Training: 5 Steps to Muscle Growth

Step 1
Select exercises that work with your structure. 

This means no square pegs in round holes eg if your back squat resembles that of a powerlifter, low bar, with a high degree of forward lean, it’s not gonna be great for quad development. A lunge variation, leg press or hack squat machine will provide you with better results. No specific lift is essential for growth, it’s more important to select appropriate exercises for your body and one’s you can execute effectively for muscle growth.

Step 2
Build excellent technique with those exercises.

If you’re looking to build muscle, just moving the weight from A to B isn’t gonna cut it. Remember, you’re not training for maximal strength, you’re not trying to move as much weight in as efficient a way as possible. You need to be able to effectively load the muscle tissue while creating maximal mechanical tension as this is the primary driver of muscle growth. You should be able to control every portion of the lift from start to finish and avoid using momentum and the stretch reflex to move the weight. Ingrain this early and it’ll save you a lot of time and frustration further down the road.

Step 3
Progressively overload over time.

At this point you should have an arsenal of core lifts that suit your structure and that you can execute in an effective way to promote muscle growth. Now your focus can start shifting to high effort sets and trying to get stronger in appropriate rep ranges. You’ve got 2 simple goals here, hit the ceiling of your rep range, increase the weight a bit, then get working on hitting that ceiling again and so on. Just remember, never sacrifice your technique for extra weight, your warm up sets and your working sets should look exactly the same.

Step 4
Use minimum amount of volume that still creates the desired effect.

You wanna be all Goldilocks here, not too little, not too much, just the right amount at the right time. Too little and you won’t be providing enough stimulus to grow, too much and fatigue goes beyond your ability to recover. Just the right amount and you’ll be growing and recovering at a sustainable rate. There’s no one size fits all, start with the lowest amount of volume for a while (this could be just 1 working set per exercise to start), if this causes you grow, stick with it. When it stops working add just 1 more set, again, if this works, continue till it doesn’t. Eventually you’ll reach the maximum amount of volume you can recover from. You can then take some deload time before starting the next cycle. The temptation is to dive in with high volume, “If 1 works great, imagine what 10 will do”. If you do that though you miss out on 2 vital things. Firstly, if you can grow off 1 or 2 sets, take full advantage of the “easy” gains and milk it for as long as possible, you can then still play your volume card when it’s actually needed. Secondly, if you start high, you never know what your minimum effective volume is, meaning you’ll quite likely be working harder in the future without getting the results that effort and the fatigue it creates deserve.

Step 5
Continually repeat steps 3 and 4 always applying steps 1 and 2!