the angle of the bench, allow you to hit more muscle fibers than you normally would when you train a muscle group with 3 or 4 exercises. And the more muscle fibers that you involve, the more muscle fibers you can encourage to grow bigger, and that leads to greater overall muscle growth of that muscle.

I suggest you follow this plan for about 4 weeks. However, feel free to throw it in

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