Yesterday I mentioned the big secret to fast muscle growth: achieving the right stimulation-trauma balance consistently.
Your goal is to train a muscle again right after damage has been repaired and supercompensation (growth) has occurred. If you train too soon or too long after, you won’t grow much if at all.
But if you hit that supercompensation sweet spot more often than not, you will “grow like crazy.”
The problem? It ain’t easy because it’s a moving target. Everything from diet, to sleep, to stress, to your training volume and intensity affects it on a workout-to-workout basis.
Even worse, you could shrink if you continue to compound damage—to the muscles and the nervous system—without total repair. I’ve been there. It’s deflating—literally and figuratively.
I want to go over a few tips to help you achieve the stimulation-trauma balance more often. The first is to understand what causes damage…
1) Too many sets to failure—high-rep and low-rep sets both cause damage in different ways.
2) Too much volume—with each additional set, there is diminishing returns.
3) Too much heavy negative, or eccentric, emphasis.
4) Too much muscle-stretch work.
There’s no doubt that you need both low reps and high reps to grow—rep-range variation. But you don’t need a lot of either…
It’s debatable whether high-rep sets or low-rep sets do the most damage. It could be that high-rep sets do more muscle damage due to calcium-ion-fatigue mechanisms, while low-rep sets create more nervous system trauma, which is cumulative over many sets…
So my first tip for natural bodybuilders is to use only one high-rep set per muscle per workout—18 to 25. The rest should be 8 to 12 reps.
As outlined in Old Man, Young Muscle, do your high-rep set first to exhaust the slow-twitch fibers. Using only a short rest after will force lower reps on your second set, even if you use the same weight, and you’ll activate more fast-twitch fibers.
That second set will also be less damaging because the negative, or eccentric, phase of each rep will be lighter.
If you take a longer rest, like 1 1/2 to 2 minutes, you’ll need to pile on more weight to stay in the 8-to-12-rep zone, and that means heavier, more damaging negatives on each rep, as well as more nervous system stress.
So how many of those 8-to-12-rep sets do you need? That’s tomorrow’s subject.
Sculpt your perfect physique: Get the ideal exercise for each muscle, the best stretch and contracted add-on moves for ultimate mass, complete 35-minute workouts, exercise start/finish photos, and details on building muscle fast and efficiently in Old Man, Young Muscle.
And you still get The Muscle-On, Belly-Gone “Diet” ebook FREE for a limited time when you add Old Man, Young Muscle to your mass-building library. Go HERE.
Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
—Steve Holman
Former Editor in Chief, Iron Man Magazine
www.X-Rep.com
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