If you’re not content with an average physique, you’ve likely spent the last 6-8 months focusing on eating more food and building muscle. 

Here’s the problem: 

You still won’t look (or feel) like someone that trains as hard as you do, until you get lean enough. 

A great example of this is our online client Michael:

He already had a good amount of muscle on the left, but over the course of 12 weeks went from 178 to 162 lbs. 

Before starting coaching, Michael was struggling with the same thing you are right now - the hard work he was putting in at the gym wasn't reflected back to him in the mirror.

Given you already have a good amount of muscle mass, getting leaner is usually the missing link here, just like it was for Michael.

That's exactly why in today's blog, we're digging into the science-backed nutrition strategy you need to finally uncover your best physique over the next 12 weeks.

Here's the plan:

→ Phase 1 [Weeks 1-5]: Rapid Fat Loss

→ Phase 2 [Week 6]: Diet Break

→ Phase 3 [Weeks 7-12]: Final Push W/ Floating Refeed

[WEEKS 1-5]: RAPID FAT LOSS PHASE

We know that the more aggressively you lose fat, the higher the risk of of muscle loss is during the fat loss process.  

But why does muscle loss happen?

It comes down to something call net muscle protein balance:

(1)

TRANSLATION:

Your muscles are essentially "built from protein".  

→ Muscle protein synthesis (MPS) is the process of your body repairing/adding to your current muscle protein. 

But there’s another, more sinister force at work here... 

→ Muscle protein breakdown (MPB) is the process of your body breaking down muscle protein.

You muscle proteins are basically stuck in a constant battle between MPS and MPB - sometimes rate of MPS is greater than MPB, sometimes vice-versa.

→ To build muscle: we need positive net protein balance - more MPS have occurred than MPB - cross any given timeframe.

→ To lose muscle: More MPB than MPS must have occurred.

Maintaining (or ideally, building) muscle as you get leaner is crucial to achieving an impressive physique at the end of your 12 week fat loss phase.

Most people struggle to reach the body the want not because they don't get lean enough... but because they don't have as much muscle as they need to achieve the aesthetic the want when they are lean (this is a very common struggle for women and men alike, and one we've helped many clients remedy through our online coaching program.)

SO WHY DOES FAT LOSS PUT ME AT RISK FOR MUSCLE LOSS?

To understand why a smart, science-based approach to fat loss like our clients use is so important, you first need to understand why you're at risk of losing muscle if you go about fat loss the wrong way.

1. Your Body's Rate Of Muscle Protein Synthesis Is Slowed While Dieting

Eating in a calorie deficit (eating fewer calories than you burn) seems to reduce your baseline levels of MPS, as well as the degree to which your body increase MPS as a response to consuming protein. (2)(3)(4)

Muscle is an "energy expensive" (it takes lots of calories) tissue for your body to build and maintain. So in a period of calorie scarcity, it wouldn't make sense for your body to prioritize adding or maintaining lots of this "expensive" tissue.

2. Training Performance Can Be Worse

Calories are energy. So when you're eating in a calorie deficit for fat loss, you're literally in an "energy deficit", and thus have less energy to freely spend on things like pushing hard in your training. 

Lifting challenging weights is the primary signal to your body that adding (or at least maintaining) muscle is important.

So if training performance suffers dramatically, maintaining or building muscle while losing fat is much less likely.

This is why the nutrient-timing recommendations we'll discuss below are so important.

3. Your Body Is More Likely To Use Protein As A Fuel Source

When plenty of energy (calories) is available, your body prefers to use carbs and fats as its fuel sources, as the process of converting protein to a usable energy source for your body (gluconeogenesis) is energy expensive and inefficient.

That said, when dieting and short on available energy, your body just doesn't have enough energy coming in (in the form of carbs and fats) to fuel itself, so it can potentially start breaking down more muscle protein as a fuel source.

You'll have more in the tank as far as your ability to train right now because you're not as lean.

So after hearing all of this, you're probably wondering...

"Why are we starting off with a RAPID fat loss phase? Won't that cause me to lose even more muscle?"

WHY WE'RE STARTING OFF WITH RAPID FAT LOSS

Over short time frames (4-6 weeks), and when you're not as lean, we don’t need to nearly as much about muscle loss accompanying rapid fat loss (as long as you're still training hard). 

Here's why.

1. You're Starting At A Higher Body Fat Percentage

We do have research that seems to indicate the amount of muscle vs. fat lost depends on how lean you are. (8)

Think: when you're less lean, your body has plenty of fat stores to pull from for energy to compensate for the lack of calories being eaten. This makes muscle protein breakdown less likely.

