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Cornish_Celt · #1 (**permalink**) 07-08-2010, 01:53 PM

A Training Philosophy For Solid Mass Gain
by: Kelly Baggett

Foundational Principles

1. The biggest problem in natural bodybuilding is, in my opinion, the alarming number of people that screw up perfectly good training with poor nutrition. Based on my observations, the majority of serious and semi-serious trainees leave their workouts having done enough to stimulate growth, yet big muscle mass increases typically require dedicated eating to take advantage of that stimulation. If you’re not willing to buckle down and take a hardcore attitude when it comes to your nutrition, you might as well stay the heck out of the gym.

2. The 3 S’s are key for muscle growth. These are stimulate, supply, and signal. Training “stimulates” growth, eating “supplies” material for growth, and your levels of various anabolic hormones “signal” growth to occur. Therefore, muscle mass gains are about 1/3 hormonal, 1/3 eating and 1/3 training. Combine them together and they combine for a synergistic effect. See: Keys to Muscle Growth

3. How powerful is the anabolic effect by itself? – In one study testosterone use alone was shown to stimulate up to a 17 pound increase in muscle mass over a 20 week period of time in the absence of any training. Additionally, the average male will gain around 40 pounds of natural muscle during puberty in the absence of any training just due to changes in his hormone levels. If you want to surpass those results naturally and you’re not going through puberty, you better figure out what you’re doing.

4. Partitioning refers to what happens when excess calories are consumed. Are they directed into muscle or fat stores? The worse your partitioning, the more fat you gain when you gain weight. The better your partitioning, the more muscle you gain. This is largely impacted by training and diet, yet with those things being a given, how well you "partition" is primarily determined by levels of various hormones, which is determined by genetics.

5. Maximizing Partitioning

A natural trainee can maximize environmental factors that affect his partitioning by training at the right frequency with the right type and dosage of training, eating enough food, sleeping enough, staying relatively stress free, and keeping his body composition within his “optimum muscle building window” which, generally speaking, is between the range of 10-17% body-fat for most males and 12-20% for most females. At less then about 10% body-fat, levels of various anabolic hormones such as testosterone go to crap, (unless you were born at 5% body-fat). At the other end, anymore then 17% body-fat and sensitivity to various anabolic hormones goes down the drain.

6. Nutrition

How powerful is the effect of eating? Studies have been done on overfeeding where people were fed an additional 1000 calories per day for 100 days without any training whatsoever. Of the weight they gained, even in the absence of exercise, an average of 35% was lean muscle mass.

7. Genetic Limits

"Genetic limits" really refers to how much muscle mass a person can carry at a given body-fat percentage and not how much muscle mass they can carry overall. Your “genetic natural limit” while maintaining a lean 6% body-fat might be 200 lbs. But if you train and eat your way up to a 300-pound bodyweight, sure as hell you will be carrying more then 200 pounds of muscle. This is why the biggest sumo wrestlers, who do little besides eat, on average carry more muscle mass then the biggest bodybuilders. That’s not a recommendation to go out and get as fat as an oversized water buffalo, but it is reality.

Training Principles

Growth is stimulated from a combination of tension, total work, and fatigue. As we’ll see in a minute, outside the boundaries of extremely low volume programs, progressively increasing tension at a given level of work is the primary stimulus for ongoing gains in growth. Factors related to fatigue might add around 10% to that.

1. Tension

To get maximal tension on all available muscle fibers in a given muscle requires full motor unit recruitment in that muscle. This can occur 2 ways:

A: Lifting a heavy load (80%+) so that all the muscle cells are firing from the first rep. (example: Lifting an 80% load for 5 reps)

B: Lifting a light load in a fatigued state so that your muscles “think” the load is heavy. (example: Lifting: a 50% load with short rest intervals and having the weight feel heavier then your ass after a 5 mile run.)

Anytime you put forth a maximal effort and have to really strain to move the weight, regardless of the weight on the bar, all the muscle fibers in the working muscle turn on and “tense up.” This is tension. Get a muscle fiber to “tense up” often enough in a workout and it gets damaged. Your muscles don’t know how much weight they’re lifting, they only know they’re working. It's not necessarily the weight that induces hypertrophy but what the muscles "go through" while lifting a weight.

2. What's the difference between heavy vs light loads for tension?

Having said that, there is a difference between lifting a light load in a state of fatigue that "feels" heavy, and a load that “is” heavy. The main difference between the 2 is the heavy load will induce earlier recruitment of the fast twitch fibers and more eccentric microtrauma during the lowering phase of a movement, which is the primary stimulus for growth of muscle protein myofibrills, while the lighter load lifted in a state of fatigue, often associated with more repetitions, will tend to induce more growth through increased “energy and water storage” mechanisms.

3. Making strength increases and getting stronger over time is all about increasing tension, while getting a “pump” is more about total work and fatigue. Suffice to say, the heavier weight you lift with a muscle or muscle group, the more tension you create in that muscle. Your muscles become damaged under tension and repair themselves by getting a little bigger so that they can better resist the load.

4. The "pump"

The more total work and temporary fatigue (due to lack of oxygen), you create in a muscle, (through high volume training, high rep sets, drop sets, static holds, rest-pause etc.) the bigger the “pump” you tend to get. These methods are typically associated with various “Weider” principles.

5. Total work

Total work refers to the total time a muscle is under tension and how much tension it's under over the course of an entire workout, which is basically the same thing as volume, which is sets x reps x load.

Work = Sets x Reps x Load

Simply put, think of “total work” as the total number of reps you do for a body-part per session and how much weight you lift during those reps. How important is it? Well, obviously it has some importance, otherwise all you’d need to to get big is generate a 1 second maximal effort isometric contraction a couple of times per week, which clearly isn’t the case, so we have to look at the importance of total work. There are 2 ways to increase the work:

A: Lift more weight for a given number of reps.
B: Perform more reps with a given weight.

5a. Increasing work though increasing bar weight, while keeping the number of repetitions per workout relatively constant, has shown dramatic improvements in hypertrophy, yet increasing the number of reps without intentionally ever trying to increase the load has a much larger influence on the endurance and metabolic efficiency of the muscle cell. Thus, for pure gains in solid muscle mass, gradually increasing bar weight while maintaining a certain number of reps per workout is key.

5b. How many reps is enough?

The research and real world observation seems to indicate 25-50 reps twice a week for a body-part is plenty. Any more then 50 twice per week and some people may have issues with recovery. What seems to be the most important factor is that a “minimal” amount of volume is maintained and not to intentionally seek out humongous increases in this area. At the volume most bodybuilders train with (A minimum of 4 sets of 8 reps per bodypart twice per week), the minimums are met and it’s really a non-issue.