Where were we? Oh yes, we last looked at how you can best accomplish muscular tension, metabolic stress and muscular damage by giving examples of which exercises will be best suited to meet the criteria necessary. I’ll get to giving an example of a chest workout at the end of this article, and which exercises to do in order to meet all that is necessary in order to get your muscles to send a hypertrophic response signal. First, I’d like to break down all that I’ve talked about in this series in a practical manner.
Increasing metabolic damage by getting a pump is relatively easy on one hand, but building strength that matches your muscle growth is very hard on the other. In order to get the most out of your goals, if building the most muscle possible is your main concern, then your training needs to remain consistent and you need to be meeting new goals and making new gains on a semi regular basis.
This means that the majority of your efforts need to be focused on slow and incremental strength increases. For this reason alone, the prescription for performing heavy compound movements first makes the most sense. You also need to be sure you’re adequately fueled (I’m not getting into nutrition in this article because it seems to me that anyone serious about building their body will make a well-rounded plan a priority. To do otherwise is just a waste of your time) and that your rest periods are long enough to regenerate your mental and physical energy levels to their fullest capacity.
After you’ve completed the heavy basic sets through a variety of rep ranges, it’s time to build a serious pump to swell the muscle cells to their maximum capacity and to exhaust the muscle fibers as well (muscular fatigue remains a necessary component when building muscle). If you were to break these two strategies into percentages, then 75 percent of your workout should be spent creating muscular tension with the basic lifts and with some exercises that will maximize muscular tension at the point where the muscle is stretched to its fullest, and then the remaining 25 percent can be spent acquiring a skin splitting pump.
How does this look if we were to be training chest? Starting with either the flat bench or incline would be the logical first and second exercise. The dumbbell version of one of them will also be beneficial in order to get a better stretch to maximize tension. Alternating between the two each week will allow for greater variety and a resulting greater physiological response. Follow these two exercises with some heavy dips (or start with some heavy dips – keep mixing things up), and then a few sets of heavy dumbbell flies or pullovers. This means that you’ve done four completely different exercises to build a large volume of muscular tension due to the volume and variety of stimuli. At this point it’s time to do some pec deck or cable crossovers or both to build a pump that will swell your chest to the point that we all wish it would stay all the time.
This example should be used with every muscle group you train. Lots of variety, lots of volume, a variety of rep ranges as well and all finished with a great pump. This series has taught you what you need to do and why. It’s now as simple as you overhauling your program to meet your muscles needs and then applying yourself to make sure you’re giving yourself the best chance you can. Only then will you see the kind of progress that you want. Follow the guidelines I’ve set out in this series and I guarantee you bigger and stronger muscles within a month or two. This is providing you can guarantee me that you’re training as hard as you can each and every set. Until next time my friends,
Happy Lifting!
The ABC’s Of Muscle Growth Part 1
The ABC’s Of Muscle Growth Part 2
The ABC’s Of Muscle Growth Part 3
The ABC’s Of Muscle Growth Part 4
The ABC’s Of Muscle Growth Part 5
The ABC’s Of Muscle Growth Part 6
The ABC’s Of Muscle Growth Part 7
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