Past the new beginning stage though, building muscle becomes disproportionately harder!

Building muscle is easy, if you're a brand new beginner. Past the new beginning stage though, building muscle becomes disproportionately harder, especially as a natural. This is why so many people, no matter how hard they work in the gym or how well they eat, can't seem to grow their muscles any bigger.

You can't brute force your way past this. And beyond the basic fixes like eating enough food or getting enough sleep, it often all comes down to one reason. Today I'm going to reveal what that reason is and how to modify your training to instantly make it far more effective at building muscle.

First, we have to understand how a muscle actually grows in order to take advantage of it. Historically, there were three mechanisms that everyone conceived as driving muscle growth. And I mean everyone, from trainers to old school bodybuilders to scientists.

And I remember reading about these mechanisms on an online forum and instantly I tried tweaking my training program to try to maximize all three of these mechanisms. And the rest of the industry did the same, promoting training programs and protocols that took advantage of these three mechanisms. However, as more research was conducted over time, it became evident that the science and reasoning behind some of these mechanisms were quite flawed.

And unfortunately, most people, including many trainers, weren't made aware of this. And as a result, many people still train ineffectively, preventing them from building muscle long term. In fact, there is a strong chance that one or more of your training habits are based on an outdated understanding of muscle growth.

So what are these three mechanisms and which of them are no longer reliable? The first mechanism, muscle damage, is actually something that most people intuitively strive for after their workouts. And it's very straightforward, representing actual damage known as microtrauma that training can cause to muscle cells. And this damage, it causes a reactive inflammatory response in the body, which can create muscle soreness, and in theory, causes the muscles to grow bigger in response.

Because of this, many people go out of their way to pursue soreness while training, thinking that more soreness means more gains. The second mechanism is called metabolic stress. And this mechanism represents the chemical demands placed on your muscles during training.

If you train your muscles a certain way, it can cause a high amount of chemical byproducts to build up in that muscle. As you work harder and harder and create more and more buildup, your muscles become more acidic, creating a burning sensation in your muscles that I'm sure many of you are familiar with. The hormonal environment and swelling of the muscle caused by this is theorized to cause muscle growth.

To maximize metabolic stress, you want to use training methods that don't allow your muscles enough time to clear away the chemical buildup. High reps, supersets, short rest periods, anything that gives you a big Arnold pump or strong burning sensation in your muscles, all take advantage of this mechanism. The third and final mechanism is mechanical tension.

And this represents the tension that's placed on your muscle as it lengthens and then contracts under load. You can think of it as a band repeatedly stretching and then shortening each rep. Generally, the heavier the weights you lift and the greater the range of motion you use to lift them, the more mechanical tension is created.

Now, all three mechanisms sound great on paper, but recent research has revealed that we've been undermining the importance of one. Way overestimated one. And well, we were completely wrong about the other.

Let's start with muscle damage. When researchers of a 2017 review took a closer look at existing muscle damage research, they were met with findings that came as quite a surprise. They found that the growth past researchers thought muscle damage caused was actually just due to temporary swelling in the muscle that would occur after training, temporarily making muscles appear bigger than they actually were.

When this was accounted for, participants who experienced greater muscle damage and soreness from their workouts didn't experience greater growth. It wasn't until the muscle damage eventually died down did participants start experiencing true muscle growth. Other studies support this as well, suggesting that although muscle damage and soreness will be a byproduct of hard training, trying to get more of it does not lead to more growth and can in fact hinder it.

As for metabolic stress, we can determine its effectiveness by analyzing training protocols that create high amounts of metabolic stress and see how well they stimulate growth. Shorter rest periods, for example, seem to create a high amount of metabolic stress, yet it's been consistently shown to cause less muscle growth than longer rest periods where less metabolic stress occurs. Training all the way to failure also creates a very high amount of metabolic stress, but when compared to stopping just a couple reps shy of failure, it at best results in an equal amount of muscle growth.

And lastly, faster lifting tempos involve far more metabolic stress than slower lifting tempos, yet tends to provide either equal or less muscle growth, overall suggesting that even metabolic stress doesn't seem to be strongly correlated with hypertrophy. Finally, mechanical tension. This mechanism has withstood the test of time, and recent research has only served to reiterate that it's the most important driver for muscle growth.

Now, although metabolic stress will always be present to some degree in your training, and muscle damage will still occur whenever you train a muscle hard enough, it's clear that for the best results, you want to structure your workouts such that they maximize mechanical tension. How can we do this? Simple. There's four modifications that you'll want to make to your workouts.

For me personally, I always thought that the key is shocking my muscle constantly with medium weight without compromising my form, posture, technique, biomechanics and ability with variable exercises and equipments every single day. This will change over nexus of body biomechanics, equipment biomechanics, method or technique of performing and planes of movements or momentums which will win muscles consciousness thus hypertrophy or muscular growth can be assessed. 

Although after a few weeks of this, you won't feel much soreness anymore, that's actually a good thing. It means you're recovering well, and your body is no longer spending a bunch of time and resources repairing old and damaged tissue, and instead focused on building new muscle. So, rest with purpose and sleeping well after going back to home is the most significant thing. 

Many people don't spend near enough time resting between sets, which decreases the amount of weight and reps they can lift in their next set, and hence decreases mechanical tension. Illustrating this is a 2016 study by Schoenfeld and colleagues that compared resting three minutes or one minute between sets. After eight weeks, strength and size for every muscle group measured increased more with the longer rest, reaching significance for three of the four muscles measured.

Now although optimal rest time highly depends on intensity of the exercise, as well as your training status, a good recommendation is to spend at least 1.5 to 2 minutes of rest between sets for most of your exercises, with three minutes of rest or even more being a good idea for heavy compound movements. Just be aware that this may turn your workouts from sweaty heart pumping sessions that feel satisfying into a totally different kind of workout that may not feel like it did much, but in reality is far superior for building muscle. Trust the process.

Third, increasing mechanical tension is not just about going from point A to point B, or how much weight you can lift. It's about how you lift that weight from point A to point B. Anytime you cut a rep short, don't control the weight down of a movement, or bounce out of the bottom position using momentum, you're effectively reducing the amount of mechanical tension placed on the muscle. Even if you've heard a million times, you need to pay attention to proper form rather than let your ego get the best of you.

In addition to that, there is one more trick that you can use to further increase mechanical tension. And this brings me to my final modification. Most people, they mindlessly train a movement, trying to hit a goal number of reps without paying much attention to how the target muscle is contracting.

For example, during the dumbbell chest press, rather than mindlessly moving the weight up and down, think about pulling your arms together and driving your biceps into your chest each rep to really feel the chest working. Doing so has been shown to stimulate more growth, especially for the upper body muscles. Try to develop this mind-muscle connection with every muscle that you train.

Even if you feel stuck right now, apply those four modifications to your workouts and you'll very quickly notice the gains picking back up again. That is the true power of science.