HYPERTROPHIC TRAINING: SIZE IS THE PRIZE

If you ask anyone what they want out of going to the gym, they’ll say something along the lines of “I want to be healthier, stronger, and look really good.”. This usually means people want their muscles to be bigger and more defined. If you want to have a larger amount of muscle mass, you need to undergo hypertrophic training. Hypertrophy is the process of muscle cell growth through resistance training. Exercise/training is a process that causes stress and damage to our muscles. When we recover through sleep, hydration, and eating, our muscles repair themselves and increase in mass. The principles of hypertrophy are:

Metabolic Stress

When we use our muscles in exercise, they produce “metabolites.” These are essentially byproducts of muscles contracting and relaxing, resulting in damage to the muscle fibers. This phenomenon is responsible for the burning sensation you feel when you’re performing an exercise. It typically occurs with sets that have higher amounts of repetitions, around 8-10 or more per set.

Muscular Damage

As stated before, muscles become stressed and damaged through exercise/training. This is an essential part of hypertrophic training, in that only when the muscle undergoes a certain amount of damage can it signal our body's recovery processes to occur.

Mechanical Tension

Our muscles can create tension in 3 types of contraction. Concentric contractions are characterized by a muscle getting shorter. Eccentric contractions are characterized by a muscle getting longer. Isometric contractions are characterized by a muscle contracting and creating tension but with no noticeable change in length. In order to stress the muscle effectively, it needs to be subjected to a large amount of tension through increased amounts of contractions. More tension equals more stress which leads to greater results in size.

How do we perform hypertrophic training?

Now that we know the concepts behind hypertrophy, how do we use them to guide our training?

First and foremost is to increase the volume of work you’re performing. Measuring your volume is as simple as tracking your total sets x reps. A good place to start with any exercise is a repetition total between 30-40 total repetitions. This can be accomplished by performing 3-4 sets of 10 repetitions, 3 sets of 12 repetitions, or even 4-5 sets of 8 repetitions. Manipulating these numbers is up to you to perform the most effective work you can.

Time-Under-Tension

Another important factor to look into is time-under-tension or TUT. This involves subjecting the muscle to as much mechanical tension as possible, resulting in greater amounts of damage and subsequent growth later on. When performing a bicep curl: starting from the elbow being completely flexed with the dumbbell close to your shoulder, slowly lower the dumbbell for 3-5 seconds allowing your muscle to be subjected to more tension during the movement. Doing this over the course of an entire set will result in more TUT, causing more muscular damage.

Overall Load

The overall load on the muscle is another extremely important part to pay attention to. Load is the total amount of resistance the muscle is working to overcome. Whether it's a dumbbell, bands, or weight on the barbell, it is essential to adequately stress the muscle enough to invoke changes in it.

The easiest way to accomplish this if you are a seasoned lifter is to use a proper percentage of your one repetition maximum. Typically you’re looking for anywhere between 65-80% of the 1 repetition maximum for this type of training. This will also be dictated by how many reps you’re performing in a set. If your sets are on the higher end, like 12-15 per set, then staying around 65% might be better. If your sets are around 8-10 repetitions, then 75-80% is a better load intensity to use.

For individuals who are newer to training and may not know their 1 repetition maximum, you can perform sub-maximal testing. A quick way to do this is to perform all of your sets while building to your heaviest one on the last set. For example: perform 5 sets of 8 reps. On the last set choose a weight or resistance where you absolutely could not perform one more repetition in that set, and that will become your repetition maximum. Each week you can either choose to increase resistance to this repetition maximum or try to perform additional sets at this number.

Getting It All to Click

Using these concepts in your training can only be effective if you track them consistently and provide yourself with adequate recovery. One of the most important pieces to hypertrophic training is lots of emphases on eating, sleeping, and ample hydration. You will be subjecting your body to large amounts of stress in training, and the only way to see the fruits of your labor is to replenish your body accordingly. Train hard and recover harder.

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