Mesocycle Design for Hypertrophy

Volume

When you build your hypertrophy mesocycle, you want to start out with a training volume that gives you an overload so that you can grow, but just gives the bare minimum so that you have room to progress. That’s your MED. With each week, you use more training volume, providing an overload over the last week and thus more growth. When you reach your MRV, further overloads are either impossible due to excessive fatigue or would simply be counterproductive and not cause more growth. At that point you deload and let fatigue fall off before starting another mesocycle, potentially one with some different exercises than the ones you just used. The average volume of this mesocycle is your MAV; the best volume for progress, but due to the overload principle, you don’t AIM for this volume, you work from just below it (MED) to just above it (MRV) for best results in the long term.

NOTE: Set numbers are examples based on average intermediate lifters with 3-5 years of serious training under their belts. All volume numbers must be tailored to the individual for best outcomes.

Intensity

When selecting training intensities, the overload principle guides us to use heavier and heavier weights with each microcycle, but it also guides us to get closer and closer to failure on each working set, as relative intensity (measured in Repetitions In Reserve) does have an effect on growth. When choosing absolute intensities, we must stay above the minimum hypertrophy threshold for intensity (around 60% 1RM) but not get so high as to limit our MRV too much (since high intensities cause disproportionately more fatigue). Most people will find that they can get their best growth with average intensities between 65% and 75% 1RM, but going above and below those ranges on certain occasions can very much be a part of an intelligent training plan. On relative intensity, we want to start with a low enough value to give us room to overload, as hitting failure too early in the mesocycle can cause disproportionately high fatigue and prevent further ability to overload or adapt. But, that relative intensity should be pushed close to the maximum in the last hard week of training to elicit an overreaching effect and cause the most growth possible.

Please use this information as a starting guide and/or food for thought. None of it is meant to be dogmatic. Always use your best judgment and track your own body’s responses for best results.

Bringing Up a Lagging Lift

If you want to bring up a lift, is the automatic answer to train the lagging muscle group of that lift. Like if you have weak triceps, will training them MORE bring up your bench? If only it were so simple. A couple of considerations need to be made before we can be assured that this is the likely best course of action, including:

1. Does the lift have clear limiting factors?

   For example, if your lower back isn't strong enough for your glutes, hams, upper back and grip, your deadlift will round you over and positioning will be compromised, leading to limited performances. By bringing up your lower back, you can very much boost your deadlift in this scenario. You can make your glutes or hams as strong as ever, but because your lower back is the limiting factor, this will almost certainly have no effect on your deadlift going up.

   On the other hand, in the bench press, if your triceps are weak, making them strong should help you bench more. But making your chest strong will help you bench more as well, even if your triceps don't get any stronger. Because of the mechanics of the lift, the chest isn't ever limited by the triceps and vice-versa, and can contribute to the lift all the way through. If you triceps are super unresponsive but your chest grows great, lockout problems on bench may actually be solved with more chest training. Same goes for all lifts (shoulder press is another example) in which there is no clear limiting factor in the kinetic chain.

2. Is the muscle you suspect as the limiting factor ACTUALLY the limiting factor in your case?

   Sometimes it might seem that way, but it turns out to be another muscle altogether. When lower backs round in the deadlift, it MIGHT be the erectors at fault. But it might also be the scapular retractors of the upper back that are weak, and their weakness leads to the chest falling over, putting the lower back in a poor position no matter how (realistically) strong it is.

   It can also be a technique issue. If you're not hitting the right positions at the start and through the lift, your back might round no matter how strong you are, and all the erector training in the world won't fix that. But working with a coach to improve your technique might reveal to you that your erectors were strong enough to not limit you all along, you just needed to improve your movement patterns.

3. If you do find a limiting factor muscle, is MORE work the answer?

   It depends! You have to figure out if the muscle in question is:

   • under its MRV

   • around its MRV

   • over it's MRV

   If it's under its MRV, it can do better with more training, so go to town. If it's around its MRV, you'll have to work on technique or something else because more training will only be a net negative. If it's over its MRV, then the surest path to gains is to train it LESS and let it progress faster due to improved recovery.

