One question we at Men’s Fitness hear often is, ‘How can I tell if my workouts are actually working?’ The short answer is if you need to ask, they probably aren’t. An effective workout routine should give you  visibly bigger muscles in four weeks. But some workouts fail to work your muscles to exhaustion, even if you’re working hard. It’s a simple formula of weight training: the more spent muscle fibres are following a session, the more they will recover and, therefore, the more they will grow.

So if you think your muscles have been under-doing it, you can reach into your workout armoury for a secret weapon: post-exhaustion. This technique involves following big, multi-joint exercises with muscle isolation exercises that focus one final effort on the targeted muscle group. It finds any muscle fibres that your body was holding in reserve and applies serious pressure to them.

The three workouts here have been designed to work and then post-exhaust two different muscle groups within each session. Rest for one minute between sets and three minutes between each exercise, and leave two to three days’ rest between workouts. After four weeks you’ll have a new, more muscular body.