Introduction
If you feel like you haven’t made much progress in a long time or your muscle growth has stagnated, this blog post will be the best thing you can come across.
If I had known these training principles at the beginning of my fitness journey I would have saved two years at the gym. I wish I had better guidance but I will ensure you don’t face the same problem.
If you want to reach your full potential you have to make sure to follow these workout hacks in your training. These workout hacks will provide you with 5 principles which are very important for hypertrophy.
These workout hacks are universal and apply to every training split and every individual, be it a beginner or an experienced lifter.
What is Hypertrophy?
In simple language, hypertrophy refers to the increase in size or growth of a muscle. It typically occurs in response to resistance training or weightlifting.
When muscles are subjected to repeated stress or resistance, such as lifting weights, the muscle fibres undergo microscopic damage. In the process of recovery and adaptation, the muscle cells repair and grow larger, leading to an overall increase in muscle size.
Let’s dive into the 5 key workout hacks to grow muscles faster.
1: Progressive Overload
Progress is a very motivating factor which helps to push us ahead. Getting bigger and stronger can be boiled down to two words – Progressive Overload
Progressive overload is a fundamental principle in resistance training that plays a crucial role in promoting muscle growth. It refers to the gradual increase in the amount of stress placed on the body during exercise over time. This stress can be applied through various means such as increasing resistance (weight), volume (sets and repetitions), or intensity (difficulty of the exercise).
Progressive overload is necessary for muscle growth because it creates a sustained and challenging stimulus that forces the body to adapt by consistently increasing the demands placed on the muscles.
Increasing your strength in the 6-15 rep range will increase your muscle mass. For example, if you are doing a dumbbell curl, increasing the weight of the dumbbells that you are curling is going to increase the strength of your biceps on that exercise.
It is easy not to push yourself and get complacent. Progressive Overload gives you the confidence to trust the process.
Understanding why progressive overload is necessary for muscle growth involves considering the physiological responses and adaptations that occur in the body.
- Muscle Fiber Recruitment:
- Progressive overload is essential for recruiting a greater number of muscle fibres during resistance exercises. As the resistance or workload increases, the body activates more motor units and muscle fibres to generate the force required to overcome the load. This increased recruitment stimulates a larger portion of the muscle, leading to more significant muscle development.
- Adaptation and Hypertrophy:
- Muscle growth, or hypertrophy, is essentially the body’s adaptive response to the repeated challenge of lifting progressively heavier loads. Over time, as the muscles adapt to the increased demands, they become more resistant to the previous stress level. Thus, continual progression is necessary to provide a continued stimulus for further adaptation and growth.
- Preventing Plateaus:
- Without progressive overload, the body would quickly adapt to a specific resistance level, leading to muscle growth plateaus. To avoid stagnation and continue making gains, it’s crucial to consistently increase the workload, challenging the muscles to adapt and grow.
The progressive overload recommendation is that on the following week, you increase either 5lbs, 1 rep or even a smoother form on the last rep.
Remember guys: Progressive overload isn’t just progressing in weight or adding another rep. Sometimes it means mastering a movement with the same amount of weight, adding more control, more squeezing, or tighter contractions. Any small sign of improvement is progression.
2: Training to Failure
Training to failure is reaching that point in a set where you struggle to perform another rep. Training to failure is that moment when your body is willing to give up but your mind is fighting it and making it possible to achieve that rep.
Training to failure was the best decision I took in my training, this made me train hard. You will never know how many Reps in Reserve(RIR) you have until you push your limits and train to failure.
If you don’t know the feeling of that last rep you won’t know how far you are from failure, it might be 2 reps, 3 reps or even more. This is not an easy thing to master as it is more of a mental challenge than a physical one. Once you have mastered your lifting form and technique, you should take your sets to failure.
” When it starts to burn is when the exercise starts“
Jeff Cavaliere
But why should you train to failure?
- Muscle Damage and Repair:
- Training to failure can cause more microtrauma to muscle fibres. The subsequent repair and remodelling process may lead to muscle hypertrophy (growth) as the body adapts to the stress by increasing the size and number of muscle fibres.
- Hormonal Response:
- Intense resistance exercise, especially when taken to failure, can trigger the release of anabolic hormones such as growth hormone and testosterone. These hormones play a role in muscle protein synthesis, which is essential for muscle repair and growth.
Beginners and those with certain health considerations should approach training to failure with caution. Beginners don’t need to train for failure because they get amazing results training far from failure. They should first master the technique and progressive overload.
3: Train Every Muscle Group TWICE a Week
According to a 2013 study, training each muscle twice a week resulted in 3.1 % greater muscle growth than training each muscle once per week.
