Your Evidence Based Guide to Building Muscle (Part 4)
Technique guidelines for maximizing muscle growth
While there are some general guidelines for exercise technique, this is another area where you need to figure out what feels the best for you. Almost all these guidelines will be superseded by how you feel and what gets you the best results. That being said, the following are some good places to start.
Every rep involves a lowering portion (the eccentric) and a push (concentric). We want to make sure we control the eccentric part of the rep so that we bias tension on the muscle as it stretches. If we lower too quickly we will bias more springy properties of the tendon, and won’t get as much muscle building signal that comes from stretching the muscle under load. On the concentric, we need to push as hard as we can on every rep to ensure we are activating those fast twitch muscle fibers. Additionally, we can add pauses in the stretch position of the rep as a way of lowering the amount of weight we need to lift to get a potent hypertrophic stimulus. By pausing where the exercise is the hardest, we bias the movement more towards the part of the rep that is the most beneficial for hypertrophy. This is not a must, but is a nice way to get as much or more growth stimulus from a set with the same or less fatigue. Finally, we want to make sure we train through as full a range of motion as we have available without compensation. For example, if we are training our quads in a squat, we want to achieve full knee flexion - i.e. lower the weight down to the point where your hamstring touches your calf. However, we don’t want to go so low that our heels come off the ground or we have to round our low back to get there. Neither of those things is dangerous, but not productive from a muscle building perspective. A good guideline is to take whatever muscle you are training and look at the main function of that muscle. For example your bicep flexes your elbow, so you want to make sure you fully bend and straighten your elbow joint on every rep.
One big consideration for the way you perform your exercises is a term coined by Dr. Mike Israetel: Stimulus To Fatigue Ratio. This is a lens through which we look at how effective an exercise is relative to how much fatigue it generates. There are essentially 4 different categories of exercises in this framework. Exercises that don’t generate a ton of fatigue and don’t generate a ton of stimulus, which should not be a major part of your program. Think of a plank, an isometric movement for our abs that will not grow our abs very well. Then there are exercises that don’t generate very much stimulus and generate a ton of fatigue, which should almost never be in your program. Think leg press done very heavy with a very short range of motion. Then we have exercises that don’t generate a ton of fatigue, but generate a ton of stimulus. If you find any of these please let me know, because they don’t really exist. Our final category is generally the types of exercises that make up the majority of your program: exercises that give good stimulus and also carry a fair bit of fatigue. In practice applying this principle is about finding those exercises that feel very stimulative and doing them in ways as to minimize the fatigue cost with doing them. This could be different for everyone, but it might mean slowing down the eccentric and pausing in the stretched position of the rep, for example. These two techniques limit the amount of load you can lift in an exercise, but spending more time in the most stimulative part of the rep maintains or increases the stimulus you get from an exercise, while the lower load reduces the fatigue cost. There are so many different variations of exercises and ways to do exercises, it’s worth experimenting to see how something feels on your body and how it could fit into your larger program.
