TRAINING.
Intensity
Training intensity needs to be adequate enough for muscle stimulation. Therefore, weight needs to be heavy enough (>30% 1RM) and volume challenging enough (>5 RPE). There’s no magical rep range, with preferred ranges been 8-12 and 12-20 for hypertrophy.
Compound lifts should be kept below 12 reps, as anything higher will be very fatiguing, not only muscular but nervous, causing a reduction in force production for the rest of the session. This could be combined with strength work within compound exercises, ranging from 1-5 reps. If your strength is higher, you can lift heavier, opening the door for more muscle growth.
Most of your training should be adequately hard.
But practical recommendations (taken from the Muscle and Strength Pyramid) are:
60-75% of your volume should be 6-12 reps
25-40% of your volume at 1-5 and/or 12-20 reps.
Frequency
Frequency is so individualised that we don’t have an optimal recommendation. However, we do know that the more frequent you can train a muscle, the more size and strength you will gain. This is most prominent in powerlifters, who base all their training around 3 lifts and meticulously practice these often 3 or more times weekly in various intensities.
Your frequency depends on your schedule, like any plan, adherence is key. So trying a plan of 6 days when you could only manage 4 is non-conducive to your goals. You have to then determine your volume over the week, consisting of sets, reps, warm up and rest periods. Breaking certain movements or muscle up over the week allows high intensity and heavier sets promoting more muscle growth. Once you have your program, adjust it as you feel, maybe you underestimated the amount and need to Pull back, or maybe you over-shot it and it’s way too intense.
For hypertrophy, twice a week for muscle groups would be enough to promote growth, remember that some exercises will hit more than one muscle group (e.g. bench press hitting pectorals, anterior deltoids, triceps and lats).
Volume
Volume is the total amount of work you perform in a given session, week or even microcycle (small training block). Total volume is the main indicator of progression.
Volume is the total of sets, reps and weight lifted multiplied together. To manipulate volume by increasing any of these 3 variables increases tension on the muscle. This volume increase would increase growth over time and is probably the easiest factor within progressive overload to manipulate.
Volume needs to increase over time (to an extent), as you will require more stimulus the more trained you become. Obviously there is a limit to volume, as doing more and more sets and reps, would require hours in the gym, which for 99% of people is unachievable, this is where weight lifted, intensity, density and frequency would become the main factors for progression.
The amount of volume you should start at is around 8-10 sets of work on each muscle group, over the week. This will then progress further to 20 sets for more advanced lifters, time allowing. This is where volume would interact with frequency and intensity to make sure progression is made in more than aspect.
Progression
Progression is key for continually building size and/or strength, if you didn’t progress your lifts in any way, you would just stagnate. Progressive overload is achieved by volume, intensity and frequency. Overload from these will result in size and strength, but after a time you will hit a limit, this is where progress comes in.
When you first started lifting, you probably had limited knowledge on movement patterns and exercises that hit certain muscles. Rarely do people with little training age go in and start back squatting with perfect form at a heavy weight. We usually start with a box squat or wall squat, go through the progressions to eventually finish at a back squat, which we can then overload to progress.
As a beginner you are further from your genetic threshold, allowing your progress to be quite significant off a very simple programme, you will see strength rise rapidly and with it, muscle mass and body recomposition. Whereas someone closer to their natural limit, will need more volume with a more complex programme to progress as much as he or she wants.
Progress within hypertrophy comes mainly from volume (number of sets/reps) and intensity (how hard you’re working), rather than the weight. Yes, the weight has to be adequate enough to ‘ the stimulus, but it’s the repetitions that causes the stimulus for muscular hypertrophy.
De-loads
During times of high intensity periods, your body goes through a lot of stress. The goal of training is to become better, physically stronger, bigger and work harder. Even with proper rest and nutrition, your body will start to become ‘over-trained’ this is normal, but when not addressed, leads to very severe consequences.
Over-training is a natural biproduct of progressive overload, we push our body as far as it can go. We then put ourselves at risk of feeling run down, illnesses and just general lethargy. This is where we can utilise de-loads to reduce the symptoms of overtraining and allow for greater adaptations through ‘over-reaching’.
Overreaching is essentially programmed training allowing periods of intense training, followed by a period of rest or reduced volume. Allowing the muscle to grow, adapt and repair causing greater adaptation. This period of ‘rest’ is a de-load week or period. either structured into training programmes, or auto-regulated. De-loads never come when you feel like you need them, however, they’re an important part of routine, when planned, you benefit from never needing them when you suffer from symptoms of overreaching.
You’ll know when you’re ready for a de-load when you get under the bar for a warm up and it feels like you’ve picked up your 1RM.