4. Choose your work wisely.

   If you finally find the limiting muscle in question and more work is the answer, make sure it's the kind of work that transfers well and is phase-appropriate. For example, if you're doing tricep extensions on a cable to help your bench press, but you're doing this with sets of 10 at 3 weeks out of a meet, you're causing some muscle growth, but the neural characteristics of the triceps are becoming less explosive and will probably make no change to your strength for that meet, or those neural changes and extra fatigue from the work may temporarily make you a tad weaker! If you're months out of your meet and eating enough to support size gains, you can use isolation moves like cable extensions. But as the meet gets closer and the training heavier, you need to transition to the right exercises that match the characteristics of the phase of training you're in, going perhaps from extensions with a cable to skull crushers, to close grip benches, and finally to board work or slingshot work right before the meet.

TD;LR: If you complain of poor lockout ability and someone tells you "just add some triceps work after your heavy lifts," they MIGHT very well be correct... but they might also be way off.

Knowing When to Back Off

When people say 'I've tried everything to grow (insert stubborn muscle or movement), they often have tried most everything -- except for backing off and training that area LESS. If you're chronically over your MRV, every new intensity technique can leave you no better off and even worse off. Sometimes cutting your volume by 1/3 or more for 1-3 months can be the best thing for your growth. MORE is not necessarily better, and it's actually worse if you're already doing too much.

And lastly, it might seem that, based on how much other people train a muscle or lift, and based on how much you train your other muscles and lifts that 'there is no way my local MRV for this muscle/lift is THAT LOW.' But it just might be and finding out by dropping volume is the only sure way to go. Worst case is that you'll get much stronger and drop a bunch of fatigue, re-sensitizing that area for massive growth and improvement when you do hit it hard again!

And just as an example: my own hamstring MRV is around 10 sets per week. Yep. Give that some thought if you're pushing into the 25+ per week set range on a bodypart and are frustrated with progress.

Training Focus

Some very good reasons to focus on several bodyparts at a time during your bodybuilding training, instead of trying to grow EVERYTHING all at once:

1. Adaptive Resistance

   Every muscle group develops resistance to adaptation over time. Throwing the kitchen sink at your biceps, for example, will work great for a while, but after several months, your biceps have seen pretty much everything you've got. They won't grow much even if you keep training them super hard unless you take a break for a month or so and just train them enough to hold their current size. When you come back, they'll respond very well again for several months, upon which you'll have to repeat the process. In essence, the idea that you can and should always try to get every muscle on your frame to grow is flawed for at least this reason.

   An interesting fact of physiology helps buttress this idea. The fact is, the human body is VERY resistant to making adaptations and will only do so at fastest rates if high overloads and lots of variation are present. Just "meh" training will likely get the intermediate/advanced not "meh" results, but actually no results at all. On the other hand, the body is VERY good at KEEPING gains with quite a low level of training (esp if that training is still heavy but low volume). You don't need to hammer every bodypart to the max for it to stick on you... you can actually hold your gains with as little as half the volume it takes to make the best ones. With this reality being as it is, training super hard for some time and really backing off for some time becomes almost essential for best gains.

2. Psychological Monotony

   A minor concern for the extra-motivated, but a concern nonetheless. If you push EVERYTHING all at the same time, your training starts to look quite similar month to month. Not only is this physiologically limiting to growth, it can get super stale psychologically. Changing the focus can not only keep you excited for training because it's regularly different, but it also gets you excited for the next training phase when you start "missing" going hard on a body part you haven't focused on in a while. Nothing gets you wanting to smash quads like taking a month to focus mostly on glutes and hams.

3. Recovery Limitations

   Fact: Your whole-body MRV is LOWER than the sum of the MRVs of your individual muscles.

   What this means is that if you tried to actually train ALL of your body parts at their MRVs (see my posts from this whole month about individual muscle MRVs), your training volume would be completely insane and you'd almost certainly not recover from the systemic fatigue. Every time you train, your local muscle physiology is disrupted, but so is your central physiology. Brain, spinal cord, hormones, and GI tract are taxed with recovery, and if you try to train every individual muscle hard, you'll likely break into two pieces very soon. So how do you get around this? Certainly it's not by training every muscle "sort of hard," because that wouldn't lead to the best gains. The idea is to pick maybe 1/2 to 2/3 of your muscles and train them all-out at their MRVs, and train the rest at 1/2 to 2/3 of their MRVs, so that they don't lose size during this de-emphasis period. Then after 1-2 mesocyles, you rotate out the prioritized groups and rotate in the de-prioritized groups. This way you get to grow all of your body's muscles over time without going too far overboard.

