No Fail Muscle Building How It Works Part 2

No Fail Muscle Building How It Works Part 2

Your New Best Friends

Let me now take the time to introduce you to your 2 new best friends: "Overload" and "Progression". Your entire strength training program should be centered around these two all-important factors. "Overload" refers to providing your muscles with a workload that is beyond their present capacity. By training to failure you are 'overloading' your muscles and effectively stimulating new growth. "Progression" is pretty self-explanatory.

It refers to making steady increases in weight and/or reps in each training session. For example, you squat 200 pounds for 10 reps in one workout. Next week you increase the weight to 210 pounds for 10 reps. This is progression, and must be the center focus of your entire training program. Why is progression important? Well, it all comes back to the whole "adaptation to the environment" spiel I gave earlier. Maybe this will help explain it:

Envision What You Are Doing

Envision a building. An earthquake hits, and the building is destroyed. Workers rush to the scene to repair the damage, only this time they decide to make it bigger and stronger incase another earthquake hits. Surprisingly enough, another earthquake hits! Only this earthquake is slightly larger than the last one.

Sure enough the building is destroyed, and the workers come back to repair it. However this time they make the building even larger and even stronger in the event that another earthquake should hit.

Understand? As your weight/reps increase your body is forced to adapt to the larger workloads. If you never progressed in weight or reps the body would have no reason to grow larger and would have no incentive to adapt. Progression is such an important part of gaining muscular size. This is why I recommend keeping a training log and making records of each workout. Nothing complicated, just some simple notes which will let you know your current weight/rep records.

In each workout you should strive to make improvements in every lift. What kind of improvements? The ability to increase by a single repetition each week would be more than sufficient. Even a half rep would be great, as long as you are improving every week and forcing your body to adapt to greater and greater workloads.

Your Worst Enemy

Okay, so I've introduced you to your two best friends. Now it's time for you to meet your worst enemy: Overtraining. This nasty, ugly term refers to training the body beyond it's natural recovery abilities, i.e. training too often, training for too long in each session, or using too-high training volume. I've seen people on the message boards say that overtraining doesn't exist and that it was a term made by the lazy in order to avoid work. This is ridiculous and just plain wrong. Yes, some people are able to get away with more frequent/higher volume training, but for the majority of us, this will bring us farther from our goals rather than closer to them.

You see, usually in life the more we put in, the better results we receive. In bodybuilding however, this is not the case. More is certainly not better. Most people just don't realize how stressful strength training really is to the body and underestimate how much recovery time they really require. Not only in terms of training volume, but also in the way of training frequency. You do NOT need to train 5 and 6 days a week in order to gain muscular size. You would be a fool to do this. Any more than 4 training sessions per week and you're setting yourself up to overtrain. In my opinion, three training sessions per week is ideal, but if you insist on training more often, then 4 sessions should be just fine.

Another Enemy

As far as each individual muscle is concerned, it only needs to be directly hit once per week. Any more and you are not allowing adequate recovery time. Ideally, each workout should last no more than 45 minutes. Why 45? It's because of another bodybuilder's enemy, "Cortisol". Cortisol is a powerful catabolic hormone which is released after about 45 minutes of intense exercise. Cortisol stimulates the break down of muscle tissue for energy. I'm not going to get all scientific on you here, so we'll leave it at that. Now I personally require more rest in between my sets, so my workouts usually last about 1 hour. Anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour is the ideal time frame to complete your workout.

That covers training frequency and time, but what about the actual volume of each workout? Keep in mind that this is an opinion article. I'm sharing with you my personal viewpoints on muscle growth. These are, in MY opinion the ideal number of sets for each bodypart:

Back: 6-9
Chest: 4-6
Abs: 3-4
Shoulders: 3-4
Biceps: 2-4
Triceps: 2-4
Forearms: 1-2
Thighs: 5-6
Calves: 3-4

I've messed around with many different combinations, and these are in my opinion the ideal numbers. Many people will look at that and say the volume is too low. Trust me, if you are training with 100% intensity, that is more than enough! Any more than that and you are simply eating into your recovery time. The idea is to stimulate or "spark" muscle growth, and then get the hell out of the gym and grow. This can be accomplished without the use of endless sets.

Now we must establish a rep range. Remember, the idea is to create muscular overload, not muscular fatigue. For all upper body movements I believe that an ideal rep range is to reach failure anywhere from 4-7 reps. Abs and forearms should be trained using 6-10 reps. The lower body is a bit different and seems to respond well to almost any rep range. Experiment and see what works for you. Some may advocate the use of 4-6 reps, some may say 8-10, others will say 12-15. I personally stick with a rep range of 8-10 for thighs, and 8-12 for calves. So here it is:

Back: 4-7
Chest: 4-7
Abs: 6-10
Shoulders: 4-7
Biceps: 4-7
Triceps: 4-7
Forearms: 6-10
Thighs: Anything under 15 reps
Calves: 8-12

This brings us to the all-important factor of exercise selection. If you want the most bang for your buck and are looking to receive the most dramatic results possible from your training, then you must focus your attention on basic compound movements. Stop wasting your time slaving away on dumbbell flyes and tricep kickbacks.