Gaining Muscle: A Universal Fitness Foundation
You might initially read that and think, "Nope, muscle? That's not for me," which is, of course, fine. But hear me out: muscle growth is a vital part of nearly every single fitness objective there is.
Think about it, do you want to be:
- Stronger: Bigger muscles harbor more force potential.
- Faster: Speed is partly a product of force potential.
- Bigger: Pretty obvious.
- Leaner: Being more "toned" means having lower levels of body fat so you can see your muscles, and having more muscle makes this a lot easier.
- In a better mood: You get to eat more food!
No matter what your goal is, everyone can benefit from a muscle-focused phase at some point.
Contents
1. Concept of Muscle Growth
2. Components of Muscle Building
3. Balancing Stress and Recovery
4. Progressive Overload
5. Mechanisms of Muscle Growth
6. Training for Strength vs. Muscle
7. Muscle Gain Commandments
8. Nutrition for Muscle Growth
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1. Concept of Muscle Growth
Muscle growth doesn't come from a perfect workout or program; it's a concept. During this short (ahem) article, I will try my eloquent best to identify the main components that go into the muscle-building milieu. Although it is a fairly complex topic, understanding the principles makes the process much simpler.
You will know why certain protocols may or may not work, and you may even be able to design your own program that fits your lifestyle rather than program hop every few weeks in search of the unicorn of workouts.
2. Components of Muscle Building
Gaining muscle can be a painfully slow process, especially compared to fat loss, which will give you visual changes almost immediately. To build muscle effectively, you need to:
1. Identify the reasons why muscle would grow in the first place.
2. Find the impactful habits and actions you can do daily that lead to your goal.
3. Repeat and refine over time.
Muscle doesn't grow by accident. Adaptation occurs at different rates for everyone, determined mainly by factors such as genetics. For most, muscle growth doesn't happen easily, except for those few "fast responders" who are outliers to the norm.
3. Balancing Stress and Recovery
New muscle gets laid down as an adaptive response to a stimulus that is sufficiently strong enough to require changes, so that when it meets that stress again, it is ready. The stimulus must be a significant stress to the muscles that is above the current equilibrium.
Building muscle very rarely (almost never) happens by accident. It is a costly endeavor and only gets harder the more you build! This is the law of diminishing returns: the stronger and more muscular you become, the fewer returns you reap from your investments. Like climbing a mountain, the higher you go, the harder each step is.
Gaining a few pounds of muscle when you first begin weight training is much easier because, as a beginner, even a small amount of training puts you above the previous habitual level you're used to. Even one set of hard bench presses or squats is likely more stress than those muscle groups have ever encountered. It's that stress that signals the adaptive machinery of the body to get to work and add new proteins to your muscles to get bigger, stronger, and more resilient.
This machinery runs most efficiently during low-stress periods (i.e., rest days). So, you get this wave of high-stress moments (training) that cause damage, followed by periods of low stress (recovery) that give the other systems of the body a chance to run all the necessary repairs. The speed at which you can recover and go again dictates, to a degree, how often and how hard you can expose yourself to these moments of stress.
Stress vs. Recovery
If you are only subjected to moments of stress, the machinery for recovery is never running efficiently enough, meaning you are actually hindering the build with too much work. Luckily, too much work is very rarely a problem. Vice versa, if you don't get the dose of stress high enough or frequent enough, then the machinery that repairs doesn't ever need to be turned on. This is much more likely. It's a balancing act, and both moments have their place.
Once you begin to be subjected to the right dose of stress and you're able to recover, you begin to adapt and get stronger. Your ability to handle new volumes of work increases. The training you were doing at the beginning is no longer stressful enough to trigger a physiological response, so as you become capable of doing more work, you now require more work to gain the stimulus that a lesser amount of work once provided.
4. Progressive Overload
This is a key principle of hypertrophy (muscle growth) known as progressive overload: the idea that as you become physically fitter, training must progressively get more challenging over time to continue to provide adequate stimulus.
Progressive overload is kind of a misnomer. Many see this "principle" and think in order to progress, you have to lift heavier weights or do more sets to progress. In actual fact, it’s the other way around. Progressive overload simply describes the process you go through. In other words, you don't lift more weight to get stronger; you lift more weight because you are stronger, and because you are stronger, you need a greater workload to stress you.
You must challenge your physiology to change it, but don't get overload twisted; it doesn't mean lifting weights above your maximal capacity—that's impossible. It simply requires more work than before, which ensures training continually reaches a "stimulus threshold." When you are "progressively overloading," you are walking over the path that you are laying. You can do slightly more now than before because of the work you've already done.
