The overlooked key to muscle growth

Here's what you need to know...

1. If your goal is to build bigger muscles and you already have a good strength base, then chasing personal bests won't build significant muscle mass.
2. Heavy weights are not that important for hypertrophy. The weight you actually move has less to do with the resulting hypertrophy than you might think.
3. Before you increase the weight, you should increase the range of motion, change the tempo or use methods to increase your training sets to stimulate new muscle growth.
4. Burnout sets and higher volume protocols are good alternatives to increasing weight.
5. The experienced exerciser knows when to deviate from their program and what their body needs during a training session.
6. The goal should be to make the weights feel heavier than they actually are.

Pure, unmistakable muscle gains

Training for a sport or to increase performance is different than training for muscle mass. Ironically, many exercisers want bigger muscles but are hindered by continually striving for new maximum weights.

If they had to choose, most men training in a gym would prefer aesthetic muscle mass over strength. They would rather look like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, even if it meant they could never bench press more than 100 kilos for the rest of their lives. And yet, they'll chase the max weights for a repetition and avoid more effective hypertrophy techniques.

If your primary goal is aesthetic muscle mass - big, impressive muscles - then this message is for you. Ready?

Heavy weights aren't that important if you want to get more muscular. The ultimate goal is to damage your muscles in the weight room and grow them through nutrition and recovery. The weight you use in an exercise has less to do with this than most people are willing to believe.

How strong do we really need to be?

Let's take a step back and look at this issue objectively. Most people want to move insane amounts of weights, and for good reason: there's nothing that feels better than a solid personal best on one of the big basic exercises.

And when it comes to the big basic exercises - think squats, deadlifts and overhead presses - there should never be an upper limit to our desire for strength. But is there a basis for this?

Strength and conditioning experts will always encourage a beginner to aim to move a certain factor of their bodyweight - for example, 1.5 times bodyweight for deadlifts for a beginner. Many non-competitive exercisers want to get stronger for health reasons - to improve the health of their joints and increase their bone density - and they use strength as an indicator of their progression. And, of course, many also want to get stronger for ego reasons.

However, as far as the health side of things goes, the question is whether your lifespan will really be greater if you can bench press a maximum weight of 150 kilos instead of 125 kilos? Maybe. It makes sense to think about this. But there has to be a point where it's okay to just maintain strength.

Coming back to the pursuit of muscle mass, does training with heavy weights and a constant focus on increasing weights really improve results if the only goal is to make the body more muscular than it was before? If you are an advanced exerciser, then the answer is "no".

Sure, it helps stimulate the nervous system and the release of testosterone and growth hormone, but scientific research suggests that sets with higher repetitions can produce similar hormonal responses.

Lee Haney has always said that it's about stimulating the muscles, not destroying them. If you are already at a level where your strength is nothing others would laugh at, then it means you have successfully developed a solid base. Assuming that you are striving for muscle mass and muscle development, it is then time to use other methods.

The myth of progression

People always quantify "progression" as increasing the load they use to perform a given exercise with the same number of repetitions. There's nothing to argue about here, but it seems like people don't realize that increasing load is not the only form of progression, which is especially true when it comes to training for muscle mass.

Let's look at a typical set of 10 repetitions of a given bodybuilding exercise. Before you increase the weight by 5 to 10% the following week, there are a few other ways to achieve progression:

• Increased range of motion: increasing the range of motion will add more time under tension with the same load as before. Examples of this would be split squats with the back leg elevated or deep squats if you are used to performing squats only to the point where the thighs are parallel to the floor.
• Change the tempo: It is definitely more challenging if you add a slow eccentric or negative phase to each repetition you perform. Paused repetitions, 4 second negative repetitions and other changes in tempo can generate a whole new stimulation for a working muscle. This is particularly effective with pressing exercises.
• Methods to extend a set: The rest/pause method, ladder sets, cluster methods and 1.5 reps are just a few ways to achieve progression with weights that are nowhere near your max weight.

If your goal is to get muscular, it's useful to change your mindset. All of the above points describe a progression. "Muscular" and "strong" have some overlap, but in many ways they are not the same thing. Becoming muscular and bulky is different and requires a different mindset.

4 tips for building mass

If you've been focusing on performance for a long time, have built a good strength base and are ready to build some "bodybuilder muscle", then here are four strategies that will help you do so.

Tip 1 - Focus on the mind-muscle connection

Many people have no idea how important it is to build a connection with the weights as they move them. They go through the motions on the dumbbell bench press with weights that challenge their strength and they try to use good technique so that you feel the movement "in your chest."

The truth is that you can use light sets and increased mental focus to achieve the same thing. You can avoid going to muscle failure with 55 kilo dumbbells on the incline bench press and use 35 kilo dumbbells instead. There is a good chance that after a while you will be more muscular than you have been all these years.

The goal should be to make the weights feel like they are heavier than they really are. You'll still feel the same sore muscles for three days once you get the hang of it. The same rules apply to many other exercises including split squats, side raises and flying movements.

Tip 2 - Use high volume weeks

Performing sets of 6 to 8 repetitions week after week will not get you what you want. This type of training becomes redundant and the nervous system will respond less and less to it. In this case, "high volume" means more sets of more exercises that include more repetitions.

Take a basic exercise like squats or presses and use a scheme with higher reps/shorter rests between sets. This could be something as simple as 6 x 10-12 with short rest intervals or something more advanced and challenging such as a Gironda 8 x 8 approach, the 10 x 10 German Volume Training method or ladder sets, none of which use more than 70% (and that's being generous) of the maximum weight.

It's important to remember what the goal is here. These workouts should challenge and exhaust the muscles appropriately to stimulate growth during recovery.

Tip 3 - Use burnout sets

Even during weeks where you are working with heavy sets of 3 reps, after your last work set you should reduce the weight to about 60% of what you were using before, and perform as many reps as possible with that weight. This should end up somewhere in the range of 15 to 20 reps.

This represents a good finish, but more importantly, bornout sets can be a good way to increase lactate levels and stimulate the pituitary gland to release more growth hormone. In addition, such a set gives your condition a kick in the butt.

Tip 4 - Train intuitively

This is a simple rule: don't become a prisoner of your training program.

It's easy to see the training session you have planned as a pile of paperwork on your desk that needs to be completed before the day is over. Paperwork left on your desk means you haven't done your job.

However, if you're doing your reps without focus, feeling pain in one or two joints and basically not getting anything worthwhile out of your workout, then there's no point in doing that workout at all. We all have training sessions where nothing seems to go right. It's easy to just go through the motions on that bad training session, even if you don't feel anything in the target muscles.

It's a true sign of training maturity to deviate from your program and do what your body needs to get the most out of a training session. It could be something as small as forgoing dips and replacing them with French presses. Maybe on squat day you feel like you really have the right 'groove' - so why not do an extra set or two? Take advantage of the times when you feel great and pay attention to the times when you don't.

Training intuitively also sometimes means ignoring the amount of weight you're moving and focusing on nothing but the scheme and stimulation (see tip #1). Don't even count the reps, just go by feel.

This is the reason you will occasionally see experienced bodybuilders in the weight room doing isolation workouts with extremely light weights. This is a valuable concept that you should not disregard.

By Lee Boyce | 12/19/14

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/overlooked-key-to-muscle-growth