Training A Hypertrophy

The main ideas from this information are: - Hypertrophy is a complex topic with a lot of information. - The principles of hypertrophy include tension, metabolic stress, and muscular damage. - There are different approaches to hypertrophy, such as focusing on loading tissues to create tension or creating metabolic stress. - Bodybuilders have been using various training methods to build muscle for many years. - Increasing cross-sectional muscle area is important for improving power and velocity. - There are different factors involved in hypertrophy, such as rate coding, motor unit recruitment, and the size principle. - Hypertrophy can be achieved through various mechanisms, including cellular swelling, muscle damage, and metabolic stress. - Muscular soreness is not always directly correlated with hypertrophy. - Different approaches to training can be used to create tension and stimulate hypertrophy. - Understanding leverage, mechanical advantage, and muscle fiber fatigue is important i So, let's get into the principles of hypertrophy. The hardest part about this is really the overwhelming amount of information around hypertrophy. I'll be honest, I got a master's degree in exercise science, I have a master's degree in performance enhancement injury prevention. Huge part of my master's degree was this concept of physiology, neurophysiology, and I really centered on actual hypertrophy. For the folks that don't know, I did research on post-activation potentiation, and I looked at the difference between doing Olympic lifts and its impact acutely on power output versus doing a 85% squat in power output. The general idea is rate of force development doesn't necessarily accentuate power in a exercise that follows it like a squat jump or a hurdle jump as much as hitting a certain intensity or cross-sectional muscle area with squatting or maybe even dead lifting. Essentially, it's just the absolute strength. But I could argue probably the reason why I chose to do that research as opposed to really looking at muscular hypertrophy, which is definitely something that's always been a fascination with me, is just out of the pure intensity which hypertrophy needs to be approached from an understanding and a mechanism. I would say if I had Brad Schoenfeld back when I was in my undergrad and graduate school, probably would have helped a ton. I mean, he existed, he just wasn't as out there as he is now. But at the other end, it goes into this dynamic of, well, what does it really break down to? Brad would say it's like three components, tension, and metabolic stress, and muscular damage. Some really good resources, books, art research articles, which I have listed in the references here, as well as he's done a series of podcasts. There's another resource out there that I think is really valuable. It's by Doug Brignull, The Physics of Resistance Training, and Doug looked at more the mechanics of creating tension, but I do think it creates this distinction, and I don't want to create a camp thing. They're both really valuable in themselves, but the truth is, I like the idea, which Doug talks about from the concept of loading tissues by understanding physics to create tension and leveraging either muscular damage or metabolic stress. I find that's a cleaner organization, I'm going to break down why. But I think there's this stigmatism associated with resistance training in general, and it has to always be heavy. I think when we have that association bias with everything in terms of output, and we just ignore or just diminish the value, which bodybuilders for now, 50 to 75 years, have acknowledged for an extended period of time, even to the point of body composition and doing fast and low-intensity cardio for an extended period of time, and managing caloric intake and all these other things, but the truth is, this is the perfect model for understanding how to build muscle. There's nothing better, so if you're a strength conditioning coach listening to this and reading through this module, you're probably going, why do I need to know this? Well, there's a couple things, and we'll go through this in practical, but most importantly, it comes down to, really, the most linearly correlated thing to improving power or velocity is increasing the cross-sectional muscle area of a muscle. But if you look through every research, in terms of power output, velocity, any rate of force development thing, we're trying to adjust the force velocity curve or the force length curve. It really comes down to changes coming from a lot of neurological, which is kind of nebulous to be honest. When you read through some of the terminology to improving someone's rate of force development speed or velocity or power, it really comes down to rate coding or how fast we're firing nerve impulses to the motor units, how many motor units we're recruiting, how well we're synchronizing, and then finally, this size principle, which are all extremely hard things to test. There's some cool research out there in regards to looking at hemoglobin in an area through NEARs. There's some cool research out there looking at, obviously, metabolic waste products from – and this stuff is not new behind you. It's funny. When I got exposed to force plates, I guess, my second time, I remember having it at Springfield College in the lab and going, can we use that? And they're like, no, it's really not that. It's kind of an antiquated thing, and now it's a staple in a lot of people's programming, including mine. So the pendulum swung back full around, same thing with Tendi units and velocity-based training and how this modernized approach and just better understanding and better appreciation for what value we can get from these tools. But the truth is this, is when we look at anything associated with increasing performance or what we want, there's always going to be some sort of element associated with increasing the cross-sectional muscle area, relatively speaking to that kind of direct input of having more sarcomeres produces more force. And the best way to get more sarcomeres is to go through muscular hypertrophy. So as we start to break down, really trying to increase