FOR BUSY MEN, getting to a fully equipped gym isn’t always realistic. Sometimes you’re training at home with a couple of dumbbells. Sometimes you’re managing an injury. Sometimes you simply want a break from heavy lifting.
But how do we make sure those lighter weights are just as effective for building muscle as the weights we’d usually use to land somewhere in that traditional ‘muscle-building’ rep range?
While we might not fully understand every single mechanism behind hypertrophy – muscle growth – we do know, from both in-the-trenches experience and the research, that one of the most reliable ways to make muscles grow is to push them close to the point of failure.
That means working a muscle to within around three to zero reps of failure – the point at which you simply can’t perform another high-quality rep – and accumulating a good number of sets and reps in that close-to-failure range.
The problem?
When you’re working with lighter weights, getting there can feel like a bit of a nightmare.
Why Are Light Weights Harder to Use for Building Muscle?
Let’s say you’ve got a weight that you can perform for 20-odd reps.
If only the final three to five of those reps are really pushing you into that hard, most growth-friendly territory, that’s a lot of potentially ‘junk’ reps just to reach the sweet spot.
So what we need is a technique that gets us there quickly, keeps us there for as many reps as possible, and ideally has some form of progressive overload built in – giving us something measurable to track in the notebook. Progress we can see quickly on paper which should, with any luck, eventually translate to progress in how tight our sleeves feel.
This is where the Centurion Method comes in.
What Is the Centurion Method?
The Centurion Method is disarmingly simple. It can also be devastatingly brutal.
You’re going to take a relatively light weight – something you couldn’t perform for a great deal more than 20 reps while completely fresh – and perform 100 total reps of one exercise.
Your goal is to finish those 100 reps as quickly as possible, in as few sets as possible. That’s it.
One exercise. One hundred reps. Keep chipping away until the job is done.
How Does the Centurion Method Work?
Let’s use the overhead press as an example.
After a thorough warm-up, grab your weights and start a stopwatch. Your goal is now to perform 100 high-quality reps of overhead pressing.
Begin your first set and keep going until you reach failure – or 20 reps, whatever comes first – while maintaining good form.
Then stop.
Take a few deep breaths.
And go again.
The key is not allowing yourself complete muscular recovery. You want enough rest to start moving again, but not so much that the weights suddenly feel fresh and light and you need another 20+ reps to get you back into that growth-zone.
We want to keep those weights feeling heavy.
Your workout might look something like this:
20 reps. Stop. Ten deep breaths. 18 reps. Couldn’t quite hit 20 this time. Stop. A few more deep breaths. 15 reps. Starting to struggle now. Rest briefly. Ten reps. At this point, the weight feels heavy from the first rep.
You continue in this fashion until you finally reach 100 total reps.
Simple on paper.
But if it’s ‘easy’, you’ve done it wrong.
Why Does the Centurion Method Work?
Something interesting happens as the workout progresses.
Your opening set might require 15 or more reps before things really begin to challenge the working muscle. But because you’re only resting for a few breaths, you’re not fully recovering before the next effort.
That means the next set gets difficult sooner.
Then the next one sooner still.
Before long, a weight that usually takes 20 reps to bring you close to failure feels brutally heavy after five or six.
In effect, you’re using fatigue to make a lighter weight feel heavier.
Those short rest periods allow just enough recovery to squeeze out more high-quality repetitions before fatigue catches up again, while keeping you repeatedly working close to failure.
Much like rest-pause training, myo-reps and cluster sets, the goal is to pack a large amount of hard, hypertrophy-friendly work into a very small space.
You’re basically speed-running your way through 100 reps, while gradually stripping away more and more of the easier work.
How Do You Progress the Centurion Method?
This is where the method really comes into its own.
Record the size of every set across your 100 reps.
In our example, that might look like:
20, 18, 15, 10… etc.
Also record the total time it took you to finish.
The next time you perform the same movement with the same weight, your goal is to hit that 100 reps in fewer sets.
Once you can complete all 100 reps in five sets of 20 – with roughly the same rest periods and within a similar total timeframe – it’s time to increase the weight and start again.
Five sets of 20.
One hundred total reps.
Then up the weight.
That’s the Centurion Method.
When Should You Use the Centurion Method?
The Centurion Method gives you a way to tap into some of the muscle-building benefits of hard training without relying on heavy weights.
That makes it perfect if you’re injured and heavier loads are temporarily off the menu, if you’re training at home with limited equipment, or if you simply fancy a change from traditional sets and reps.
It could also work as a high-volume addition to your existing heavier training, giving you a way to attack muscle growth from a slightly different angle without simply adding more heavy work.
That’s not to say 100-rep sets are somehow superior to a well-designed hypertrophy programme.
But if the weights you’ve got available feel too light, the Centurion Method gives you a diabolically simple way to make them feel anything but.
