Fundamentals of Maximising Muscle GrowtH

Fundamentals to Maximise Muscle Growth

The pursuit of muscle gain is a long held goal of almost everyone you see in the gym, it might not be at the forefront of everyone’s mind when training, but I bet at one point or another (whether for aesthetic or functional purposes) it has been a priority. It can be a long and arduous process which can lead to a lot of frustration when the results you expect don’t come along. This is especially true once you pass the “newbie gains” stage when you can pretty much look at a barbell and put on muscle.

Here I will be going through the 5 major factors I believe play a vital role in maximising muscle growth, Consistency, Technique, Intensity, Volume and Nutrition. If you are knew to training some of these concepts may be a little more in depth than you need to worry about (especially as we get to intensity and volume), but its always good to have more knowledge than you need rather than not enough.

Consistency

Let’s start with the most basic concept and the one you have probably already been told countless times. “Consistency is king”, heard that before? You probably have and for good reason, because it’s true. None of the fancy concepts you here about progressive overload, fatigue management, optimal technique, etc matter if you only train a couple times a week every other month. If you want to grow some serious muscle, a serious amount of time and consistency is required. If you can’t train at least 3 times per week consistently for months/years at a time then you will never get the results you want. There is a reason only a small percentage of the population have what would be considered “good” physiques, it takes a hell of a lot of time and patience.

Luckily, once you have an understanding of this you will find that the majority of your results will come if you simply stay consistent and keep rocking up to train every week, in simple terms, dial in your nutrition, resistance train at least 3 times per week and you will get 80% of the results you want. I’ve found in my experience what separates people who get results and don’t is simply wo sticks it out longer, the people who adjust and keep the training ball rolling when life gets hectic, as opposed to stopping for months at a time when things get tough. This is called the “low hanging fruit” of results, basically meaning the simple stuff is what gets you the most reward.

Now, if you want to get into that extra 20% that takes your results from good to great, keep on reading.

Technique

Everything you ever read regarding the best ways to build solid muscle in the gym is predicated on the idea that you have a good technique. So first let’s mention what defines “good”, without bringing in any major individual limitations, good technique basically means taking exercises through their full range of motion. If you can’t perform an exercise through its full ROM then you should be focusing on addressing the underlying issues preventing you from doing so.

So let’s assume your technique is solid, now we need to ensure that you are maintaining this technique throughout all of your repetitions, a common example of this not happening is the guy in the gym who starts his bench press with full reps (touching the chest) and then as things get hard stopping the reps half way down just to grind out those few extra reps. Now did he actually get any more muscle activation doing those couple of extra reps at half his possible range of motion? I would argue no. He did however increase his chance of injury and promote an unnatural movement pattern, so there’s that.

Technique can also show us what muscles we need to pay more attention to, when looking to grow muscle we can often just fall into the habit of trying to hit the muscles we think look small compared to others, which can be very subjective and not always ideal for deciding where we want to focus. Struggling to get past parallel in the squat? We may need to focus more attention to the glutes, struggling to lock out a bench press? We may need more direct triceps work. While muscle growth often relates to aesthetic/physique goals it can also come in to play for increasing strength, so looking for how your technique breaks down can help us find what muscles we should focus on.

Intensity

When I say train with intensity, I don’t mean absolutely wreck yourself and train until you want to die every session. Training intensity refers to how close to failure you are on any given set, failure being the point where you could not perform another rep of any given exercise (while maintaining proper technique).

We know that as a rough guide the lower rep ranges 1-5 are more appropriate for strength adaptations, while higher rep ranges 6-15 are more appropriate for hypertrophy (gains). For reference, studies have shown muscle growth happens in all rep ranges 1-30reps, however for a practical sense, it is best to spend most of your time in the 6-15 range. Strength and Hypertrophy have a synergistic relationship however so it is advisable to occasionally dip your toe in the strength ranges. Think, ‘a stronger muscles has the potential to be a bigger muscle, and vice versa’.

Now that we have covered rep ranges lets talk proximity to failure, the perfect rep range doesn’t matter if you aren’t close to failure. Studies show the best results being found within 0-4 reps shy of failure. From personal experience with both myself and clients 1-2 RIR (reps in reserve) is the sweet spot for most people and as a general rule the higher in reps the set is, the closer you should go to failure. The opposite applies to heavier sets (I wouldn’t want to fail on a 3-rep set of squats anyway). I’ve also found it best for newer lifters to push closer to failure mainly because they don’t really know how to gauge how many reps they have left simply due to lack of exposure to lifting.  

Volume

Now that we know how hard we should be pushing ourselves during a training session, we can look at how much work we do per session. Volume basically refers to how much work we are doing per workout, it can be measured by reps x sets x load, but this can get messy, so I like to measure volume by total working sets. Total sets can be measured on a per session, per week and per muscle group basis.