the ability of someone, and you're wondering, well, what's the point of focusing on hypertrophy or building muscle? Well, there's a direct correlation to a lot of outcomes that we want to accomplish in regards to increasing cross-sectional muscle area. Now on the other end, we could look at this from the concept of rehabilitation. We could look at this as a concept of body mass or body compositional changes. We could look at this as a lot of different areas. We could look at this from, hey, I want to get someone post-operatively and increase their cross-sectional muscle area associated with that muscular group attached to that joint. This is usually the classic example of the quadriceps associated with post-ACL operation. Now that's a really good indicator. Maybe we want to look at it from, I have a guy who's playing offensive line, I want to increase their body mass tenfold, but we wanted that to be functional, so we want to increase their lean muscle mass. The point being is increasing muscle mass on an athlete is a really important skill. Now it comes down to the question of what models can we leverage, and can we get too myopically focused on a certain model? If we were going to look at bodybuilding, and I was just on social media and I came across a couple different bodybuilding grades, and it brought me back to reading Flex magazine in a grocery aisle, and I'm not ashamed to admit I was buying those as well and looking through those, and seeing these absurd programs. One of the ones was basically six to eight exercises, and five sets of 15 to 20 on every single exercise. If you do the math, you're doing five sets of 20, that's 100 reps for eight exercises. You could do 800 reps. Now let's be honest about that. Is that maybe part of their bodybuilding cycle? Maybe is that a cutting phase thing? Is that a muscular building phase? And that's the question. Because it's like we're just getting a snapshot into a workout. I can go back to Secrets to the Inner Universe by Bill Pearl talking about just doing circuits of 20. We can go into Mike Mentzer and Arthur Jones and looking at going to complete muscular failure. So not only taking it to concentric, but eccentric and isometric failure. We can look at it from the concept of even like a classic example of Frank Zane's programs were gnarly in terms of actual volume. And put it whatever way you want it. A lot of it was density-based. Vince Durante used to do eight by eight as quickly as possible. There's a lot of bodybuilders out there doing this quote-unquote extremely high volume workout, and you're like, well, that's not for performance. It's just for aesthetics. But I would be honest to say like if it does have an impact on building muscle, we should at least consider it, right? And then it goes into this dichotomy looking at sarcoplasmic versus myofibril hypertrophy. And that is a really tough one to break down. Because the truth is you're fooling yourself if you really think you can create this specific adaptation on certain muscular fibers as opposed to cellular swelling. Any time you're starting to create a hypoxic environment where you're occluding oxygen to an area, whether it's the lack of delivery from increasing tension in a muscle that closes off the area or the removal and production of waste products, you're going to create some sort of cellular swelling. It just is what it is. And cellular swelling is going to go into this metabolic stress continuum, right? So if we're going to create this continuum, so to speak, where on one end there's muscular damage where I'm just breaking down tissues. So I am taking these Z lines and stretching them to their end range, and I'm creating a rupture. And I'm breaking them down a ton and a ton and a ton. So the functional need to add more sarcomeres. Or hey, here's the other thing. We talked about this in strength deficit and longitudinal hypertrophy. Depending on the rate and the amount of intensity, you could very well likely be adding more connective tissue. But on the other end, if we have a very pragmatic approach to increasing tension over a larger range of motion in a very, very structured way, we can absolutely increase sarcomeres along the length of that muscle fiber. But my point of all this is there's really no simple way to say that we are working more myofibril or sarcoplasmic, which is not. And it's not a bad thing to say that I'm going to have a carryover into metabolic stress creating cellular swelling. Because what happens, and we could talk about this in extents, it goes into this idea of when we create metabolic stress, we create an endocrine response that increases the ability to recover from future workouts. And I think if I'm a betting man, when I look at the physiological adaptations of something like high-low or working zone 2 in conjunction with working a high CNS training program, all of that stuff, and I mean this when I say this, all of that stuff is a bigger thing going into this vertical integration. And we talk about this in our high-low, we talk about this in strength-deficit, we talk about this a lot of places. But the idea is knowing what you want to accomplish and then building a bunch of drivers to help me accomplish that. Now let's get back into what really actually causes hypertrophy. You want to pin me against the wall and say, Tim, what is it, what is it, what is it? It's tension. It's tension within a muscle. And what is tension? Is tension work? Is tension a contraction? Is tension eccentrically loading? Yes, all of the above. Again, it's a joke term to describe what happens in a muscle that's going to create the adaptation that we want. And what is that, what is that what we want? We want stimulate mTOR, that enzyme that creates protein synthesis to go through translation, transcription. We want to increase that cross-sectional muscle area, not only from an intermedial part of that belly, but also the distal and proximal ends. And we want to look at this from a bigger, more well-thought-out, pragmatic approach of saying tension is important because it gets me what I ultimately want of performing at a higher level, whether it's coming off an injury and increasing the muscle