How to Grow Your Muscles
Evidence-based notes on reps, sets, and load to get big
Hey everyone,
This week I ran into an excellent video on muscle building.
In the video, professional powerlifter and scientist Layne Norton, Ph.D., breaks down some of the evidence surrounding reps, sets, volume, load, and more to maximize muscle growth.
Here are some of my main takeaways. Enjoy!
Actionable Insights
Hard sets are sets you take within a few reps of failure and will give you the best chance of muscle growth
You probably shouldn't always go right to failure, but it can be useful for helping you find failure (especially if you're a beginner)
Instead of trying to grow all your muscles at once, do volume cycling: take blocks of time to focus on one body part’s growth, while maintaining the other muscles
Do 6-12 hard sets per workout, somewhere in the 5-30 rep range
You could split this into two main exercises for a body part, with 3-6 hard sets, with 5-30 reps each set
I usually rest anywhere from 1-2 minutes between sets
Do this workout 2-3 times per week
Amazingly, it takes minimal stimulation to maintain muscles you're not trying to grow (provided you still do a few hard sets and eat enough protein)
Date of the video: July 6, 2022
A Few Definitions
Hypertrophy: increase in muscle size
Progressive overload: gradually increasing weight, sets, or reps, which basically allows your muculoskeltal system to get stronger and adapt
Volume vs. Hard Sets
Volume = weight x reps x sets
One problem with volume to judge progressive overload is that there’s junk volume: sets with lots of volume that aren’t challenging to the muscle.
Example
Volume matters, but it needs to be of sufficient intensity
Take the following examples, doing barbell squats:
There will be greater adaptation in muscle hypertrophy and strength in the second example (right) because the muscles are challenged
Volume Redefined
A better way of framing volume is the number of hard sets
Hard set: a set taken in close proximity to failure
Failure: you can’t complete another repetition on that exercise without significantly breaking form
Don’t Need Absolute Failure
You don’t need to go to full muscle failure for every set, because:
It’s incredibly fatiguing
It doesn’t appear to be necessary to maximize hypertrophy
If you train within 1-3 reps of failure, you get basically the same hypertrophy outcomes
You also have lower risk of systemic fatigue and injury risk
Note: beginners are horrible at estimating how close they are to failure
Anyone who does any compound lifting (ie squats), know that getting within 2-3 reps is very difficult
You could train to absolute failure as a good teacher for the above
How Many Hard Sets per Workout Per Week?
There is some debate, but for hypertrophy, we know a few things, generally:
Multiple sets are better than single sets
Muscle protein synthesis caps out at 10 sets per body part per workout
6-8 sets (per body part per workout) gets close to maximizing hypertrophy effect; 8-12 could be slightly better, but it largely depends on rest (ie more rest, less sets per body part per workout because you can use more weight and reps, leading to less fatigue and more focus and better form
Limited on Time?
Superset opposing body parts (ie chest/back, bis/tris)
Fatigue won’t overlap generally
Weekly Sets
Pretty unclear, but 2x a week per body part is better than one time
A more practical way is to distribute volume throughout the week
Synthetic response to exercise is about 24-72 hours long
There’s 4-6 days of muscle being unstimulated if you only train once a week
Practical Limitations
It will be time consuming and difficult to do high volume with everything at once, and you might be more likely for injury
Do volume cycling: instead of trying to grow everything at once, take blocks of time to focus on one body part’s growth, while maintaining the other muscles
Example: lets say you want to grow your legs, so you do 30 sets a week for quads and hamstrings
You distribute this across 3 days in a week
For the other body parts, maintain the muscle
For maintenance, rearch shows that you can maintain muscle by barely doing anything, relative to the last week
If you keep intensity high in your sets, you can reduce volume by 1/3 to 1/9 and not loose mass or strength
Dr. Norton recommends doing 1/5 of previous volume: if you’ve been doing 15 sets a week, drop this down to 3 sets, close to failure
This ives you time to focus on the muscles you’re trying to grow
Legs example: do this program for 12-20 weeks for legs, then put quads and hamstrings on maintenance (if you were doing 30 sets a week, now go to 6 sets) and increase volume for back and chest or whatever muscles you want to do