In a new video on his YouTube channel, trainer and kinesiologist Jeremy Ethier breaks down the fundamentals of growing muscle, and explains how best to approach your workouts so that you can see continual gains over time.
Progressive overload
Increasing the load you’re lifting on compound movements gradually over time is how every beginner starts to see progress. However, the longer you train, the less weight you will be able to realistically add to your lifts. At this point, you need to find new ways to challenge yourself.
Reps
When you can no longer add more weight to the bar, increasing the number of reps you’re doing in each set will mean that you are actually lifting more weight in total per workout, providing more stimulation to your muscles.
“This is extremely helpful if you only have limited equipment or a nagging injury and you can’t increase the weight on your lifts even if you wanted to,” says Ethier.
Sets
Once you’ve hit a max on your reps, upping your sets is the next logical way to be lifting more weight per session. “Adding sets can be as simple as going from 3 sets of 12 one week, to 4 sets of 12 the next week,” he says. “It’s a really simple way of adding massive amounts of volume to your program.”
However, Ethier adds that there will come a point of diminishing returns here, and this approach will also unavoidably make your workouts longer. But there are ways to boost your gains without continually adding more volume.
Tempo
“If we slow down our reps, we can increase the amount of time that tension is placed on the muscle to stimulate more growth,” says Ethier. He recommends trying this when training weaker muscles, where adding even a small amount of weight is likely to raise the difficulty of an exercise and therefore yield results.
Form
Finally, one of the best ways to ensure you’re getting the most out of each exercise is to focus on your technique—this is something you need to perfect before you start adding huge amounts of weight.
“Better form involves relying more on the target muscles and will result in more growth even if all other variables remain the same,” says Ethier.
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