Postactivation potentiation (PAP) is a phenomenon that has recently gained popularity in the strength training community. The underlying principle surrounding PAP is that prior heavy loading induces a high degree of central nervous system stimulation, resulting in greater motor unit recruitment and force, which can last from five-to-thirty minutes.

The word potentiation refers to the ability to do one exercise with the purpose of enhancing the performance of a second movement that immediately follows. By lifting a heavy weight and then immediately following that lift with a lighter one basically preps your your muscles to lift the lighter weight much easier. The heavy weight stimulates your central nervous system to recruit more motor units than it would have otherwise used on the lighter weight.

Quite literally, you can become stronger in seconds.

Did I catch your attention yet? By employing PAP in your training, you may be able to blast through a plateau. To put PAP to the test, I decided to include this concept in my squat training this morning.

Here's how the technique works if you are squatting. Let's say your max one rep front squat is 190 pounds. After a good warm-up, the protocol calls for a heavy lift at 90 percent of your one rep max, or about 170 pounds. Then after about 3-4 minutes, reduce the weight to 80 percent of your one rep max. In this case, about 150 pounds. Do this set for as many reps as possible. After another 3-4 minutes, do another heavy set (90 percent of max), followed by another set of reps at 80 percent of max. Do no more than three one-rep heavy sets and three lighter sets per exercise and do only one such PAP activity for one bodypart.

It worked! The single rep heavy weight excites the central nervous system, calling on it to recruit more muslce fibers than would normally be recruited to do the lighter weight set in some other pyramid fashion.

You can use this technique not only with squats, but also with barbell bicep curls for biceps, barbell military press for shoulders, barbell bench press for chest, close grip bench for triceps, and barbell bent over rows for back.

Try this method for 4-6 weeks and then move on to another technique. You can come back to it at a later time especially if you have a lagging bodypart.