I am going to talk about what the research says about how to maximize muscle hypertrophy. So we're going to be breaking down this systematic review about how to maximize muscle hypertrophy.
This is a systematic review, so it takes into account 30 other studies, and it kind of points towards the broader principles of how to maximize muscle hypertrophy. So in the first part, we're going to talk about the mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy. And then in the second part, we're going to actually talk about the training methods that maximize those mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy.
So we'll start with this quote here, that effective hypertrophy oriented resistance training should comprise a combination of mechanical tension and metabolic stress. So these two mechanisms of mechanical tension and metabolic stress combine to stimulate muscle protein synthesis and result in muscle hypertrophy. So you might be wondering, what is mechanical tension? And here's what the research says about mechanical tension.
(Mechanically induced tension produced by both force generation and stretch is considered essential to muscle growth. A combination of these stimuli appears to have a pronounced additive effect. This means that resistance training that involves mechanical overload is a key driver of muscle hypertrophy.
And when we get to training methods, we'll talk about which training methods are most effective for increasing mechanical tension. Another key driver of muscle hypertrophy is metabolic stress. Metabolic stress manifests as a result of exercise that relies on anaerobic glycolysis for ATP production, which results in subsequent buildup of metabolites such as lactate, hydrogen ion, inorganic phosphate, creatine, and others.
What this means is that when we're doing resistance training and we're using our anaerobic systems for energy production, we have a buildup of these metabolites, which have an anabolic hypertrophic effect. It's a combination of mechanical tension and metabolic stress that we have to get from our resistance training workouts and our overall resistance training program to result in the most muscle hypertrophy. Okay, so now you might be wondering, what does the research say about the training methods that specifically lead to the best outcomes in muscle hypertrophy? So this systematic review specifically points out that these three methods are particularly beneficial for time efficient training.
Agonist antagonist or upper lower body supersets. This is a training method where you're working opposite muscle groups of the lower body or upper body, or you're combining one upper body movement with one lower body movement. This training method is particularly time effective because while one muscle group is resting, the other muscle group is working.
This allows for short rest periods and higher metabolic stress. There are a ton of different combinations of supersets that you can use. For example, working your quads and your hamstrings, working your biceps and your triceps or your pecs and your back.
But working this combination of agonist antagonist or upper and lower body supersets has been demonstrated to be a time effective method for improving muscle hypertrophy. Additionally, both drop sets and cluster sets have been shown to be effective. A drop set is whenever you perform an exercise with a higher resistance and then you drop the load or the resistance down as you continue through the sets.
For example, you may be doing a leg press with four plates on each side and then you drop it to three plates and two plates to minimize the rest period. A cluster set is a little bit different. That's when we're breaking down a big set into mini sets.
So for example, instead of doing a set of 15 on leg press, you could do three sets of five with a very short rest period in between. And what the systematic review showed is that both the drop sets and the cluster set method are time effective methods for increasing metabolic stress and therefore hypertrophy. This systematic review also demonstrates that the combination of high load resistance training with low load blood flow restriction training can be an effective method for increasing time efficiency and metabolic stress.
Blood flow restriction training is a method where we occlude venous return of blood from an extremity while doing training. For example, we could use a blood flow restriction cuff on the upper arm and then do bicep curls and we're going to impair the venous return of blood from the bicep during that bicep curl. This can increase the metabolic stress even at a very low load.
This method has been shown to be effective for not only the peripheral muscle groups like the bicep, but also for proximal groups, for example, if you're doing a chest press with a blood flow restriction cuff on the arm. In order to use this method, you would want to look more into the research on how we occlude blood flow safely and how we load this effectively. However, what this is saying with the systematic review is that over a large body of evidence, it has been shown to be effective for maximizing the mechanism of increasing mechanical tension.
This systematic review showed that accentuated eccentric training can be an effective solution. Accentuated eccentric training is a training method where we use more load on the eccentric portion of the exercise than we do on the concentric portion of the exercise. There are many ways to employ this method, but what this is showing is that it is an effective method and it has been demonstrated as such over many studies.
The reason that eccentric overload can be effective is that during eccentric contractions passive muscular tension develops because of lengthening of extracellular elements, especially collagen content in the extracellular matrix and titin. Let's give you a visual for what that means. If we look at a sarcomere, which is just at the microscopic level, what muscle looks like, what this is saying is that eccentric training can have an effect on other components, not just the actin and the myosin.
For example, the titin that's connecting the myosin to the z-line is not a contractile protein, but it is a protein that can have damage and can have a hypertrophic response. So by having this eccentric passive tension element of our training, we can actually effectively stimulate more protein synthesis. Now an important point that I want to mention is that although drop sets, cluster sets, eccentric overload training have all been demonstrated to be effective, we don't need to include those in every phase of training.
It's not very realistic that every program is going to have each of these elements in it. It's more important to realize that these are just individual tools and they can be used to achieve the primary outcome of progressive overload in the program. It would actually be a bad idea to try to incorporate all of these at once into your training or just randomly go between them because the body needs a consistent overload.
You'll be better served focusing on one block of training that's focused on mechanical tension and doing higher loads at a moderate volume and employing one or two of these methods for a few weeks and then going into a block of training that's higher volume and focused on metabolic stress, but not doing that necessarily year round. Incorporating blocks of training with different volumes, different intensities and different methods and cycling between them year round will help you avoid plateaus from trying to do everything at once. Lastly, I want to cover one very important topic from this research study, which is volume.
A quote from this research study reads, Evidence indicates that significant muscle growth occurs when the majority of training sets are performed with about 3-4 repetitions in reserve, with moderate to high load. This study suggests that although the ACSM guidelines recommend 1-3 sets per exercise with 8-12 reps, 70-85% of 1RM, that the recent literature shows a much wider range of training options. Several studies have found that training with low loads, 30-60% 1RM, result in similar hypertrophy to training with moderate and high loads, greater than 60% 1RM, when volitional fatigue occurs.
So what this recent study is showing is that there's probably a wider range of loading that we can utilize than we previously thought in terms of maximizing muscle hypertrophy. Meaning that previously we didn't think that loading at 50% 1RM for high reps near failure was very effective for muscle hypertrophy, however, recent evidence is suggesting that it could be. That said, I think we need to consider that it's really only a significant driver of muscle hypertrophy if we're near failure.
We can't use low load and do 10 reps when we could have done 30 because that's not effective. That's really just junk volume. One important quote that I think really sums this up well is the following.
Evidence indicates that significant muscle growth occurs when the majority of training sets are performed with 3-4 repetitions in reserve. So what does that mean, 3-4 repetitions in reserve? That means that with whatever load you're using, the exercise could only be performed for about 3-4 more reps before you would reach failure. This would be roughly equivalent to a 6-7 RPE rating of perceived exertion.
The big takeaway that I want you guys to have from this is that hypertrophy training does require higher volumes than strength training for example, but it's important that we're staying about 3-4 repetitions in reserve, we're not going all the way to failure on our sets, and we're also not loading so low that it's not very difficult. While we can load across a larger spectrum of resistance, we want to make sure that we're reaching that sweet spot of intensity with each of our sets.
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