Oh and drugs don't change these relationships. Drugs like anabolics allow your MRV to go up both locally and systemically to about the same extent, so they let you train and recover from MORE, but you can now also handle more. Yes, even folks taking drugs need to go through this pattern of emphasis/de-emphasis to get best results.

Applying Specificity

In exercise selection, specificity says you have to do the competition movements coming up close to your meet. It doesn't say you have to do them ALL THE TIME.

Example: while standing presses transfer best to strongman, seated presses or even incline presses can train most of the same muscles while perhaps not being as taxing on the lower back (and whole-body recovery as well) as standing presses.

Is this an conundrum of specificity vs. fatigue management? Absolutely not! Just do the seated and incline moves in the months before your next meet and switch to standing presses in the weeks before the meet itself.

This way you get the best of variation, fatigue management, AND specificity. And what's this logically phased structure called, you ask? Why, periodization, of course.

Fatigue Accumulation

The effect of relative intensity on fatigue accumulation (given volume and absolute intensity are held constant) is likely exponential in nature.

Thus, if you have to do 60 total reps in the squat with your approximate 10RM, doing all the sets as 3's vs. 5's won't make a huge difference on the fatigue you generate from that session.

Doing all the sets as 6's vs. 8's will have a meaningful effect, and the 8's will fatigue you more, being that they are closer to failure.

Doing all the sets as 9's (let's just say 1 rep shy of failure for each set) vs. taking each set to concentric failure will have have a BIG difference on effect on the cumulative fatigue of that training session, with the "to fail" approach causing much more fatigue for the same volume and absolute intensity.

Because it's unlikely that stopping one or two reps shy of failure produces MUCH less stimulus than going to failure but that going to failure produces MUCH more fatigue than stopping just short, it's probably a good idea to use failure training very judiciously in a program, especially for intermediate and advanced lifters.

Because it's not just about asking "how much more growth did training to failure give me?" It's also about asking "how much more sub-maximal training could I have fit into the same amount of fatigue and would that have grown me even more?"

Soreness and MRV

For the muscles that get sore from training (not all get regularly sore), can you use soreness as a proxy for approximating how close you are to your MRV and thus if you should consider adding or removing volume? To some extent, yes.

Best muscle growth requires plenty of muscle damage, but there's certainly such a thing as too much. A good start for each of your accumulation weeks of your mesocycle except the last would be to aim for a midrange soreness. A level that lets you know you hit it hard but nothing that lasts for a week and seriously hinders daily movement. To catch the potential benefits of overreaching, the last week of your accumulation phase (pre-deload) should get you very sore. Still not insanity, but much more sore than usual.

Best strength training occurs with high volumes, but the volumes must be low enough to keep fatigue lower than during size training. Why? Because while those training for size can be pretty beat up and still grind the reps to present an overload, those training for strength need to be much more fresh to present the high forces with good techniques that produce the best strength adaptations. Those training for strength might aim to train with just enough volume so that they don't get sore on a weekly basis or just get minimally sore, but with no more volume than that. For the final pre-deload week of the meso, strength trainers will benefit from doing more volume; enough to get them moderately sore but not much more than that.

Is this way of informing your training perfect? Not even close. But it might be a good start. Let's put it this way: if you're training for size and you never get sore and if you're training for strength and are always radically sore, you might be using to little or too much volume for your goals.

Constant Tension is BULLSHIT

People will defend all sorts of training practices (mostly the failure to execute a full ROM) by citing the concept of "keeping tension on the muscle." Many of these SAME PEOPLE will then say "I do myoreps, and other rest-pause techniques... they are great!" This may come off as one hell of an impressive contradiction! There may be several reasons for not locking out during an exercise or not taking several seconds here and there to do more reps (variation, working around joint pain), but enhanced growth stimulus is simply not one of those reasons.

Some common arguments in favor of constant tension and their rebuttals:

1. "Constant tension allows you to tax the muscle more because you don't give it a break."

   Then why do you do multiple sets at all? Aren't those really big ass breaks? What determines growth in large part is how much total mechanical work you do... range of motion being equal, how many total reps you do in your workout. It doesn't much matter if you do 20 reps on one set by taking a couple breaths here and there at the lockout or if you do 2 sets of 10 reps by avoiding lockout by just a hair every time.

2. "You feel the burn more during constant tension, and that means more of a metabolite stimulus."

