Muscle Science: Part III
A closer look at the science of building muscle.
In this edition of Momentum you’ll learn about one of the most important principles of muscle building, progressive overload, and how it relates to the primary driver of hypertrophy, mechanical tension. In case you missed them, read Muscle Science: Part I and Muscle Science: Part II.
Our bodies are incredible and adaptable ecosystems.
When presented with a stressor, our body can respond by adapting to the imposed demands of that stress.
In the soft tissues of the body, like muscles, this is known as Davis’s Law. It states that muscles heal and adapt according to the stress that is imposed upon them.
Think about how that applies to lifting weights. If we lift heavy weights, our muscles will adapt to be able to lift heavy weights again.
The primary stimulus, or stressor, needed to cause muscles to grow is called mechanical tension.
When mechanical tension is applied to our muscles they respond by growing aka muscle hypertrophy aka gainz.
When there is no mechanical tension on our muscles, think bed rest or significant time away from the gym, there is no growth stimulus so muscles atrophy aka shrink aka string bean arms.
Let’s look a little closer at this.
Mechanical Tension
The modern king of hypertrophy research is a gentleman by the name of Brad Schoenfeld.
In one of his many landmark papers he outlined the three primary drivers of muscular hypertrophy. They are mechanical tension, muscular damage, and metabolic stress. While mechanical tension is not the only contributor to hypertrophy, significant muscle growth is impossible without it.
Many experts in the field, myself included, think it is the most important driver of hypertrophy and by focusing on it you can actually accomplish the other two.
So, what is mechanical tension?
Mechanical tension is what occurs when force is generated within the muscle and/or stretch is applied to the muscle.
This is basically what lifting weights is.
Think of how mechanical tension is applied to the lats during lat pulldowns.
The lats generate force intrinsically to produce the movement of bringing the bar down to the chest during the concentric contraction and then continue to produce force during the eccentric contraction as the weight is lowered until finally there is a big stretch placed on the lats at the top of the exercise.
This is why full range of motion strength training that emphasizes the stretch position is so important for muscle building.
Again, our body is incredible at adapting so if we do the same workout forever with the same weights in the same way we can’t expect to make progress beyond newbie gains that everyone experiences when trying something new.
This brings us to possibly the single most important and foundational principle of any training program: progressive overload.
Progressive Overload
With regard to muscle hypertrophy and lifting weights, progressive overload is the process of continuously creating more mechanical tension within the muscle by increasing one or more variables of a weight training program.
There are many, many ways to progressively overload your workouts to continue to force adaptation.
If you simply added 1 rep from last week, you have created more mechanical tension and progressively overloaded your workout.
If you normally lift with crappy technique, swinging the weights around, you can progressively overload your muscles by lifting with strict technique and placing all the stress on the target muscle.
Every single week you should try to add 1 rep to a set, add 5 pounds to an exercise, add 1 set to a muscle group, or add 1 lengthened partial at the end of a hard set to continue to overload the muscles enough to adapt bigger and stronger. Can’t do that? Try to focus on smashing the target muscle even more with better bodybuilding technique like we talked about in Muscle Science: Part II.
Think of it this way: you need to ask your body to do more work. In any way possible.
Here’s the catch: you can’t continuously add weight or reps to every single workout forever. You will reach a point where gains are harder to come by as you train for longer and longer.
This is where intelligent program design comes in. You can continuously manipulate your training program to allow for periods of intense progressive overload, followed by a recovery period, and then do it again with similar, but different stimuli.
This is what a smart coach will do with a program. Continuously manipulate the variables to make progress without over reaching for a long enough time interval to create great results.
Cough cough…
Ahem…
This is exactly what I’ve been programming for years with the BREAKING GAINZ FOREVER program.
Putting it All Together
To optimize hypertrophy you must apply mechanical tension to the muscles you want to grow. You must do this in a progressive manner and always strive to ask more of your body to continue to make gains; aka progressively overload your program.
This is exactly the type of training we apply to the muscle building work in the BREAKING GAINZ FOREVER program.
Questions about building muscle? Leave them in the comments below.