Firstly, welcome. Thank you so much for coming to the site and taking the time to read this post. It honestly means everything to me that you guys keep coming back and engaging and I really hope I can keep bringing you top notch content for many weeks to come!
If you tuned in to last weeks post then thank you and I hope you enjoyed it, if not then definitely go back and check it out after you've read this one. Now, without any further ado lets discuss muscle gain and how you can maximise it while in lockdown!
First things first, here are a few important terms to get your head around:
- Hypertrophy: Scientific term for muscle growth
- Load: Any external resistance placed on the muscle
- Metabolic: Anything that results from the body's energy systems creating energy
- Stress: Anything that causes the muscle/body to work beyond rest conditions
- Fibre: An individual collection of muscle proteins, muscles are made up of multiple fibres
- Cross sectional area: The 2 dimensional mathematical area of the muscle if it were cut in half
How do we grow muscle?
Lets start right at the top, how does science define muscle gain?
Hypertrophy (muscle growth) is defined as ‘An increase in the cross-sectional area of skeletal muscle, through a growth in the size of its component cells.’. We achieve hypertrophy by exposing the muscle to progressively increasing load across time causing an increase in both the muscle mass and cross-sectional area (Russell et al., 2000).
This 'progressive overload', sets of a complex pathway of biological signals in play that, through various feedback loops cause adaptations or "changes" within the muscle. The first of these changes is the mobilisation of satellite cells, which are the “framework” for new muscle to be built on, like the foundations of a house (Bruusgaard et al, 2010). The body then uses these foundations to build new structures and components of muscle, like new muscle proteins or mitochondria (power stations for the muscle).
Now, not all stress and not all training will cause this downstream of pathways and the eventual muscle gain they induce. Scientific research is quite clear that training must induce one of three main stressors in order to "activate" muscle hypertrophy, the "holy trinity of muscle gain" if you will, which are:
1) Metabolic stress: The work placed on a muscle as a result of energy producing pathways and their waste products. (de Freitas et al, 2017)
2) Mechanical tension: The amount of force placed on a muscle by some external resistance (Kruger et al, 2016)
3) Muscle damage: The resultant damage to the muscle tissue from training (Damas et al., 2018)
How do we maximise the Hold Trinity?
So it sounds like all you've got to do is work hard, create a lot of force, cause some muscle damage and building muscle should be pretty easy to do it, right?
Unfortunately not. Building muscle is not just about working hard and it's certainly not just about causing muscle damage. Think, have you ever seen a stacked long distance runner? No? Even though it is a very hard, metabolically stressful, high load, muscle damaging exercise? In reality you have got to be clever and do the right stuff in the right conditions to grow some lean tissue!
The first key for building a program that will grow muscle is time under tension. More specifically time under significant tension (TUST). What this translates to is how long your muscles are contracting and having to move/resist the force of an external load. Essentially if you do a press-up really quickly you might spend 1 second under tension. But, if you lower your chest to the ground for 3 seconds and push slowly back to the top for 3 seconds that is SIX TIMES the amount of TUST as the 1 second press-up. That means that you would need to do SIX one second press-ups to get the same muscle building response as ONE press up if you went 3s down 3s up. More time under tension means more time for the muscle to work and more metabolic waste/stress for it to deal with.
The second and equally important key is mechanical tension. This one is easy. The harder you make the exercise with weights or angles of force the more mechanical tension your muscles will be under and the higher the hypertrophy response will be. However, this works in an intricate balance with metabolic stress as to generate metabolic stress you need to do a high volume of work. If you go too high with the mechanical tension you physically can't complete enough volume to active one third of the holy trinity! Essentially, controlled, targeted load and lots of it, seems to be the winning formula.
The third component of a good muscle building program is one that induces a muscle damage. Now, while it is uncertain to what extent muscle damage is a driver for hypertrophy or simply a product of training programs that induce it, the fact remains that exercises associated with high levels of muscle damage are extremely effective at building muscle. Things such as eccentric (lengthening) contractions, high external load and high volume are all associated with increased muscle damage.
