Training For Gaining

A visit to any gym at a peak time and you’ll see it all. Some might be lifting heavy while others might be working with lighter weights. Then you’ll get the members who spend hours on the cardio machines leaving a trail of sweat behind them and then you get the ones who train in a sweat jacket like they’re trying to make weight for an event. The interesting part is that often they all have the same goals which are to build muscle and lose fat.

In this article I’ll be looking at how to train for gaining muscle and what different types of training routines are commonly used by gym members and I’ll try to include examples of when I’ve used them myself.

Types of Muscles

Some of the boring stuff first. Muscles in the body can be split into three main categories which are smooth, cardiac and skeletal muscle. 

Smooth muscles are found in organs of the body where movement is necessary to perform their task. For example the stomach needs to churn food and the intestines need to move this along further down the digestive tract which is done by smooth muscles found in these organs. Smooth muscles are not consciously controlled. Cardiac muscle is found in the heart and also contracts involuntarily. Finally skeletal muscle is controlled consciously and is what enables us to move around. This is the muscle we are concerned with building and making bigger, (not to neglect the importance of having a big heart).

Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy

Skeletal muscle can be trained and as a result of this training it will adapt. These adaptations can vary but we’re interested in making it grow. This adaptation is called hypertrophy. For a muscle to grow it must be subject to a certain stress which we apply by forcing the muscle to perform a movement against resistance. When the muscle is continuously subject to this stress it begins to adapt. When this stress is removed the muscle will tend to revert back to a smaller size as it doesn’t see the need to remain big and maintain this adaptation. This is seen in astronauts who spend a long time in space.  As there is no gravity in space the resistance on an astronaut’s body is removed and the muscles in the body have no resistance to work against. They lose muscle size very quickly and regain this muscle size when they reintroduce the stress on their muscles caused by gravity on Earth.

An astronaut waving bye to all his gains :(

So to get a muscle to continuously grow we need to keep training it and furthermore we have to keep increasing the stress we subject the muscle to. This is known as progressive overload.

Progressive Overload

Using the astronaut example we can see that when they are back on Earth they go back to their original size but they won’t continue to grow past this. This demonstrates the importance of progressively overloading the muscle for it to adapt beyond its current size. If the gravitational pull of the Earth became stronger overnight we would all become swole in a few months just by keeping posture against this increased force.

Now there are a number of ways with which we can overload the muscles and apply stress to stimulate growth including increasing weight, increasing reps and sets and increasing how frequently the muscle is trained.

Thinking back to all the different people in the gym doing all sorts of sets and reps ranges you can see that people tend to differ in what they believe is the best way to stimulate muscle growth. There have been many different routines that have incorporated different techniques to overload the muscles such as forced reps and drop sets and many people tend to stick to certain ways to overload the muscle simply due to preference but few look into what works best.

Most training routines will work and cause some growth in muscle size but whether or not they are the best for muscle growth is debatable. Two of the most popular training routines, HIT and High Volume Training are where a lot of these techniques stem from and they have been adapted in many ways.

HIT (High Intensity Training)

Popularised by Mike Mentzer throughout the 80s and later adapted and reintroduced by Dorian Yates, HIT is a style of training which many lifters swear by. This style of training focuses on working towards a max effort set where you will perform certain number of repetitions which usually fall in between a rep range of 6-8 reps where the aim of the set is to take your muscles to complete failure. Complete failure is when you cannot perform another rep without sacrificing form and this was thought to be the ultimate stimulus for growth by HIT fans.

Dorian Yates, HIT Advocate

The sets building up to this max effort set are often considered warm up sets and are not taken to failure. When you are on your final set a training partner or spotter can be quite important and can help you perform assisted reps or other techniques such as rest pause reps can be used if training alone. Using this style of training you would usually train each muscle once a week or once in a micro cycle (more on training cycles in the follow up to this article).

Now the idea of HIT training was to progressively overload the muscles by continuously adding weight to the bar. This is where the limitations of HIT training begin as there is only a certain amount of weight you can keep adding. Although strength does increase over time, it tends to increase at a diminishing rate. So you notice that your strength goes up slower and slower over time. Relying on this as the only variable to change cannot be the best form of overload. This is probably the main drawback of this type of training. Not to say that it doesn’t work, but it isn’t the best way to train for hypertrophy.

From my personal experiences with HIT I found that as a beginner I did see results and some of my biggest increases in size and strength came from HIT training. But I put this down to using this training early on in my lifting years at a point where any routine would yield significant results if performed consistently. I was still training with a HIT routine until a few years after having experimented with other various other routines but I felt that it wasn't working as well as it had done before and I decided to move away from it and try a different approach.

Volume Training

Although volume training is not really a strict category as much as HIT training is, it is often used to describe routines that have a high number of sets which are taken to a high number of reps. These types of routines are typically the ones shown in bodybuilding magazines where each muscle is hammered by using 4-5 exercises per body part with 4-5 sets per exercise where you can perform up to 20 reps per set! (hence the name volume training).

Arnie took a high volume approach to training and a quick search of any of his routines that he used shows that he was a big fan of performing a high number of sets per exercise.

Arnie, Showing off his pump

The aim of volume training is to work the muscle in a way where you fatigue it over the course of a workout and often each muscle is trained once a week similar to the way you would train using HIT. Volume training uses various techniques to induce overload such as drop sets and super sets and a big focus of workouts is to get a pump where your muscle is full of blood from all the sets and reps performed. Arnie was a big fan of the pump as most of you know.