If you train your muscles 1x a week you will have to train that muscle group with more volume in each session while training 2x a week means less volume per session.
For example, if you train your biceps with 12 weekly sets, a frequency of 1x a week would mean that all 12 sets are performed in a single session, whereas a frequency of 2x a week means that 6 sets are performed per session.
Performing more volume for a single muscle in a session will result in accumulating more fatigue in that muscle and the performance will go down towards the end of the workout. On the other hand, a muscle trained with less volume in a session won’t accumulate as much fatigue and performance won’t go down to the same extent. This provides a better stimulus and hence more muscle growth.
Let’s understand scientifically why training each muscle group twice a week promotes muscle growth.
- Increased Frequency:
- Training a muscle group more frequently ensures that you stimulate muscle protein synthesis (MPS) more often. MPS is the process by which your body repairs and builds new muscle tissue. A study published in the Journal of Physiology found that muscle protein synthesis rates are elevated for up to 48 hours after resistance exercise. Training a muscle group more frequently allows for more opportunities to stimulate protein synthesis, which is essential for muscle growth.
- Optimal Recovery Time:
- Training a muscle group every 48-72 hours allows for adequate recovery time. This ensures that you can hit each muscle with sufficient intensity during each session, promoting optimal growth without risking overtraining or injury.
Use a workout split that accomplishes a 2x-a-week training frequency while enabling you to get in the adequate volume of 10-20 weekly sets per muscle group. The image below demonstrates some popular workout splits.
4: Control the eccentric
Eccentric is the lengthening portion of an exercise or generally the lowering portion of an exercise. For example, during a bicep curl, the eccentric phase occurs when you lower the weight back down to the starting position.
During the eccentric phase or elongated phase of an exercise, most amount of micro-tears are being formed which results in increased strength and muscle size over time.
Rep speed is extremely important but it’s often not talked about. The hot topic generally is how many sets? how many reps? with no thought about how you’re performing those reps. Control the weight at all times, don’t just jerk the weight up and down. Increase the time under tension.
A time under tension of 40 seconds or more per set is ideal for building muscle. You can build muscle with less time under tension but you’re certainly going to increase the risk of injury and it’s not going to be optimal.
What I do is time my sets so that I have an idea of how long I am lifting weights during each set. The vast majority of people are lifting far too quickly.
The most important factor is that you go slower on the eccentric phase than the concentric phase. In other words, if it takes you 1 second to raise the weight, it should take you 2 seconds to lower it. Twice as slow on the way down than on the way up.
The reason is your muscles are approximately 30% stronger during the eccentric phase than the concentric, so by putting more time during the eccentric you’re forcing your muscles to work equally in both directions. Explode on the way up and control your weights on the way down.
If you aren’t lifting with a controlled tempo then you’re much more likely to injure yourself. Controlling the eccentric will also keep you away from ego-lifting.
After you have mastered taking all your sets to failure, you can apply this principle in your workout.
Note: If you are a powerlifter then this workout hack does not apply to you because you wanna maximize your explosiveness to get stronger.
5: There is no Specific Exercise that You NEED to do
Do you watch a sport or show or read a book which you don’t like? Can you eat a meal which you don’t find tasty for a long period if there is a substitute for it which you like?
We don’t do anything these days if we don’t want to so why is it supposed to be different with workouts?
There is no exercise that you need to do, every exercise can be a mass builder or shape builder if you do it right, train hard enough and apply progressive overload.
Barbell exercises aren’t necessarily better than free weights or machines.
You wanna do the variation of an exercise that you find most comfortable and are excited to do. Fitness is all about making it easy for you to stick to it.
I was never a fan of barbell back squats but I enjoyed training my legs on the hack squat machine so I did that or on a leg press machine. The most important thing is to do the movement pattern and not any particular exercise.
For example, if you are training your back then you have to do a horizontal pull movement and a vertical pull movement, If you don’t like pull-ups then just do lat pulldowns. It’s as simple as that.
When you find an exercise less enjoyable to do it’s hard to motivate yourself to stick with it for a long time. On the other hand, if you enjoy any specific exercise it often taps into intrinsic motivation, where the pleasure of the activity itself becomes the driving force. This type of motivation is more sustainable.
You should arrange your training around exercises that make you want to go to the gym rather than dragging yourself there.
Conclusion
I apply these hacks in my workouts and it has given me great results so I am confident if you truly understand these workout hacks and apply them in your workout it will speed up your progress, maximize muscle growth, and make your fitness journey more enjoyable and effective.
Fitness is not a sprint, but a marathon. Take satisfaction in gradual progress and remember that the journey to strength is as important as the destination.
Thank you for reading! Comment below with your thoughts and suggestions.
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