Let us take a look at volume per muscle group first, studies have shown that about 10-20 sets per muscle group per week is a sweet spot for stimulating growth, with a trend towards higher volume being more optimal. It is possible to see results on much higher volume than this, however for a practical sense much more than 25 sets a week on one muscle group either results in too much fatigue if not managed correctly or other muscle groups being neglected. In regard to sets per muscle group per session, 8-12 sets seem to be the most optimal range. This will be enough volume to elicit growth but does not cross over into the “junk volume” range.

How you spread this volume out over the week depends on your training split, but it is favourable to split volume per muscle group into 2x sessions per week for the best results. For example, if we want to have 18 sets of chest over the week it would be favourable to split this over two sessions. So session 1 could have 10 sets and session 2 later in the week could have 8.

So, how do we spread our total working sets for all our muscles over the course of a training week, or even a single session? It would be great if we could just do 12 sets per muscle per session and spend 2 hours in the gym, but practically that is not possible. Plus, we need to give consideration to fatigue. This is where following a proper thought-out program has its benefits as the amount of sets our body can handle over the course of a session/week depends on a variety of factors including time you have to dedicate to training, exercise selection (a set deadlifts is more fatiguing than a set of bicep curls), proximity to 1 rep max (heavier, low rep sets are more fatiguing than high rep “lighter” sets) and individual fatigue management. Following a thought out, personalised program should consider all these factors and give you an optimal volume to hit every week.

To leave you with a takeaway for deciding on your own volume, start with anywhere between 20-35 sets per session, if you are having a heavy session I would lean towards the lower end of volume, whereas if you are having a higher rep session you could lean towards the higher end. So for example if I was to be hitting a heavy leg day (compound movements between 6-10 reps) I would be wise to stick to the lower end of that range (20 sets). However, if I was hitting a push day (chest, shoulders, triceps) and doing mostly accessory movements I could easily handle upwards of 30 reps.

Nutrition

And finally we arrive at what you should be doing outside of the gym to maximize muscle gain, in term of nutrition your main two focus points will be calories and protein, let’s start with protein.

Protein intake plays a vital role in producing muscle mass, so we want to make sure we are consuming enough to provide our muscles with enough to elicit a greater level of muscle protein synthesis. This, combined with an appropriate level of resistance training will create the ideal environment for our muscles to grow.

So how much protein do we need to consume? I like to use a grams of protein per kilogram of body weight as a guide. From research that has been conducted it appears that 1.6-2g/kg is an ideal range for most people to aim for. So an 80kg male would want to aim for roughly 128-160g of protein per day. From personal experience I find it best to aim for the higher end of this range as this ensures you are definitely getting ‘enough’, while there has not been any research suggesting downsides from eating too much protein (in realistic terms). So I see it as a ‘there are possible benefits and no downsides so may as well’ situation.

Here are a few practical tips when it comes to protein consumption:

It makes sense to aim for the higher end so that on days you don’t hit your protein target you are already over your minimum requirements.

Overall protein consumption matters more than protein timing throughout the day, but optimally you want to aim for about 30g per meal.

I wouldn’t stress to much about protein quality, if you are getting protein from a variety of sources then you should be fine. Don’t fall for the marketing of certain supplements saying that they are worth the extra $$$ because of “protein quality”.

Now lets look at calories, the first thing we want to ensure is that we are in a calorie surplus, this will create the best environment to promote muscle growth going forward. Muscle growth is technically possible while in a deficit (easier if you are new to training or coming back from a lay off) but it is much slower and not ideal. You don’t want to fall into the trap of trying to build muscle and lose fat at the same time while actually not achieving either, pick one goal and do it well.

So how much of a surplus do we need? Our main priority should be finding a range where we maximise muscle growth and mitigate fat gain. Now the ins and outs of calorie expenditure can get quite complicated so for most people a trial-and-error approach is needed as it is impossible to accurately find an exact calorie target for any one person. If you already know your rough maintenance calories then add 10-25% onto that and simply see what happens. The best way to do this would be to regularly track your body composition (weight and measurements) and adjust accordingly to mitigate fat gain.

I would take a conservative approach to begin with and slowly add calories over time as your body adjusts. Muscle gain is a slow process so a slow increase in weight over time is optimal, if it begins to climb to quickly or stops completely it is best to review calories and make adjustments every two weeks.

Summing up

Now that you have a good understanding of the principles of growing muscle you should remember that there is no best approach, everyone can take these fundamentals and apply them in different ways. As you may have noticed a lot of the science trends towards optimal ranges and not exact numbers, which is beneficial as it means it is almost impossible to do it “wrong”. My advice, take what you have learned here and apply it to your own training, make adjustments as necessary and strap in for the long haul.