Four Keys to Muscle Growth

Firstly why?

Hypertrophy should feature in everyone’s training at some point, and the reasons why are threefold:

1. Increased muscle mass actually is associated with better health and resilience to illness.

2. Increases tensile strength (strength through your joints).

3. It looks cool 😉

We believe in helping our clients feel comfortable in their own skin and often that means building some muscle. What it also means is their potential to develop other qualities, for example strength is much greater also.

If you want to know what the real drivers behind muscle growth are, keep reading.

Not too heavy, not too light

Choosing what weight to put on the bar comes down to picking a weight that will stimulate mechanical overload, without causing too much fatigue and without using too much glycogen (stored carbohydrate in the muscle).

You need to avoid wasting energy on unnecessary reps and sets that are unimportant for muscle growth. If you could achieve the same or better results in the gym with less reps would you do it?

You see, we want you to stimulate growth and have the necessary resources (in the form of glycogen and amino acids) available to be able to build muscle!

It’s a bit like a boxing match, you need to get your attack in then get away before being floored.

It feels like going in the gym and trashing yourself is the brave thing to do, however 25 years into training I would now argue it’s far more brave to stick to a program, keep a little in the tank and trust in the process rather than throwing the kitchen sink at it every session.

Train hard today, but train in a way that you can train hard tomorrow or the next day too.

Progressive overload

When hypertrophy or growing lean tissue is a main training goal, overload is essential.

What do we mean when we say overload?

What this means is moving more weight, doing more sets or reps with the same weight, spending more time under tension (moving weight), taking less rest and training with more frequency. If you want to keep building muscle then you need to achieve overload in some form.

This doesn’t mean that you need to achieve overload in ALL of these ways to progress. The most efficient way to see how your body is responding to training for hypertrophy is to change limited variables, one or two at a time, then record the results in the form of a photo/body fat/muscle mass.

To summarise: you don’t get better at reading by reading the same sentence over and over again. You wont grow unless you progressively overload your body.

Ready to get cracking? Get in touch today to meet one of our coaches to discuss what your plan.

Recovery

You can only train as hard as you can recover. The harder you train, and the stronger you get the more time you will need to commit to recovering from training and the smarter the programming of your training needs to become to avoid fatigue and injury.

What do we mean when we say recovering? Are you sleeping 8 hours a night? Are you drinking enough water each day to stay hydrated? Eating enough food and making sure you are moving well?

If not there is a good chance you could improve your results.

When we want to gain muscle it feels like the only thing that is really important is hitting the gym hard, and we certainly want you to do that, but there is only so much training you can do.

Would you say you’ve got more room for improvement in your training or in your recovery?

Improving your recovery can be equally as challenging as improving your training, for different reasons but don’t forget, improving either can elicit gains!

If you’d like a plan that’s going to be effective and a coach to keep you accountable and on-track feel free to fill in the quick online form further down this page and arrange a meeting at our HQ.