This also means that the "stimulus threshold" is a moving set of goalposts that becomes harder to hit. The stronger and fitter you become, the more work you warrant. This is why gaining muscle slows down. After this first golden period of training, you need to make a vested effort to do more work and hit that threshold to lay down new muscle.
5. Mechanisms of Muscle Growth
Muscle growth is thought to be driven by these moments of stress, more specifically, mechanical stress that is placed upon the working muscle. Within your muscles lie some cool receptors and cells known as satellite cells. Under normal daily conditions/activity, they sit dormant. These cells, like seeds in spring, only arouse from their dormancy once a sufficient stress level is detected within skeletal muscle. Once active, they are thought to multiply and fuse to existing cells and create new myofibers (the basic unit of skeletal muscle) to initiate the repair and regrowth of new muscle.
This basically means that a certain level of mechanical stress must be hit within the working muscle to trigger the process that leads to new muscle. The stimulus threshold must be reached. Just like Doc's car in "Back to the Future" must hit the critical speed of 88 mph, anything below is simply getting to the threshold or just wasted energy.
There are three main mechanisms that equate to this "mechanical stress" that ensure you hit 88 mph:
1. **Mechanical Tension**: The amount of force produced within the muscle stimulates those receptors to initiate growth and repair.
2. **Muscle Damage**: Micro-tears and damage occur to muscle fibers while we train. This damage must then be repaired, and regrowth begins, so long as the recovery environment is conducive to do so. Most damage occurs during eccentric (lowering phase) contractions and when the muscle is placed under tension in lengthened positions. This is why training through a full range of motion becomes an important factor in hypertrophy.
3. **Metabolic Stress**: Occurs during exercise in response to a low-energy state. If you've ever done an extended set of biceps curls and they feel like they’re ready to explode, you've gotten familiar with this "low-energy" state, also known as "the pump." That is metabolite accumulation, the accumulation of metabolites (lactate, inorganic phosphate, and hydrogen ions) in the muscle cells.
6. Training for Strength vs. Muscle
It's kind of the same but it's not. Strength training is much closer to training a skill; it’s highly neurological. It's learning to maximize and express your current muscular contractile capabilities to their fullest through a specific movement.
Metaphor Alert:
It's learning how to drive as fast as possible around a racetrack with a 2-liter engine. Hypertrophy training is building a bigger engine. It’s taking that 2-liter motor to 3 liters. Once the engine is bigger, there is the potential for a faster lap time. There's no guarantee the 3-liter motor will go around the track any faster than the 2-liter car. That's down to how the driver uses that extra muscle. But the potential is ultimately higher with a car that has a bigger engine.
What does that mean when you're in the gym? Stop chasing one rep maxes—or at least not so often. A one rep maximum is more an expression of your current capability. It tells you where you're at strength-wise but doesn't necessarily take you where you want to go. It's akin to hammering it around the track with the same car over and over, maybe only making very minor improvements, but also getting quite beat up. Significant improvements are more likely once the engine (muscles) is a little bigger, as it has greater capacity to produce force.
I like to phase training in ways that mirror this: times that focus on the building of structures, of capacity, and phases that have you laying down more total tough work over time. Then gradually phasing into small phases when the training offers short windows of opportunity to see "what's under the hood," for lack of a better phrase.
This is how we
wave training at @thorpe.performance. We spend most time in the "building the engine" phase. We very, very rarely do anything lower than three reps and usually nothing lower than five. We spend more time doing sets of six up to 12 (sometimes 30) reps, yet EVERY SINGLE PERSON gets stronger. Because reps count, they must be tough, but they count. They are the toil that builds the engine.
7. Muscle Gain Commandments
- Emphasize great technique with control through large ranges of motion.
- Use the appropriate load to create large amounts of tension over multiple reps.
- Do multiple sets of 3 to 12 (even 30) reps to allow high volumes of work.
- Recover and repeat 1 to 2 times per week per muscle group.
- Increase the amount of total work (sets/reps/load) over time.
- Work hard!
8. Nutrition for Muscle Growth
Muscle hypertrophy occurs when muscle protein synthesis exceeds muscle protein breakdown, resulting in a positive net protein balance in cumulative periods. This can be achieved with both resistance training (RT) and protein ingestion, which stimulate muscle protein synthesis and lead to decreases in muscle protein breakdown. From a nutritional point of view, protein intake alongside RT is a potent stimulus for muscle protein synthesis.
By understanding these principles, you can make informed decisions, tailor your training to your needs, and optimize your muscle-building journey.
Now you know the science behind sculpting those biceps. But next time you’re lifting, remember: it’s not just about showing off your guns—it's about nailing that DeLorean up to 88mph, driving it into the future, and becoming the strongest, fastest, and leanest version of yourself.
Get lifting, stay patient, and trust the process. Your future buff self will thank you.
crack on
@thorpe.performance
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