10/08/2026
3 Giant No-Nos In "Hypertrophy Training"
You may look at this list of things and raise an eyebrow because you may have done, or currently are doing, at least one of these things in your training.
If you made your own training program with these things included, hire a proper trainer to program it for you. If your trainer programmed it for you, also hire a proper trainer to program it for you, because discomfort maxxing is not how you grow muscle.
Okay! After that truth bomb, I think I owe you, my precious followers, an explanation as to why I'm making the training choices that I make here. So, let me explain!
If you're training to build muscle, every exercise should take the targeted muscle of that exercise closest to failure without something else inhibiting it.
For instance, if you've done a set of barbell squats and stopped the set panting so hard that you drag your tongue across the floor but the concentric velocity change from the first rep to the last is indistinguishable, or you stopped the set because your lower back had taken a way more of a beating than your quads (assuming your goal of that is to grow quads), or you stopped the set because your upper back is so beat that you started throwing your glutes back unintentionally, it's fair to say that the set didn't deliver its intended purpose of stimulating your quads for growth.
Simply put, you shouldn't do a working set of any exercise and stop it feeling "I could've gone for a few more reps if it wasn't for my *insert any reason other than the target muscle/muscles failing to go for another rep*" (Before you all come to the comment section about this statement, no! I'm not saying that every set of every exercise should be pushed to mechanical failure. I'm simply saying that nothing else of the set should limit the set if it were to be pushed to failure other than the target muscle itself.) This is exactly why I neither start, nor finish the set out of breath. I know I have solid technique to achieve the task of delivering the most stimulus to the target muscle, but, if I either start a set out of breath, or used a load light enough to ge me out of breath mid-set, I most likely will still fail to stimulate the target muscle of the exercise for growth.
To explain the 3rd point, the whole supposed point of adding an intensity technique to add more relative intensity, and therefore, supposedly more stimulus to an already sufficiently intense and stimulating set to make it better. No intensity technique makes sense on a set that's not hard enough to be stimulative to begin with, and an intensity technique is unnecessary at best and detrimental at worst when the set is hard enough to be stimulative. So, I'd much, much rather do another set after sufficient rest than trying to pile it on with the current set. In fact, I'd much rather stop the straight set once I reached mechanical failure and moved on to the next exercise than adding an intensity technique into the set. (Yes! I'm being a strsight set purist here because I understand how muscle growth works!)
So, this is why I never do these 3 things in my training.
