What’s wrong with how I train now?

If you are like most people I see in gyms who are seeking to increase muscle mass you  will have done so by attempting to increase load in a linear manner. In other words you will have put a little more weight on the bar every week, done your 3 sets of ten reps and waited for your body to grow. That's all well in good to an extent but if you have stuck with this for more than about 6 weeks you will have watched as progress slowed dramatically or even screeched to a halt. At this point your local bodybuilding guru will have told you to "switch up" your exercises and then begin again to add a little weight each week once again. This is popular bodybuilding training in a nutshell.

The only factors taken in to account by most trainees are;

1. How many sets performed per exercise. (This is usually a constant).

2. How many reps performed per set. (This changes sometimes in a random manner, or according to fatigue  

    levels).

3. The weight on the bar. (most trainees try to increase this all the time).

4. The exercises performed. (This typically changes when progress halts).

Now, lets have a look at what other factors might come in to play if trainees took the blinkers off:

5. Total volume of work.

6. Rest periods between sets.

7. The density of work. i.e. how many lifts at what % of a maximum divided by the time taken to perform the lifts including rest  

    periods.

8. The speed of the movements performed, including the amortization phase, concentric
    phase, and eccentric phase.

9. The order in which exercises are performed.

10. Frequency of training the same muscle groups / movements.

There are many others, I merely intend to show that treating load and exercise choice as the only variables in bodybuilding training is inadequate as it prevents maximal levels of hypertrophy and encourages staleness. Taking other factors in to account and training them sequentially will lead to much greater progress over time and this is the focus of Ultimate Hypertrophy Training; but first we need to answer a few questions about hypertrophy itself.

What is hypertrophy?

Hypertrophy is the growth of a cell or structure. As muscles are made up of many different structures there are several different “kinds” of hypertrophy. For the sake of simplicity I will break these down into just 2 categories: growth of contractile elements and growth of non-contractile elements.

2 main types of hypertrophy.

The key when training for hypertrophy is to understand the relationships between growth of both the contractile and non-contractile elements. Take an engine as an analogy; it will serve us well to think of the non-contractile elements as being  the fuel tank in an engine with the contractile elements being the pistons themselves. If there is insufficient fuel capacity then our “engine” will fail. If the fuel injection system is faulty then it doesn’t matter how much fuel we have available, performance will be compromised. If the pistons themselves are small and weak then the neither the amount of fuel available nor the fuel injection capacity is relevant - the engine will not produce much power.

In a muscle cell the “fuel tank” is the sacroplasm, the “pistons” are the sacromeres. Growth of the fuel tank is referred to as sacroplasmic hypertrophy, growth of the pistons is sacromeric hypertrophy.

Muscle Cell Architecture and Function.

Within the cell there are several organelles and subsystems that warrant closer inspection. Muscle fibres are known as myofibrils. Each myofibril is made up of a collection of sacromeres, the basic contractile unit of muscle tissue. Sacromeres are in turn made up of thin and thick filaments of actin and myosin, in a 2:1 ratio. Muscles contract through a ratchet mechanism in which a thin filament of  actin slides between thicker myosin filaments. You can visualise this by placing your palms one atop the other so your fingertips touch the wrist of the opposite arm. Now raise your fingers of the lower hand to push the upper hand further toward the opposite side. This happens many thousands of times over and the sum effect is the entire muscle shortening.

Myofibrils are attached to motor neurons (nerves) which in turn go to the spinal cord. In this way muscles can be activated either reflexively at the spine or consciously by the brain.

A neuron fires a tiny electrical impulse which creates a release of acetylcholine at the synapse (the junction between the neuron and the cell it activates) which causes an organelle called sacroplasmic reticulum to release calcium ions in to the sacroplasm. This increase in calcium ion concentration exposes the active sites on the actin filaments and allows cross bridges (tiny links – visualise the hooks on a sheet of velcro) to be formed between actin and myosin. With the actin and myosin now connected by the cross bridges the ratchet system described above allows the muscle to contract.