   Yep, but you get fewer reps each set. In fact, you might get less metabolites that way. Let's say you do 100 total reps of leg presses, doing 10 sets of 10 reps each with constant tension. The last 2 reps of every set has you feeling the burn, so we can say there were 10 distinct pulses of metabolite accumulation. Another method would be to use rest-pause and stop for a couple of seconds at the top of every few reps after 10 reps on each set to let the metabolites die down just enough to crank out another 2 reps or so. That's 5 20 rep sets, but each set has 6 pulses of metabolites in it (one at 8-10 reps, one at 10-12, etc.) ... so that's 30 total metabolite pulses... that's much more total metabolite exposure, making constant tension actually WORSE at metabolite summation if you really push the logic.

3. "Constant tension allows me to feel the muscle work better."

   Maybe, and there is something to a mind-muscle connection, but I'd say that stopping on occasion, locking out, re-setting your position and going for more reps can help with feeling the muscles more as well, so I'd say constant tension is neutral at best here.

Overloading Over Time

As muscles get bigger and stronger, overloading them becomes more disruptive to homeostasis and this can greatly tax recovery. Thus as you progress over the years, while you can still train with high frequencies (3+ times per week for the same muscle groups), you might need to make some of those workouts less overloading than others so that you can adequately recover. Just a couple of months ago I had to reduce my back training to one big session and a second smaller session per week. I'd trained it twice a week with two overloading sessions for years, but my back finally got so big this became unsustainable. This process might give some insight as to why giant pro bodybuilders train so infrequently, why smaller folks just starting out can benefit from more frequency, and why everyone in between needs to make adjustments to their own needs instead of blindly following someone else's programs.

Adding Cardio to Weight Training

Weights burn as much fat as cardio (if not more) and build/spare muscle better by a long shot. So why do bodybuilders do weights PLUS cardio and swear that it's the best way to lose fat and keep muscle?

The fundamental reason why weights plus cardio is the choice for bodybuilders is that weights generate more fatigue PER CALORIE BURNED than cardio. Put another way, cardio is a really good way to burn lots of calories at the lowest cost to the bodybuilder's total maximal recoverable volume (MRV).

Especially when dieting down, your MRV is very constraining on how much work you can put into the gym. Do too much and exceed your MRV, and muscle loss, stalled fat loss and injury are not far behind. But when you're dieting, you've got a certain amount of calories to burn per week, and unlike during massing, that's gotta fit into your MRV as well as weights. So the right choice is to do as much weight training as possible THAT STILL LEAVES ENOUGH MRV ROOM FOR CARDIO to burn the needed calories. If you try to get to that calorie amount with weights alone, you'll overreach your MRV long before you reach the needed calorie burn. If you try cardio alone, calories won't be a problem but muscle mass won't either when you lose it all!

We can also see here why the biggest and hardest-training (most MRV-constrained) bodybuilders usually choose lower intensity cardio; it has the highest calorie/fatigue ratio. You can do more of it without draining your MRV as much and leaving more of it for weights. Does that mean everyone should do this? No way. If you've only got a couple hours a week to train to be leaner, it should all be weights cause you're nowhere near pushing recovery limits. If you're training lots but not close to your limits, HIIT is good to add in to burn a ton of calories and save tons of time, esp. if getting lean is more important to you than sparing max muscle.

But if you're pushing your training and cutting diet to the max and wanna save the most muscle, low intensity cardio is the way to go.

When you are cutting: reducing food intake vs. adding cardio

I think that any approach the eschews either completely is probably not the best one.

• If you do no cardio at all (and you are just trying to get lean; some strength sports get an exemption from this), you have to drop your food intake so low that your metabolism will slow down a ton and your cravings will skyrocket.

• If you do minimal food lowering and add more cardio (some endurance athletes can use this approach effectively), pretty soon you risk doing so much cardio that muscle loss, wear and tear, and sheer time loss are big concerns.

For best cutting results for the physique-oriented, a combo of calorie cuts and cardio additions is probably best.

Role of Maxes in Training

If you take training maxes (heavy singles in training), make sure it's for at least one of the following two reasons:

1. You're using them to inform and alter future training.

2. You're using the maxes for direct stimulus as part of a logical program structure.

Make sure you're NOT just taking heavy singles "to see where I'm at." You should be able to see where you're at (in a general sense, not discounting point 1 above) by just tracking your performance in any rep range, including the one you're doing now. Keep that ego in check!