In this current day and age you will find countless of articles on fitness sites and videos on YouTube about the optimal way to train for muscle growth.
“What is the absolutely best way to train in order to optimize muscle growth and to sculpt the perfect physique?”, this is the question so many people ask themselves when they get excited about their fitness journey and it’s the state of mind they transition into as they go along building their physique.
I have fallen a victim to this mindset as well, which led to unrealistic training demands for my lifestyle and recovery abilities during certain times. We are fed to believe that more is always better, and while that may be true in some cases, it doesn’t apply to everything in life and especially not to training.
In the past couple of years, the research on fitness and particularly muscle growth has blown up. We have clear rules when it comes to the 3 most important factors of training for hypertrophy, which are volume, intensity and frequency.
The research has shown that in order to maximize muscle growth, lifters should aim to perform 10 – 20 hard sets near failure per week and divide that over a minimum of 2x per week training frequency.
It’s easy to get carried away and aim for the higher end of the volume spectrum because more sets equals more muscle growth, right? So this means that I should adopt a high volume bodybuilding routine and go to the gym six days per week, right? Wrong!
You have to set realistic expectations for your lifestyle and current training level. If you have a job, a family, an active social life and other obligations that you have to live up to, it’s sometimes hard to drag yourself to the gym every day and while it can be done, it’s better to opt for a training routine that is realistic to follow.
The amount of hard sets you need per week is highly over estimated by a lot of people. I often see total beginners making the mistake of following high volume routines, smashing set after set… while not even being able to bench press their own body weight.
What happens is that these people spend their lives away in the gym for a certain amount of time that causes them to dread the gym since it has become a second job. As well do they burn themselves out by performing way too many sets, that they can’t properly recover from their grueling training.
I’ve seen this happen so many times over the past 2 decades of my training career that it becomes predictable what will happen. “What will happen, you ask?”, you’ll get sick and tired of the gym and will quit training altogether.
THE TRUTH ABOUT FITNESS AND STAYING IN AMAZING SHAPE FOREVER
Getting in amazing shape is one thing. Staying in amazing shape is a lifelong commitment.
You might feel intimidated when hearing this, but don’t get beaten down, as it’s actually pretty simple to get and stay in shape for the rest of the time you spend on this earth. All it takes is the right knowledge and the right mindset and taking the appropriate action!
Listen carefully as this is very important. Fitness is a game of diminishing returns. You read that right. About 65% of all the gains you stimulate for a certain muscle group during a training session will come from your first hard working set. If you perform 3 hard working sets near failure in a good rep range for hypertrophy, you will have stimulated about 85% of the maximum amount of muscle growth you can trigger.
This means that with each following set, you will trigger less and less muscle growth. Believe me, when I say that for many people who simply want to build an amazing looking body, a body like Brad Pitt in troy for example, you can easily get away with performing 9 to 12 sets per muscle group per week.
Beginners should stick to about 9 sets per week. Intermediate lifters can bump it up to 12 sets. Advanced lifters will sometimes bump it up to 15 sets per week for certain muscle groups which are going through specialization phases, while maintaining and slowly build muscle mass in non-specialized areas with the minimum effective volume required for growth.
A total beginner who has not build any muscle whatsoever doesn’t need to do more than 9 sets per week as any stimulation is going to trigger growth. There’s no point in performing 18 sets per muscle group per week as he does not need it to grow his muscles, he hasn’t built up any work capacity and he will simply not recover from the excessive junk volume since he’s a toddler who can’t walk, yet he’s trying to run a marathon.
You are not training to become a pro bodybuilder on a quest to win a Mister Olympia contest. Your training should be accustomed to your lifestyle. The goal of the ‘average Joe’ like you and me is to simply look athletic, like a modern day Greek warrior. Not a juiced up, unnaturally big bodybuilder.
When I was at my biggest and strongest, I only trained with 9 – 12 sets per muscle group per week and trained in the gym 3 days per week with a full body workout, centered around a couple of key movements and supplemented with a couple of accessory movements. I stimulated my muscles instead of annihilating them, ate properly and allowed them to recover, so that they would become bigger and stronger to lift heavier weights the next session or perform more reps with the same weight.
More is not necessarily better, because gaining muscle and strength is a long term process. If you lift and eat properly during your first 6 to 12 months, you will see drastic changes and you will experience most of your physique transformation. After that initial period of noobie gains where your hypertrophy skyrockets, things will go way slower.
Adopt a training approach that allows you to be able to show up to the gym a couple of times per week (3 times is perfect), that allows you to perform a certain amount of volume that will trigger a significant amount of muscle and that keeps your stimulation to fatigue ratio under control (9 – 12 sets per muscle group per week).
Focus your training around the bench press, weighted chin up, squat, overhead press and supplement these lifts with a couple of accessory movements such as Romanian deadlifts, upper back rows, direct arm work and calf work and I promise you, that if you are consistent and eat in a slight calorie surplus, you will be amazed and pleased with the results. You will have become bigger and stronger and a totally different person. More athletic, more masculine, more attractive.
The beauty of it all? It’s harder to build muscle than it is to maintain it. Once you’ve built the physique of your dreams, you can get away with performing only 1/3rd of the volume you used to build it up with. This means you can shorten your workouts, or you can only train every couple of days, like I did when I was in a maintenance phase.
CONCLUSION
Fitness is a long term game. It takes time to build an amazing physique and it requires lifelong efforts in the gym to maintain it, although maintaining is easier and requires less work than building it.
The message is that I want you to be in amazing shape for the rest of your life and want you to stay in the game for the long haul. It’s for this very reason that I advise you to adopt a manageable training approach when it comes to time spent in the gym.
The person who does manageable consistent efforts over a lifetime will achieve much better results than the person who goes balls to the wall for only 6 months.
Kevin Mahjoubi