So far, in the hypertrophy series, we’ve had a good look at
- what exercises you should be focusing on at the gym.
- how to correctly and safely perform exercises.
- how much stimulus your body needs for optimal growth.
MUSCULAR GROWTH POTENTIAL
Most untrained folk would have an FFMI that would fall in the range [18–20]/[14.5–16.5] (men/women). As they go through training, their FFMI would start increasing towards their genetic limit i.e. [24–26]/[20–22] (men/women). The question that we’re interested in at this point is:
At what rate can we gain lean mass?
- Growth rate depends on the level of advancement in training. The more muscular you are, i.e. the closer to the limit, the slower would be the growth rate.
- We come in different sizes — tall vs short, male vs female — hence, it would probably make more sense to describe growth rate as a percentage rather than an absolute value of increment in kg per month.
- Genetics would play a big role in what the actual growth rate would be. Growth rate is also dependent on several noisy factors for instance:
Two beginners with the same starting FFMI, going through similar training stimulus could be at drastically different states at the end of two years simply because one was more motivated.
Because of this, what we’re looking for is a range of values rather than one well defined number to describe growth rate.
A beginner has potential growth rate of lean mass of about 0.75–1.5% per month. This rate can be sustained for about a year or two.
For every subsequent year, this rate becomes half wrt the previous year.
For example, a beginner whose lean mass is 50 kg (not total mass!) can expect about ~0.4–0.7 kg of muscle gain every month in the first and second year of training. In the third year, the growth rate would be ~0.2–0.4 kg per month; fourth year would show ~0.1–0.2 kg gainzz per month and so on.
Wait a second…
Are you saying that men and women have the same growth rate?
Yes, that’s correct. Most of the differences between men and women are because of differences in the starting state — women start off with lower absolute lean mass and this have far lower absolute potential than men*. The effect of resistance training is almost identical in terms of percentage growth rate towards that genetic limit.
* Also, women tend to be bottom heavy while men are top heavy. This difference continues to exist even as both types of athletes advance in their training.
Tracking the amount of lean mass gained
If you are a total beginner, i.e. excessively weak OR excessively fat, it might be possible for you to gain muscle while losing fat. This is what is known as a recomp phase (body recomposition). But for almost everyone else, optimal muscle gain generally requires that you gain some fat in the process i.e. stay at a caloric surplus. This is generally called the bulk phase** of a lifter. Similarly, one can think of a cut phase where the primary goal would be to lose fat but loss of muscle exists as a side effect (for non-beginners).
** A decent bulk should generally have more than 50% of the weight gain coming from muscle. Anything less than this probably means that your surplus is a little too much.
Suppose you are bulking, how can you estimate the amount of lean mass you’ve gained? Surely, the gain in total body-weight is more than the actual muscle gained (because some of it would be fat).
METHOD 1
Estimate your lean mass at the starting and ending points using the body fat calculator attached in this article. The difference between the two values is a good estimate of the lean mass you’ve gained. This method works best over large periods of time (6+ months).
METHOD 2
We could use improvements in strength level to estimate increase in lean mass. So, how does strength level correlate with lean mass?
This is actually a very difficult question to answer considering the different levels of expertise and anatomical structures lifters come with. But, as a general thumb rule for beginners (with good form) and intermediates I like to use this info:
A 20 kg increase in the estimated Powerlifting Total* corresponds to an increase in total lean mass of about 1 kg
*Powerlifting total is the sum of 1 rm’s of Squat, Bench and Deadlift.
As described in the last article, we use the tested/predicted 1 rep max to quantify our current strength level for a particular movement. As a generic measure of overall current strength level, we use the Powerlifting total.
This method generally works well over short periods of time (~1–2 months). A real life example:
Last year, I improved my squat and deadlift by 20 kg and my bench press by 12.5 kg (52.5 kg increment in powerlifting total). According to method 2, I had gained ~2.6 (i.e. 52.5/20) kg of lean mass in this period.