When I tried using a high volume approach to training I can say it was probably amongst the most enjoyable workouts to begin with but over time I found there was little structure to the routines and I would jump on any machine and just perform 4/5 sets on that particular exercise. One problem with this was that it was almost impossible for me to track progress as I didn’t know if I was getting stronger at a particular movement. I also found that volume training took a lot of time and I could be in the gym for many hours most of which was training time and not much rest time.

So What Works Best?

Both of these approaches to training can get you results but I don’t believe that sticking strictly to one method is the best way to approach your training. Having a routine which involves a certain amount of HIT work and high volume work can work a lot better. So this can be done by having sets where heavy weight is lifted for a shorter number of reps and having a certain amount of reps where lighter weights are lifted for a higher number of reps.

The HIT training methods and volume training methods are just two categories which are often considered to be at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to training variables and they directly focus on the two primary routes to achieving hypertrophy which are myofibrillar hypertrophy and sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.

Myofibrillar hypertrophy is when the muscle fibres are growing larger and this is often the focus of HIT or tension training where there is particular emphasis on causing damage to muscle cells through time under tension and heavy resistance. Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is the increase in the muscles energy stores, namely glycogen. Volume training seems to be designed to achieve sarcoplasmic hypertrophy where the high number of sets and reps deplete these stores with the aim of achieving super compensation after the workout once your muscle has adapted and is able to hold more glycogen than before.

Although these are two different routes to achieve hypertrophy most workouts will achieve an overlap and give the trainer aspects of both types of hypertrophy.

Some may make an effort to focus on one particular type of hypertrophy in the belief that it gives their muscles a better look. Supporters of HIT training argue that myofibillar growth keeps them looking denser and less puffy whereas volume training may not achieve this type of look for their muscles. Going by this, volume training might not actually be the best way to get a leaner look and there certainly isn’t any rationale behind switching your whole workout to a high rep, light weight routine which is what many people do when they’re looking to cut (people who say they’re toning aka toners). It’s probably the worst thing you could do when you’re trying to maintain muscle while losing fat but I’ll write a whole article on that alone, this is training for gaining!

Toner

Finally, I want to talk a bit about power training. Power training is where a large load is lifted for a short number of reps creating enormous tension on muscles. This can be thought of as an extreme at the opposite end of the training spectrum to volume training as there is hardly any depletion of energy stores apart from creatine phosphate and ATP. Power training is usually performed on compound movements such as squats deadlifts and bench press with a break of over 3 minutes per set to allow creatine stores to be replenished.

Power training, apart from creating the largest tension on muscles also creates the biggest strength adaptations resulting in strength gains. However, since the time under tension is not as long as it might be while using a HIT training routine or even volume training because of the lower rep range, power training shouldn't be used alone for achieving hypertrophy but is a very useful addition.

I’ve found that since I’ve started power training my strength increases have complemented my hypertrophy gains and also I’ve found power training to be the most enjoyable type of training, apart from when I almost broke my back. Adding weight to the bar and aiming to beat your previous best can be a highly motivating factor and I’ve found that it helps me make consistent progress. Adding a number of power sets to your workout can mean you’re spending a lot more time in the gym because of the rest needed in between sets to fully recover which is something to consider when designing your routine.

Putting it Together

Now that we’ve covered both HIT and Volume training and understood how they can achieve myofibillar and sarcoplasmic hypertrophy we can start to make a routine with the addition of some power work to help some strength gains.

Where most micro cycles will train each muscle once per week there has been a lot of research showing that this isn’t the optimal way to train. Where one might perform 10 sets on a muscle group they would be better of splitting that workout into 2 separate workouts both consisting of 5 sets. This is because you get to have a better workout each time as you aren’t going to be exhausted half way through the workout. More importantly, this allows your muscles to have twice as many periods where it has been stimulated for growth allowing greater muscle protein synthesis amongst many other factors which add to your gains.

When you begin training each muscle twice a week from having trained it once a week for most of your life you might notice that you find yourself to be very sore or still fatigued from your previous workout but it is important to push through this as it only lasts a short number of weeks after which you adapt to the increased frequency.

So when training each muscle twice a week it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll have twice as many work outs because you can begin to pair more muscles together since you won’t be performing as many sets as you might have done before. Also you want to structure your routine so that you can include some power work along with tension work and a certain amount of high rep work so that you get the best of strength gains as well as myofibillar and sarcoplasmic adaptations. I like to perform most of my power work towards the start of the week and then perform the lighter work towards the end of the week as I find this to be the best way for me to lift the heaviest weights in the power workouts.

The routine that I’ve stuck to for the longest since incorporating these techniques has been an upper/lower split where I train both upper body and lower body twice a week. I focus on power workouts for the first two workouts and the second set of workouts would focus on a higher rep range and more tension and high rep work. This can be further broken down into smaller workouts if you find that some workouts are becoming too long but this depends largely on how much time you have to go to the gym.

Also an important factor when training is to keep a track of what you’re lifting in the form of a training log. This is critical to progress because it helps you understand your improvements in strength and allows you to better achieve progressive overload.

Furthermore, I also like to keep a track of rest time in between sets and typically like to keep them within the same range throughout my workouts. This eliminates any changes in strength being down to a longer rest and I get a better understanding of my strength gains. Rest periods are usually a between 1 minute – 90 seconds for high rep ranges and 90 seconds – 2 minutes for any tension work that falls into the 8-12 rep range. With power work I’ll take as long as I feel I need but I still keep a record of how long was taken which is usually anywhere between 3-6 minutes.

I’ll leave here for now and look more into routines in the following article and look at exercise selection. I’ll also start look at periodization and different ways to keep the gains coming while breaking through plateaus. I’ll also be explaining how training hard and training smart are two very different things and it’s not always best to take yourself to failure each time especially if it’s going to be at the expense of sacrificing total training volume which is the ultimate growth stimulator over time.