Building Muscle Requires a Plan Hypertrophy- biology : excessive development of an organ or part
specifically : increase in bulk (as by thickening of muscle fibers) without multiplication of parts
e.g cardiac hypertrophy
2 : exaggerated growth or complexity”
*Source: Mirriam – Webster dictionary
Hypertrophy, or building muscle mass, is a good thing, a VERY good thing. It can even save your life. It’s sad when I see people over 50 or 60 start to shrivel away, all hunched over with loose skin and no muscle tone. Because I know they could look and feel so much better!
In high school, I read a great book on bodybuilding called “The Bulgarian Training System”. It was a fairly simple concept, a 6 days per week workout on a two day split. It went something like this:
Monday: Chest, Back, Biceps, Calves
5 sets on each, 15 reps per set, LIGHT TO MODERATE WEIGHT
Rest time between sets – 30 seconds
Tuesday: Thighs, Shoulders, Triceps, Abdominals
5 sets on each, 15 reps per set, LIGHT TO MODERATE WEIGHT
Rest time between sets – 30 seconds
Wednesday: Chest, Back, Biceps, Calves
5 sets on each, 10 reps per set, MODERATE WEIGHT
Rest time between sets – 60 seconds
Thursday: Thighs, Shoulders, Triceps, Abdominals
5 sets on each, 10 reps per set, MODERATE WEIGHT
Rest time between sets – 60 seconds
Friday: Chest, Back, Biceps, Calves
5 sets on each, 5 reps per set, HEAVY WEIGHT
Rest time between sets – 120-180 seconds
Saturday: Thighs, Shoulders, Triceps, Abdominals
5 sets on each, 5 reps per set, HEAVY WEIGHT
Rest time between sets – 120-180 seconds
Sunday: Rest
Repeat for 12 weeks, then change exercises and again every successive 12 weeks.
If your goal was to get bigger, gain muscle mass, and experience hypertrophy (muscle growth), then this would be a good basic program to follow.
In many cases, we can benefit from growing muscle. Having some muscle helps us look better, helps us be more metabolically healthy, decreases our risk on some injuries, lowers our insulin levels, and generally speaking it’s a very good thing to have some muscle size. You don’t have to be a bodybuilder to want to put on muscle. As a matter of fact, because of changes in hormones and the natural aging process, older adults can perhaps benefit the most from training specifically for hypertrophy.
The challenges are unique in this type of exercise. It’s not as simple as it might seem to gain muscle. That’s because we can actually get a lot stronger, and never gain much in the way of muscle size. For example, Olympic weightlifters will often be relatively light and still be able to lift a ton of weight because they’ve gotten excessively strong compared to their bodyweights. This is because gaining strength is largely neurological and adaptive versus changes in muscle size, it’s a process of coordination, of gaining the ability to recruit more fibers, and to exert more energy and power through fibers through the muscles you have. Hypertrophy definitely helps with strength, but you don’t always need hypertrophy to get stronger because it is not always the primary cause of an increase in strength. Hypertrophy happens for very specific reasons. Hypertrophy can be seen as an adaptive process, where your muscles adapt to a training stimulus by becoming larger. These are some basic tips for how to make your muscles bigger, if that’s your goal.
- Volume is king: Volume = Weight lifted x Reps x Sets on Each Exercise
- There are 3 muscle fiber types: Fast Twitch, Intermediate Twitch, and Slow Twitch. Fast twitch fibers gain the most size, so training with more weight, doing more sets, and with less rest time is the key.
- This means doing MORE in general terms.
- Using short rest time between sets (30 seconds) boosts lactic acid in the muscles, which has been shown to stimulate growth.
- Trying to get a “pump” where you feel your muscles swelling while you’re working out. This pushes blood into the muscles and causes a growth response.
- Alternating sets, or super sets where you rotate between two opposing muscle groups to cause more pump:
- Chest and Back
- Biceps and Triceps
- Quadriceps and Hamstrings
- Shoulders and Back
- Training to complete exhaustion / failure to recruit and stimulate more muscle fibers.
- Recruiting more muscle fibers to exhaustion by doing drop sets where you do successive sets with a little less weight each set.
- Lifting heavier weights boosts protein synthesis.
- Causing mechanical trauma (a good thing in this case) by training with more weight or at a slower speed with eccentric muscle contractions, often called negatives.
- Training more frequently, thereby increasing total volume.
- Performing compound (multi-joint) exercises primarily, to increase total volume.
- But also performing isolation (single joint) exercises secondarily to increase muscle exhaustion at specific places.
- When performing cardio exercise, performing more HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training) sessions with intervals lasting 10-30 seconds, versus long and slow cardio sessions. Doing too much cardio exercise can cause a loss of muscle mass. That’s why marathoners are usually skinny.
- Periodizing your workouts, where you methodically change them to work your muscles in a different way, thereby stimulating more growth.
- Pushing through your mental limits. Many people never work hard enough to gain muscle size. You have to train hard and often!
And remember…there’s never been a better day than TODAY to make it happen!
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