03/30/2023
When training for muscle hypertrophy and getting stronger, the concepts are few but the methods are many. Especially when it comes to hypertrophy.
For instance, mechanical (muscle) tension is going to be the number one driver for muscle growth. But it doesn’t mean that other methods such as metabolic stress (from high reps) or muscle damage.
15-20 sets per week is ideal for muscle growth with somewhere between 4-30 reps per set. You don’t have to get all the way to failure, but you have to get pretty close. About 2-4 reps in reserve. The more experienced you are, the more you probably need to go to failure.
What I do is train to failure or very close to it. The rep ranges I use are 5-9, 10-15, 20-30, failing within one of those rep ranges depending on the exercise. The more experienced you are, the more you probably need to go to failure. I enjoy training this way for a few of reasons:
- One, I’m probably a little masochistic and enjoy the pain.
- Two, being that I go to failure, I can get by with doing less sets. You can make gains in muscle hypertrophy by leaving a few reps in the tank but it will require more sets. To me this is boring and these are the type of people you see playing on their phone between sets. But you still need to get to where you are getting some sort of slowdown in your rep tempo (due to difficulty, not purposefully).
- The third reason is that I have logbooks that contain every workout (the exercise, weight used, reps and how many sets) going back to 2005. I treat that logbook like the enemy. Each time I go back to the gym or out to the garage I’m focused on beating those numbers. Whether they are from 20 years ago or last week. When spending some months where I’m trying to put on muscle, if I’m progressing in a lift week to week or bi-weekly under the same conditions (technique, tempo, nutrition and sleep status), then I know I’m adding some quality muscle tissue.
A few reasons to spend some time putting on muscle, other than the visual aspect:
- Muscle makes up 40% of the body and is associated with movement, posture, metabolism, breathing, immunity along with the endocrine system. Super important to go into our elderly years with a substantial amount of muscle/strength.
- Human skeletal muscles are some of the biggest cells by volume in all of biology.
- About 25 billion dollars a year is spent on muscle wasting diseases.
Here’s a set of hack squats from a couple of days ago. With this same weight, I did 5 reps a few months ago. Here I got 8. Took me three months to add three reps to this movement. And I’m thrilled with it. In today’s environment, people want everything now and therefore get discouraged from things that can really benefit them long-term.
Muscle is hard to build, but quite easy to keep or re-gain once you have it. If you’ve been training for years and find making progress is hard, some of the above may help. If you’re just getting started, enjoy those beginner gains.
