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Muscle growth is a two part process. First, the muscle is damaged during heavy use, this effect is called micro-trauma. Second, the body repairs the tissue, and like any good repairman throws on a little extra “for luck” in the hopes that it won’t have to do this again. In order to create further growth you must increase the stimulus, which can be measured by the power output.

Power = Work / Time

Work = Force * Distance

Force = Mass * Acceleration

So putting it all together:

Power = (Mass * Acceleration * Distance) / Time

So why did we get all fancy about that? In order to talk about progression in lifting weights it’s necessary to understand what progression means. If today you lift 4×8x215 (four sets of eight reps of two hundred fifteen pounds) and tomorrow you do 5×5x220 did you progress? If you’re thinking simplistically, then the obvious answer seems to be yes, after all there was more weight on the bar right? If the distance stays the same, which it often does for the same lift, and you don’t vary the acceleration or time (which is far less guaranteed, in fact heavier lifts often end up slower with longer breaks) then on a mass basis alone, you’re still putting out 21% less power with the second scheme.

With hypertrophy training, the total power exerted by the muscles is what determines the amount of damage they take, and thus how much repair work (growth) they’re going to do. Generally the easiest way to progress is to add weight to the bar, but your other choices include lifting faster, taking shorter rest breaks, increasing the overall distance of the lift (such as doing full squats rather than just to parallel), and changing the set/rep parameters to produce higher overall loading. For me, I like to change as few variables as possible, so I focus on the weight almost exclusively. For many lifters this is difficult, as they can’t progress by 5lbs every session, but this is actually fairly easily solved by using fractional plates. The standard smallest plates are 2.5lbs each (adding up to 5lbs if you have one on each side), but if you go to Piedmont Design Associates they have a selection of sub 2.5lb plates like these:

This particular set contains everything from 1/16th through 1lb plates, and I’ve found it enormously helpful. If you don’t have access to quality hardware like this though you can achieve similar results by adding reps and sets. So the first week you might do 4×8x215, then 5×8x215, then 6×8x215, at which point you’re probably ready for 220. Another way of doing that would be to start with 4×8x215, then 4×9x215, then 4×10x215, then you’re probably ready for 220. As you can see, that’s all quite a bit more complex than just going 4×8x215, 4×8x217, 4×8x218.5, then being ready for 220.

So now that we know a little bit about muscle growth and progression, I’m going to give you a cardinal rule:

You only grow when you’re recovering, never while you’re in the gym.

This is a pretty important concept, basically what it’s saying is that you need to remember that gym time is damage, it’s only when your body is repairing itself that you’re going to make progress. Too much gym time, too much damage, can actually exceed your bodies ability to effect repairs and cause you to experience less progress for more work.

So how much exercise is optimum? The exact answer depends on a large number of variables including things like your nutritional strategy, genetic makeup, lifestyle choices, training age, recovery methods and many other factors. In general, your exercise density as expressed by number of separate exercises per week is going to be best between 15-25 total exercises. More is better until you overdo it, so you’ll want to be conservative, start at the lower end, and slowly work your way up.

Here’s a second rule for you:

The more often you train a muscle, the faster it will grow, assuming adequate recovery.

While recovery time varies a bit between different muscle groups, they tend to be ready for more training somewhere between 24-48 hours after the first session. Waiting longer than a week between training sessions generally doesn’t produce much in the way of results. So essentially we want to train them as often as possible without exhausting ourselves, with the time between varying between 2-7 days.

Your exact plan is going to depend on where you can free up time during your daily and weekly schedules. One consideration, is that a workout session of longer than 90 minutes (actual time lifting weights, driving, warmup, showers, etc. don’t count) tends to be counterproductive as your cortisol levels will start to spike. Cortisol is a catabolic (muscle wasting) stress hormone, and we want to avoid creating large amounts of it, since that would tend to cancel out all our hard work. Doing too many exercises in one session is also a problem, as your energy levels will be so depleted by the time you reach the end that you won’t be putting out anywhere near full effort. Generally I wouldn’t do more than six exercises per session, and even that is quite a few, I prefer a schedule with less.