area and that muscle mass in that area. Whether it's going into the setup of, all right, I want to have increased cross-sectional muscle area because force is a limiting factor. Or I want to go into this other concept of when I really want to understand that the bigger, faster, more capable person of going longer is usually going to be the one that's more successful in the team sport. Well, okay, more reasons to go ahead and focus on that. So what are some of the drivers of metabolic stress? We've got growth transcription factors, again, what's simulating that transcription. We've got IGF-1, again, insulin sensitivity, looking at bringing these drivers of protein synthesis to the cell, right? When there's a demand, we start to drive these things to the cell. Cellular swelling, so we are accumulating hydrogen ions within the cellular environment from going through lactate dehydrogenase pathways, so pyruvate, these are going to get turned to acetyl-CoA and enter into the mitochondria to go through the citric acid cycle and the electron transport chain. But if it becomes hypoxic, meaning there's not enough oxygen, we start to go through lactate dehydrogenase, and we start to utilize that to produce lactate, but it starts to produce hydrogen ions, which is a generally acidic ion, and it starts to create a very acidic environment, that cell starts to swell, and then that cell may rupture. And then it goes through this idea of potentially this cellular adaptation, and it could go into fusion or fission. So fusion, which means those two cells or mitochondrias are going to convert together, creating a supercell, or fission, those cells split and create two new cells and then make a version of a version, which is another conversation. So we start to produce a lot of phosphate from going through these contraction cycles, again lactate, and then as we talked about hydrogen. And then the other end, we talk about muscle damage, inflammatory response, mechanical growth factors, right? We start to rupture these E-discs, again IGF-1, and then satellite cells, which is this idea of how we're going to start to rebuild these tissues after we break them down. But the difference between the two is one is more of this physiological outcome from doing repeat contractions and tension that's going to create this inflammatory response or metabolic stress. The other one is direct breaking down of the tissues. And one of the big misconceptions with hypertrophy is muscular soreness or DOMS is not automatically associated with increasing cross-sectional muscle area. And that's the thing. Chasing the soreness isn't always going to be the panacea for creating muscle mass. And muscular damage is good until it's not. We can only produce so much adaptation from breaking down the muscle fiber. We might need to utilize a different strategy. And this is when you see bodybuilders hit this threshold of, hey, I need to become more optimized with my training. And they might shift from heavy weights with large eccentric loads that are going to create a lot of muscular damage. And then they transition to more higher rep, lower intensity type of programming. And they create this swelling metabolic stress environment that gets them incredible results later on in their career. And we could do this on a more micro basis. We can do this on a macro basis. We could do this as a person that has a lot of CNS overloading. And we don't want to increase a lot of eccentric stress and dampen that CNS even more. So we might want to utilize a metabolic stress type of programming. There's always going to be a reason to understand both ends. And we can look through this process from day one. We start to have this injury cycle. We start to proliferate. We start to remove the debris. We start to get these cells adapting and growing. And then all of a sudden, we have a whole new muscle cell. And the other part about it is when we look at it from this concept of myopically locked in on, I'm only going to do myofibril or more functional hypertrophy, you're fooling yourself. Because it has a very short window where you can actually do that for it. And then it's very interruptive to what we're trying to do with potentially improving speed and power. All I'm trying to say is there might be a really good opportunity to start to look at more metabolic stress outcomes from at least the endocrine perspective and recovery perspective relatively speaking to the muscular damage perspective. The end road, though, is how do we create tension, right? And a lot of times, there is a dormant muscle type of response to doing a heavy loaded movement with the intent to increase myofibril hypertrophy, right? Like Gary Gray would say the best way to turn a muscle on is to eccentrically load it. But that's if we know that we are creating the perfect line of tension within that muscle cell, right? And a lot of people don't really understand origin insertion and how to bring the insertion closer to the origin. It comes down to having the right tools, the right positions, the right feel, the right timing, understanding mechanical advantage, disadvantage, understanding between flexor and extensor based muscles, understanding between pinate and parallel muscle fibers. I implore you to go to our gear ratio module within our movement course because it goes through a lot of that, mechanical advantage, disadvantage as well. And when we look through that, if I can understand how to create optimal eccentric loading within tissues or yielding isometric within tissues, then yes, there is a higher probability I'm going to get the outcome I want with a heavy loaded movement to create muscular damage. That is possible. It's just hard. It's really hard because we're mostly leveraging compound multijoint movements. And one of the things about compound multijoint movements, it's all a matter of maintaining leverage and mechanical advantage, right? This is why people push their butt back when they squat and they bend their knees when they deadlift. This is why they lift their thorax when they're doing pull-ups. It's why they lift their thorax when they're doing bench. Because when we look at these mechanically disadvantaged