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Evidence-based articles & blogs to help with making training more effective, nutrition more flexible & life more enjoyable.
If you’re in need of a hand with more strategic programming to accelerate your muscle growth efforts, you should know that I’m looking for TWO new clients to jump into my high level GOLD Coaching Package. I’ll lead you step by step to physique building success while you eat your favourite foods and do NO cardio.
All very relevant questions in the pursuit of muscle growth. Here’s what you need to know.
Typically speaking, the more stable an exercise is, the better it is from a hypertrophy (muscle growth) standpoint.
The less stable an exercise is, the more energy you’ll waste in the pursuit of creating stability & balance, in addition to bracing against the load itself.
More stable exercises afford us the ability to focus on moving the external load & mechanically loading the muscles we’re actually trying to train.
Basically, they allow you to put all of your effort into torching the muscles we're trying to torch.
Exercises that require more skill, more bracing, or more stability, will rob you of that energy and effort.
As an example - barbell squats will always be inferior for hypertrophy to pendulum or hack squats, because there is more bracing, stability & balance required throughout the movement.
They are a great exercise that work a large number of muscles, and if you're a powerlifter then you have no option but to do lots of barbell squatting, but at the end of the day, you still have to keep a precariously-placed barbell on your back and move it through space without any external support.
The limiting factor with a back squat is often your ability to brace against the load on your back - it is rarely the strength in your legs - which means as a quad-builder, they tend to suck.
Your back, or your brace are likely to give out far sooner than you'll be able to work your quads anywhere near hard enough to create enough mechanical tension to build muscle.
In order to build muscle, we need mechanical tension. We create that when we approach true muscular failure - so if you can't take the muscle groups you're trying to grow towards failure, you're probably not going to grow.
So - have a think about whether or not the exercises you’re using are actually giving you the opportunity to train your quads/ chest/ back/ whatever muscle group you want to grow as hard as you think they are, and make sure you’re eating in accordance with your goals to support muscle growth.
If you’re in need of a hand with more strategic programming to accelerate your muscle growth efforts, you should know that I’m looking for TWO new clients to jump into my high level GOLD Coaching Package. I’ll lead you step by step to physique building success while you eat your favourite foods and do NO cardio. Simply CLICK HERE to submit an enquiry & I can send you all of the relevant information.
