We started the final phase of our strength and hypertrophy training block this week. In honor of that, we’re talking about muscle growth and how you can increase yours. There’s a lot of convoluted information out there, so I’m going to do you a solid and make it simple. Muscle growth isn’t complicated. It just takes some planning, a good deal of work, and food!
Before we get into the three things you can do to increase your muscle growth, let’s have a quick chat about the foundational elements that grow muscle.
Muscle Growth: The Three Things You Must Do in Training
Here are the three things that must happen during training for muscle growth:
- You must increase your training volume.
- You must have ample time under tension.
- You must create muscle damage.
Those are the three things that must happen in sufficient amounts for hypertrophy to happen. Once we hit those basics, we must do one more thing – eat enough! You must be in a caloric surplus to grow muscle, otherwise, your body won’t have enough resources to do everything else and make you bigger.
With that covered, let’s talk strategies. These puppies come straight from our current Beyond Strength training program.
Muscle Growth Strategy 1: Eustress Breath Ladders
We’ve supersetted our main lifts using a technique called eustress breath ladders. Eustress training is a type of heart rate-based strength training that helps you dynamically control your breath and your stress response. Those are important things for being a human being.
The eustress breath ladders also create a ton of time under tension. Here’s how they work: You do 3-5 reps, then take three breaths, then do 2-3 reps, then take three breaths, then do 1-2 reps. That’s one set. And here’s the kicker, you can’t put the weight down as you do your breaths – you gotta hold on to it until you finish the final rep. It’s spicy, especially during grip-intensive exercises.
Controlling our stress response allows us to get in more volume during a session. If we just went crazy and burned ourselves out, we wouldn’t do as much work. And that’s no bueno for muscle growth. The combo of time under tension during each set and the accumulated volume creates enough muscle damage for muscular growth. We like this.
Muscle Growth Strategy 2: Strength Training Intervals
Strength exercises done with incomplete rest induce a nice amount of muscle damage. Tack time under tension on top of that and you have yourself a real muscle growth party.
Our assistance training during this program features :30 work / :30 rest lifting intervals. We’re circuiting three exercises with the intervals. For example, we do a deadlift variation for :30 then rest for :30. After that rest period, we do a pressing variation for :30, then we rest for :30. Then, after that rest period, we do :30 of hanging, then we rest for :30 before starting the circuit over again.
You should aim to get around 15 reps during the :30 work period if you’re doing a rep-based movement. If you can do way more, you’re not using enough weight. If you can’t get to 15 or so, you’re using too much weight.
Muscle Growth Strategy 3: Density Training
Our Friday class is called Resilience. During this workout, we typically do high-volume strength training that builds work capacity and muscle. Resilience this time around features density sets.
Density strength training is a form of interval strength training. The goal is to increase the density, or amount of training, you do in a short period of time. For example, the amount of work you do in 1-2 minutes. Now, the amount of weight you use counts toward the total amount of work. So, if you keep the reps the same in that 1-2 minutes, but are able to use more weight, you’ve increased the density.
We’re doing 2:00 density supersets. For example, during one superset, we do 5 split squats on each leg, then 8 rows. We have the remainder of the 2:00 to rest, then we start over. We repeat that process for 5 total sets.
We’ll progress by trying to use more weight each week. But you could progress them by increasing the reps per set to make the set denser.
Go Build Some Muscle
Take these three strategies and get to training! They offer the necessary volume, time under tension, and muscle damage to create muscle growth. And, since it’s the holiday season, you should be smashing enough calories to support hypertrophy. If you happen across this article after the holiday season, remember that if you don’t eat, you don’t grow.
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