One common strategy is the Monday-Wednesday-Friday workout, six exercises per session. This results in a weekly density of eighteen exercises, well within tolerance, and an average workout length of about an hour and fifteen minutes, which while long is doable. Given the twelve exercises we talked about last week, you’d divide them into to two halves, and workout on an A/B schedule:

A Day - Squats, Pullups, Military Press, Dips, Decline Weighted Situps, Supported Forearm Roller

B Day - Stiff Legged Deadlifts, Calf Raises, Bench Press, Cable Row, Trap Bar Shrugs, Barbell Curls

There are three main problems with that schedule. First, since it’s tied to specific weekdays, how do you compensate when you miss a day? Second, those workouts are going to be pretty draining energy wise. Third, with so many off days, it may be difficult to maintain motivation, personally I do much better when something is shorter, easier, and more frequent. I prefer to use “cycles” rather than days. Basically you string together a series of workout days and recovery days, and just keep repeating that. The advantage is that you’re not tied to a seven day period, and if you miss a day, you just pick right back where you left off in the cycle. Here’s what I’m currently using to good effect:

Day 1 - Pullups, Military Press, Dips, Decline Weighted Situps

Day 2 - Bench Press, Cable Row, Trap Bar Shrugs, Barbell Curls

Day 3 - Squat, Calf Raises, Stiff Legged Deadlifts, Supported Forearm Roller

Day 4 - Off Day

Then I repeat days 1-3, take two off days, and start over. This produces an exercise density of 18.67 exercises per week, with an average workout time of 45 minutes. Even though it’s a nine day schedule, this has proved to be very easy to stick with. By monitoring your progress and fatigue levels you can decide when to raise your density, or when you could use some extra off days.

Some common signs of overdoing it are small injuries, excessive tiredness outside of your workouts, and muscle soreness persisting longer than normal. If you start experiencing any of that, it’s best to back off a little bit, your progress will be a lot better in the long run than if you push yourself too hard. As an example, I had been doing a four on one off schedule which worked great, but wasn’t maxing out my potential. I switched to three on one off, and that proved to be a bit too much. Now I’m doing 3 on 1 off, 3 on 2 off, and it’s working well. Progress is up, fatigue is under control.

Feel free to mix and match your own schedule, one that fits your lifestyle. As long as the overall density and workout length are kept within bounds, there are many configurations that can work successfully.

Exercise selection will be strongly influenced by your goals. A powerlifter does a very different workout than someone training for mixed martial arts, and neither of those is the same as the workout for a bodybuilder. Why are they so different? The specificity of training principal I mentioned earlier, that is different sorts of training produce different adaptations. Since our goal is retention of lean mass during a calorie deficit, we need to focus on engaging as much muscle mass as possible as that lets the body know it’s not ok to get rid of it.

With that in mind our first job is how to break down our training requirements. There are three main methods that I know of:

1) The traditional five part method: Chest, Back, Arms, Legs, Shoulders

2) The muscle method: Quads, Hamstrings, Calves, Abs, Obliques, Pecs, Lats, Rhomboids, Spinal Erectors, Deltoids, Traps, Biceps, Triceps, Forearms, Glutes

3) The movement pattern method: Vertical Press, Vertical Pull, Horizontal Press, Horizontal Pull, Quad Dominant Legs, Hip Dominant Legs, Trunk Flexion

Those are pretty much in order from worst to best. Breakdown by movement patterns is pretty much the accepted method nowadays, though there is some hybridization with method #2. The reason for this is that it tends to promote better overall growth, and prevent muscle imbalances that would cause injury or lack of progress. Method #1, while still used by many, is considered to be antiquated and not very effective.

So for method #3, we’ll want to select an exercise that corresponds to each movement pattern. Some exercises are better than others though, here’s some simple rules on how to decide:

1) Heavier is almost always better since it will produce a bigger response

2) Free weights are better than cables which are better than machines. More instability produces a wider effect as your stabilizer muscles kick in. Don’t take this to extremes though, instability which too seriously degrades the amount you can lift is generally counter-productive, lifting weights on a bosu ball for example.

3) Compound movements that involve multiple joints are better than single joint movements where that is possible. Again, this is because they involve more muscle mass acting at one time.

Why do we care about how much muscle we involve at one time? Two reasons, first it’s more time efficient, I don’t know about you but I have things in life to do besides hang out in the gym all day, and second the larger the muscle mass involved, the more growth hormones are released, and the better your progress.

So with all that in mind, here are some good choices:

Vertical Press: Military Press
Vertical Pull: Pullups
Horizontal Press: Bench Press
Horizontal Pull: Cable Row
Quad Dominant Legs: ATG Squat
Hip Dominant Legs: Stiff Legged Deadlift
Trunk Flexion: Incline Weighted Situps

That’s a pretty good selection, but we missed a few areas: Traps, Calves, Forearms, Biceps, Triceps.

Traps: Trap Bar Shrugs
Calves: Calf Raise
Forearms: Supported Wrist Roller
Biceps: Barbell Curls
Triceps: Dips

When you put all that together we’ve got the beginning of a good program. We’re going to want to pick a set and rep scheme for each exercise that places us in the hypertrophy zone. 4×8 is a great choice as it gives a nice mix of sarcomere and sarcoplasm growth, 5×5 is also very good, it was made popular by early bodybuilding star Reg Park who built a very nice physique using that scheme. In the next article we’ll talk about fatigue and how to organize your lifting schedule.