Strength & Conditioning

Developing strength and conditioning is a key goal for most athletes in order to improve their athletic performance. It's a complex, scientific study of exercise physiology, biomechanics and nutrition. For intermediate to elite athletes, even psychology becomes an important aspect in achieving personal best results, or that extra 2% that might mean the difference between success and failure. 

However, for the vast majority of people joining a gym and wanting to get fit and healthy, the focus is usually much more on developing muscle and losing body fat to achieve a more aesthetically appealing physique, whatever that means to each individual.

So, for the majority of people reading this, your goals are to probably lose body fat and put on a bit of muscle. For many, it might be just to lose weight. I like to think of this as body transformation. It's about building a solid base underneath and chipping away at the edges. Having a thinner waist, wider shoulders and a six pack is not out of the realm of possibility for anyone.

This page is devoted to building muscle, or muscular hypertrophy.

While there are many factors that affect the potential to build muscle the most fundamental principle is Progressive Overload.

In layman's terms, Progressive Overload means stressing the muscles more than you did the last time you trained. The simple explanation to muscle growth is that once they are stressed to near maximum effect they will adapt to the additional stress after training in order to be prepared for the next workout.

For pure muscular hypertrophy, the muscles will grow within a certain repetition range that can be anywhere between 6-20 repetitions. Below that number and you're aiming for power, and above will be more muscular endurance. Everyone will respond differently to different repetition ranges and even different muscle groups will respond to different ranges. Individuals will also respond differently to different reps and even psychologically will be more inclined to be more motivated to achieve X number.

The general range considered best for hypertrophy is between 8 and 12 reps.

Everyone will be different in how they would best like to increase weights and reps and tease the muscles into growing. There are also a multitude of techniques to use in order to overload the muscles.

Using a spotter to go to failure and beyond, drop sets, pyramiding, supersets, are some terms that come to mind. Then there's rest between sets, time under tension, tempo and level of intensity - do you go to failure or just to 2-3 reps in reserve. All factors to manipulate in order to complete an optimal workout for muscle growth.

One of key factors to remember is that muscles don't actually grown when your training, it's during rest between workouts that the muscles adapt and grow. Depending on how intense you workout may determine how long your muscles need to rest and recover, adapt, and be prepared for the next workout. As a novice, doing a few sets for each body part this may just be a 48 hr rest. For an experienced lifter doing much more volume and intensity this may be 2-3 days rest between working a particular muscle group.

My personally preferred workout is a combination of a PPL and Bro where I'll do PPL and then do a few more workouts targeting specific muscle groups for the rest of the week. For eg, PPL focussed on the major muscle groups like Chest, Back and Quads and just train shoulders, biceps and triceps in another three sessions.

Ultimately, building muscle is based on some basic principles and then individualising workouts to a person's specific preferences and the time they have available to train.

I want to get strong!