The Growth Season: Muscle Hypertrophy

I must, I must, I must increase my bust

It's been decided, by next summer you will be the newest card carrying member of an exclusive fraternity, “The Meathead Brigade.” You've become an expert on health and fitness from your regular visits to websites like bodybuilding.com and T-Nation. You have a copy of the holy bible, Arnold Schwartzenegger's, The Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding. You’ve read the stories of athletes making ridiculous gains and watched the infomercials of regular Joe’s adding impressive muscle gains. If it worked for them, why not you? Your goal is to spend the winter and “bulk-up” by putting on 30 pounds of hard muscle.  And you’ve come up with a foolproof plan to attain this goal.

·      Eat big, get big: You started your diet plan (you found this great online diet on a bodybuilding website, a 5,500 calorie/day your favorite action movie-star follows).

·      Protein weight gainers morning, noon and night: You did the research on supplements, (flipped through multiple Muscle magazines) and you’re now an aficionado. Your gym bag now resembles a small pharmacy (because the real life Hulks in the advertisements wouldn’t lie to sell a product they are being paid to endorse).

·      Train big, get big: Your credo is “to live, breathe, and dream successful iron feats.” You’ve even adopted a pre-training rallying cry to psych yourself up (the actors from the movie 300 would be proud).

Surely, your physique and feats of strength will be the kind of things myths and folklore are made of. There will be tall-tails sung to the heavens about your triumphs (and will definitely get the adulation of the pretty girls in the cardio area). You are well on your way to become the next mass monster of your gym and glory is soon to be yours!

"I'm not fat, I'm big boned!"

Fast-forward 12 months later. Another summer has come and gone. True to your word, you spent the entire winter "working out" and sure enough you stuck to your food plan and gained more than 30 pounds. You religiously took every supplement your idol in the magazine ad recommended. But unfortunately, you envisioned a totally different body. You are feeling lethargic and your drive to train is dwindling. More importantly, it looks like the pretty girls on the cardio machines are paying even less attention to you now. Amazingly, the foolproof plan didn’t work!

News flash, muscle gains aren’t that easy!

So where did it all go wrong?

First off, if you want anything in bulk, go to Costco. If you want to grow, here is the plan.

When "bulking" plans go wrong

Instead of "Bulking," Grow: If you treat the cold weather season as an offseason of “bulking up,” you more than likely added unwanted weight in the form of excess fat. So logically, you "grew" by adding mostly fat, not muscle. Here’s another thing to rattle around in your noodle, if the offseason is a plan to grow, is it really an offseason? Anyone can "bulk-up" but not everyone can make muscle gains. Instead of bulking-up, maybe take a more gradual and modest weight gain approach in your nutrition plan. It won’t be fast but it will ensure an incremental muscle increase. Any rapid gain is not natural nor is it sustainable. Seriously, what is bulking up anyway? It’s become an excuse to be lazy about nutrition habits during cold weather. Let’s instead refer to it as the growth season (putting on lean muscle tissue). But if you allow your ego to get in the way or you are delusional about your abilities, there’s no helping you.

·      Your Nutrition Plan: What you don’t understand (or care) is that the movie star is paid to look like that. Damn it, we expect him to look like that! And he will do whatever it takes to get there. Beyond the speculation of the "supplements" he is taking, one must admit and respect the time he puts into training. He trains extremely HARD. He has all out wars with the iron. As a result, he expends a ton of energy to perform his training session. However, in order to recover from those sessions, he’s going to need to crush a lot of food. His body will be burning calories when he is not training because his body is trying to recover and begin the growth process. The body grows at rest, not during training sessions. Now, he didn’t start at 10,000 calories, he had a baseline to start from. As his training intensity spiked, so did his body’s demand for food. Note: Elite athletes and movie-stars have professional guidance in every area from nutrition to training programs. Everything is monitored and individualized for them.

"Look how vascular I am...If it's one
thing women love, it's a vascular man."

·      Your Supplement Plan: A supplement is literally something extra. You are supplying something to tend to a deficiency. This is an important element to understand. Too much of anything is going to be useless regardless of what anyone else tells you. And in many cases, people fall victim to supplement abuse because of their dependency on them. What you don't know is the mass monster from the magazine oozes some kind of Performance Enhancement Drug (PED) coming out his eyeballs and pees a steroid! He doesn’t mention all of the other kinds of the other supplements and PED’s he is taking beyond the one he is endorsing. Save your money. I’d recommend holding off on buying everything the mass monster at the supplement stores is peddling (for more information on PED's and supplementation check out the documentary, Bigger, Stronger, Faster).  

Muscle Hypertrophy Training: I'm a big believer in training for strength. However, I find most people train to look good and if that's your goal, muscle hypertrophy is a different animal. Strength requires more skill and attention to technique, while muscle hypertrophy just requires moderate weight in both compound and single-joint exercises between 8-12 repetitions. This is where most people fail (mostly guys) because they try to use too heavy of weight to make the desired muscles work appropriately, muddling a strength and hypertrophy program. Put the 50 pound dumb bell down you were "cleaning" as a biceps curl and grab a 25 pounder. Now try squeezing the biceps at the top and control it on the way down for 3 sets of 8-12 repetitions.

It might not be the fastest or sexiest plan but it is safe and if you follow it, it is guaranteed to get you results. Remember, muscle hypertrophy isn't about strength, it's about stressing the muscles appropriately. Look, I don’t care what you look like (only periodic pictures can judge you), as long as you are improving toward your goal safely. Who can take that away from you? Finally, I do recommend working on a strength training program to fine tune compound patterns before undertaking a muscle hypertrophy program because you can implement these skills seamlessly. Be sure to stay tuned for my upcoming blog about strength training. Best of luck in your training!