This is great, but what does an actual program look like?
As you can see above, one of the two major components of a strong muscle building program has been compromised by the recent lockdown...right? We don't have big weights or access to equipment that can allow us to expose our muscles to high enough progressively increasing mechanical tension. Wrong. Although body weight exercise is often seen as easy and light, it has two big trump cards up it's sleeve, angles and gravity.
I don't know about you, but doing a body weight chin-up, pistol squat, or press-up for 10 reps is tough, and there are some exercises that are downright brutal for 10 reps (handstand press-up). Even then, if you can easily do 10 press-ups, all it takes is elevating your feet and I guarantee it will get exponentially harder with each inch they get raised up. But why am I talking about 10 reps?
Well, simply put a 10 rep max (not being able to complete more than 10 reps of an exercise without failure) is predicted to be around 70% of your 1 rep max (the absolute maximum weight you can lift for 1 rep; 1RM). Interestingly, the NSCA (National Strength and Conditioning Association) state that the external load that is "optimal" for hypertrophy is around 65-85% 1RM. So, if we can figure out a way to get as much volume as possible with a 10 rep max then we would be completing the holy trinity of muscle gain...
This is where EDT (escalating density training) comes in to play. For EDT you pick two antagonistic (work opposite actions) exercises and try to maximise the number of reps you can complete in a given time. You get no rest, to maximise metabolic stress, you use a 10 rep max weight to keep mechanical tension high and you stick to strict tempos to exaggerate your eccentric phase. The best part about it?...It's unbelievably simple to use in lockdown. All you have to do is be clever with exercise selection. 1) Choose two antagonistic exercises (ideally compounds such as press-ups or chin-ups as they work more muscles, but isolation exercises such as bicep curls and tricep extensions work as well).
2) Choose a variation that would be a 10 rep max in a row out but no more (2 reps either side is okay, 8RM or 12RM would be fine but no more).
3) Choose a time limit that allows for a minimum of 50 reps (50 reps is a good minimum effective dose for inducing metabolic stress without compromising load).
4) Go 5 and 5 until you drop (you can self select rest to an extent but try to keep it constant and unrelenting).
5) Progressively overload it week on week (Get more reps in the time limit, increase the time limit, make the exercises more challenging/intense, increase reps to 6/7/8 per set, or a combination of all the above!)
And that's all there is to it. A breathtakingly simple and extremely effective method for maximising muscle growth that is easy and very applicable to the current climate.
Once again guys, thank you so much for tuning in an I can't wait to have you back next week where I'll be discussing how to put together a perfect full body lockdown session.
See you then!
References
1) Russell, B., Motlagh, D., & Ashley, W. W. (2000). Form follows function: how muscle shape is regulated by work.Journal of applied physiology,88(3), 1127-1132.
2) Bruusgaard, J. C., Johansen, I. B., Egner, I. M., Rana, Z. A., & Gundersen, K. (2010). Myonuclei acquired by overload exercise precede hypertrophy and are not lost on detraining.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,107(34), 15111-15116.
3) Krüger, Martina, and Sebastian Kötter. "Titin, a central mediator for hypertrophic signaling, exercise-induced mechanosignaling and skeletal muscle remodeling."Frontiers in physiology7 (2016): 76.
4) de Freitas, M. C., Gerosa-Neto, J., Zanchi, N. E., Lira, F. S., & Rossi, F. E. (2017). Role of metabolic stress for enhancing muscle adaptations: Practical applications.World journal of methodology,7(2), 46.
5) Damas, F., Libardi, C. A., & Ugrinowitsch, C. (2018). The development of skeletal muscle hypertrophy through resistance training: the role of muscle damage and muscle protein synthesis.European journal of applied physiology,118(3), 485-500.
6) Baechle, T. R., & Earle, R. W. (Eds.). (2008).Essentials of strength training and conditioning. Human kinetics.