16/07/2020
Hypertrophy and/or strength training.
I see many posts recommending this or that routine for muscle gains and strength
To gain muscle or strength keep in mind the following principles.
The 2 most important are
1 Specificity
2 SRA - Stimulate, Recover and adapt.
Fail to do any one of these, you will NOT progress.
Let's break it down even further
Specificity.
Basically if your trying to grow your muscles as big as possible it's no good doing a 10 mile run daily. Or if you want big shoulders, focusing on leg press. Training MUST be targeted towards a specific goal.
Stimulate
First and foremost learn how to do the movements correctly, you may need a trainer to help with this.
You must hit the target muscle with enough intensity to trigger an adaptive response.
The best way to think of your training is with the Rate Perceived Exertion. An RPE of 10 means you've maxed out a set, you couldn't do any more. RPE 9 means you could've done 1 more rep, and RPE 8 means you could've done 2 more and so on.
If you're working at RPE 5 or less, you may as well go home, your wasting your time.
Now.....each repetition closer to RPE 10 gives a better adaptive response......but it also increases fatigue, both local and systemic, which accumulates and also needs to be recovered from.
So for optimum intensity most would benefit from RPE 8. But if you feel particularly good go RPE 9 or on last set of exercise RPE 10.
Next you need to think about volume. The amount of work you do.
It's proven that the same volume spread over several workouts in a week is better than cramming all your volume into 1 workout.
What you're looking for is somewhere between your
MEV Minimum Effective Volume
And...
MRV Maximum Recoverable Volume
If you're not doing enough volume you may as well go home, you're wasting your time. If you're doing too much you'll violate the first principle of SRA , by not recovering.
For most this will fall somewhere between 10 and 20 sets per week, remembering each one of those sets needs to be around RPE 8.
So a good starting point will be 15 sets per body part per week, if you're recovering easy add more work if you're not able to progress pull back a few sets.
Recovery
To optimise recovery you need to be sleeping adequately, 8 hours a night if possible, and eating enough calories to support your metabolism, exercise routine, and non exercise activity plus a little more. Protein needs to be around 1.6g per kg Bodyweight, I've posted on this before, this figure is from a large BMJ meta analysis of studies performed on trained athletes.
Finally time, recovery needs time. In order to build you first tear down then rebuild bigger and stronger. If you tear down again before you've even built back up what was torn down you'll go backwards or remain the same.
Having said that, muscle protein synthesis is elevated, and peaks around 24 hours post exercise, so most repair is done in first 24 hours. So providing you got stimulus right, RPE and did an MEV in the workout and didn't do too much you should recover in about a day or so.
Adapt
Lastly you must adapt your training as your body adapts. This is where the principle of progressive overload comes in.
Progressive overload basically means as you adapt to a workload you must increase it to progress further.
There are many ways to do this.
The easiest is to add more weight to the bar.
Let's say you start a bench press routine and 150lbs for 8 Reps is RPE 8. A few weeks later your RPE same weight and reps is 6. Add some weight to get back to RPE 8.
Other ways to increase workload is adding more sets, doing sets slower, resting less between sets.
Caveats
Fatigue management, as previously mentioned fatigue, both systemic and local is accumulative, and a fatigued body doesn't grow. When your workouts start to fall flat, and you lack motivation, and you're just feeling knackered and tired constantly, you need to do a deload which is a period of rest or active rest. About 1 week should be enough. For active rest you can lift weights but at RPE