ABS EXERCISES
You might have noticed that nowhere in the whole discussion did we talk about ab-specific exercises. This is because you don’t really need them: heavy barbell movements build your core well enough that if you are sufficiently lean (<12% body-fat for men and <18% for women), you WILL have visible abs if you’re sufficiently strong.
But why not do some extra ab work to make the abs “pop out”?
Crunches and Leg-Raises are not recommended for people who have a sedentary job life. “Sitters” generally come with relatively tight hip flexor muscles because their hips are flexed all the time. The commonly used ab-builders (crunches and leg raises) are more hip-flexor activating rather than targeting the abs. This could aggravate the tightness of hip flexors and end up causing muscular imbalances and back pain.
Planks (especially side planks), on the other hand, are really good ab and core builders and could be used regularly as a part of your warm-up routine; plank “activates” your core without having the hip-flexor related side-effects of crunching.
TRAINING EFFECT AND MAXING OUT
Maxing out i.e. performing a set till failure is always very exciting. We get a chance to evaluate ourselves; a chance to see how much we have improved since the last max-out.
Does maxing out have any training effect?
Suppose 80 kg is your 7 rep max for bench press. Obviously, performing full 7 reps of 80 kg will have more training effect than, say, 5 reps (in one set). But this is true only when the sets are in isolation — suppose we have more sets to perform, then fatiguing yourself to the limit in the all the sets may not always be the best idea. After every set till failure, your performance degrades rapidly thus hampering the net work done over all the sets combined. Due to this, I used the following thumb rule and started seeing drastic positive changes in my training:
Do not perform more than one max out set for a particular movement in one training session.
Avoid technical failure
You will notice that when people test their 1 rm, the form is generally less than ideal. This is called technical failure: the lifter performs the lift successfully but does not perform it the way he/she is supposed to. While this “form vs weight on the bar” trade-off is acceptable for professionals in competition, it is not advisable to go through this risky path regularly as a part of your training. Thumb rule 2 about maxing out would be this:
Do NOT go to technical failure
If you feel like the next rep WILL have bad form, stop right there. If you feel like you can’t lift the weight loaded on the bar with good form, stop right there. No amount of “pushing the limits” BS is worth the injuries which will set you back in training.
One rep maxes
There are several issues with performing 1 rep maxes:
- Chance of technical failure and thus injury is high
- Central nervous system (CNS) of the lifter goes through higher stress — thus hampers recovery
- The need for spotters and safety equipment would go up
- The training effect from the set itself is low + the accumulated fatigue prevents other sets from being effective enough.
While it is true that beginners can make personal records (PR’s) in almost every session, these should ideally be new n rep maxes (where n > 1). I think beginners have no business testing their 1 rm frequently (unless there is a competition coming up). Rep max attempts, just short of technical failure, is what constitutes a good training program.
A SUMMARY — Muscle & Strength Training Pyramid
The image shown here is similar to the nutrition pyramid by Dr. Eric Helms we’d seen in Fat Loss — Part 4. Some examples that can be read from the pyramid:
- Your adherence to the program/schedule is more important than worrying about rest periods in between sets.
- No amount of fancy exercise selection is going to give you any benefits if the Volume, Intensity and Frequency of training are messed up.
- Progression in your squat is more important than performing the reps slowly to increase time under tension (tempo).
FAT-LOSS, FITNESS AND HYPERTROPHY — TO SUM IT ALL UP:
This concludes the 12th and the last part of this series. The basic goal of the whole write-up was to provide one comprehensive resource guide for someone who wishes to take care of his/her health, athleticism and looks. In a way, I wish I had a resource like this while I started — I could have saved some time for my personal fitness pursuits (but then, I wouldn’t get a chance to learn from my mistakes and then write medium.com articles about it). I genuinely hope you find the whole thing useful. Feel free to comment and let me know what you think. I’m glad you made it through till the end.
THANK YOU! — Anand
