One Easy Trick to Maximize Muscle Growth

Our apologies for the hanging title. Trust us, when you read this article, you’ll be the smartest one in your gym. Well, maybe not (depends on the gym!), but at least you’ll have something cool to tell your friends.

If you gain nothing else from this article, the take home message is that you must constantly mix up your workout routines to achieve maximal gains in muscle strength, size, definition, and to avoid plateaus. Some have cleverly marketed this concept as “muscle confusion”, and it is one reason why we have outlined several training techniques on our blog to help you train smarter to achieve better results than just training harder. Just click around and you’ll find them!

Without getting too scientific, you should know that resistance training (lifting weights), targets specific muscle fibres. These muscle fibres are anaerobic, meaning they function without oxygen, and are capable of fast and powerful movements. Ever heard of fast-twitch?

New research in the European Journal of Applied Physiology (catchy title, we know) reveals that there are different subtypes of fast-twitch anaerobic muscle fibres in bodybuilders. Interestingly, the most abundant fast-twitch muscle fibres are dual capacity, meaning they function for both power AND endurance.

Therefore, if you only train using low-rep sets, you’re only utilizing half of the ability of your most abundant muscle fibres, and your gains in size and strength will reflect that. You need to train to exhaust both power and endurance components of your fast-twitch muscle fibres.

The perfect example of a bodybuilder who trained this way?

 

Arnold often used a technique we have already described, pyramid sets, where he would increase weight over a number of sets on his compound moves like bench presses. When he reached his heaviest weight for around six reps, he would then reduce the poundage for two "burnout" sets, 12 to 15 reps each.

He also often used double-drop, or strip sets, which are three progressively lighter sets back to back to finish off an exercise.

Therefore, he crushed the power component of his muscle fibres early in his set, and then got an immense pump with the lighter sets towards the end.

Therefore, the trick is:

Use a lighter weight and get a higher number of reps at the end of a set of compound movements.

There are many techniques and names for these lighter sets (burnout, drop sets, strip sets, double-drop sets, etc.). We will write about each in detail in the future. For the meantime, use one of them to integrate both power and endurance into your workout routines.