positions that are trying to create adaptation on a muscle cell associated with that, it's always going to go to the spot where we have the most leverage or the most mechanical advantage. And we are not training the tissues associated with that movement. We might not be creating muscular hypertrophy. We might be axial loading, creating some sort of systemic load, but it's more about creating this mechanical advantage and not necessarily creating this output of increasing cross-sectional muscle area. Now, we can still leverage these high-threshold compound multijoint movements with lower intensity, which is a different mechanism. And this goes into this grooving the pattern, right? Pavel will talk about that in this idea of learning how to kettlebell swing. You learn how to kettlebell swing by getting enough repetitions where you figure out organically the right way to do it, but you learn about how to create tension by doing enough volume to feel that muscle fiber actually fatigue, right? And let's say that we have this strong feeling and bias towards, hey, certain muscle groups or movement patterns are going to be later in the workout. We have a little bit more systemic fatigue, and we typically can probably create this morphological change at that muscle tissue, or I should say architectural change at that muscle tissue, because we're already fatigued and we already are creating this metabolic stress with the body, and we create tension maybe a little bit more in a linear way, right? So let's say that you follow a tier model and you don't do posterior chain or upper back until the C-series or later on in the workout. There might be a higher probability that you might be able to create increased cross-sectional muscle areas because you've already accumulated a lot of stress at this point, and you start to produce a lot more metabolic stress early, and you feel that rep a little bit quicker. But can't we get there faster, right? And this is something that we look through the high-intensity training proponents, and we look at a true set of failure, and understanding what leverage we have, right? So have you ever done manual resistance? If that person is cocking back and trying to create this leverage of these isolation movements, right? So for example, let's say that you're doing a manual resistance lateral raise, right? So I'm putting my hands around your wrist, and I'm resisting you both on the concentric, the isometric, and then the eccentric portion of that movement. Now let's say that they start to move their body forward and back and try to create leverage. Let's say that they open up their thumbs to try to recruit their anterior delt as well as their medial and lateral delt. Let's say that they kind of sandbag in the eccentric so they have a little bit more strength on the concentric. You know very intuitively that this isn't training or stressing what we want, as well as you're getting word out. You're getting a first-hand view of how people are so good at compensating to accommodate that stress, and how that's not going to create the outcome that we want from a cross-sectional muscle area in that delt. And I'm not trying to say that's the end-all, be-all, and you should do manual resistance tomorrow. But I'm just saying, if we understand how most people are really good at compensating and aren't creating the adaptations and the tissues associated with those joint patterns, we're not going to get what we want. And this is my point off of looking at everything from a more holistic perspective. The end result is tension. If I can create tension, I can create adaptation. Now before that, yeah, muscular mechanical damage is more associated with myofibrofibrohypertrophy. I don't want to lie about that or mislead anyone on that. But I would argue that there's a very high probability you're not creating that outcome at a very localized area. You're creating it more central nervous system, and you're not creating this architectural change in a muscle. On the other end, there's probably a higher probability, at least with compound multijoint movements, to create architectural changes in a localized area because the intensity is lower. You can maintain that tension in that muscle group longer. You start to accrue a little bit more of that metabolic waste product associated with higher repetition or higher time and attention sets. Maybe you start to associate the density or the exercise order, and you may be able to get that outcome in the tissues. And again, coming back down to it of, okay, is this post-rehab? How are you going to build muscle in a muscle group associated with those joints that we are rehabilitating? How are we going to increase muscle mass for someone with a limited cross-sectional muscle area who wants to improve their force? How we're going to improve muscle mass in conjunction with increasing their body mass, it comes down to how do I create tension, and I need to pick the right tool for that job. Muscle tension is a goal. Metabolic stress or muscular damage is the input in which we can get that. And I'm just saying that this fool's goal of trying to say that I can engineer an outcome based off of just doing higher intensity and shorter duration may not be getting us everything that we want as much as we want it to be. And I would say you need to have at least appreciation for, there's a lot of bodybuilders out there that don't use heavy-loaded movements and create incredible muscular adaptation. I mean, that's something to really consider. So I'm going to pause there. We'll get to practical. We'll go through how to do this on a higher level. But to look through this one, I went deep on this one, so this is a really important one. And plus, as I start to think about what we really can do as a strength conditioning profession and going, okay, well, I improve speed, I improve force, I decrease the rate of injury, a lot of it might actually come from actually improving lean muscle mass and understanding how to create more cross-sectional muscle area as well as having a better muscle-to-fat mass ratio. That matters quite a bit. All right. Hope you guys are digging this, and we'll see you guys next week.