As you get leaner (probably below ~12% body fat for men and ~18% for women), pushing aggressive fat loss is more likely to result in muscle loss, as your muscle protein will suddenly become a much more likely candidate to be broken down for energy.

So at the start of a diet (given you're not already <12% body fat), it makes sense to be more aggressive, and then slow rate of loss as you get leaner.

2. Training Performance Will Still Be High

On a similar note to the above point, much of how hard you're able to train (which again, is very helpful for preserving or building muscle mass) is tied to how lean you are.

Even though calories will be low (which of course does still impact training, but is far from the only factor here), much of the "low energy" levels associated with dieting come from changes in levels of the hormone leptin.

Leptin is essentially your body fat regulator. It's secreted from your body's fat cells. So as fat cells shrink, leptin levels also decrease.

Low levels of leptin will cause hunger to increase, but will also cause your body to "put the brakes" on any excessive energy expenditure.

This means as you get leaner, you also get more lethargic - a partial cause of drops in training performance.

That said, realize that leptin levels are also influenced by carbohydrate intake in the acute setting (levels can be dramatically increased or decreased in a matter of days, depending on your intake). So again, body fat isn't the only thing that matters here.

But the fact that you're less lean means that you'll still be able to push much harder in your training on lower calories than you'd be able to later in the diet.

Motivation is highest, hunger is lowest, and your energy levels in your training are highest during the first month of the diet. 

 You’re still so fresh to the diet and training performance won’t be dramatically impacted also means you’ll be able to hang onto (or even continue to build).

That’s why we’re going to be pushing along aggressively for the first 5 weeks, before taking a week at maintenance.  

[RAPID FAT LOSS PHASE] RATE OF LOSS AND MACROS

→ Rate Of Loss: 1-1.5% of bodyweight per week.

→ Calculating Calorie Intake: 

1. Determine your current maintenance calories (if you don't know, use this calculator for a rough estimate).

2. Determine how many pounds per week you need to be losing to hit the desired rate of loss (I.e. a 200 lb man losing 1.5% of body weight per week would be losing 3 lbs per week).

3. Eating 3,500 calories below your maintenance equals 1 lb of fat lost. So if you need to lose 2 lbs per week, you need to eat 7,000 calories below your maintenance intake across the week.

→ Calculating Macros: 

PROTEIN - Adequate protein is crazy important here.

1. It’s the most filling food, so making it a focal point of every meal will help prevent cravings and overeating.

2. The amino acids in protein are the building block of muscle tissue. So plenty of dietary protein is a must to prevent your body from breaking down muscle protein due to lack of available protein via your diet.

3. It burns the most calories during digestion. All foods have a “thermic effect” - meaning they actually burn calories while being digested. Protein by far burns the most calories during digestion:

So basically, eating plenty of protein is very important for the physique you want, and can even speed up your fat loss a bit.  

FATS - Fats are important to prevent major hormonal disruption, as many of your hormones are actually built (in part) from dietary fat. That said, there's a very clear "ceiling" where we stop receiving any major benefits from eating more fat.

CARBS - Once you’ve hit the recommended doses of the above, it’s smart to fill the remainder of your calories with carbs. 

Remember, you’re not just here to lose fat. 

You also want to maintain (or ideally build) as much muscle as possible. This is very much a product of how hard you’re able to train during your diet. 

Carbs are the fuel source your body prefers to burn, and the one it runs on most optimally when you’re training to build muscle. 

When training in the 5-15 rep range (which is where a majority of your sets should be for muscle gain or maintenance), most of your sets will last 20-40 seconds.

Your energy system responsible for fueling intense bouts of training in the 20-40 second range is fueled exclusively by carbs:

So filling the remainder of your calories with carbs is essential to fueling your training to the best of your ability, and achieving the result you want at the end of this diet.

→ Final Macro Recommendations:

• Protein: 1-1.5g per pound of body weight
• Fat: .3-.4g per pound of body weight
• Carbs: The rest 

OTHER KEY CONSIDERATIONS DURING THE RAPID FAT LOSS PHASE

1. Nutrient Timing

For someone who’s been training multiple years like you, whether you build, maintain, or lose muscle during this cut is largely a product of how well you manage the smaller (but still important) details.

One such detail you shouldn't overlook is nutrient timing.

→ Consume 3-5 meals/snacks, with 3-5 hours between, each containing 30g+ protein

Not only will having a 30g+ bolus of protein help you achieve the “satiating dose” needed to get the maximum amount of fullness from your meal (thought to be around 20g of protein in a meal), it'll also help you stimulate muscle protein synthesis more frequently.

We need 2.5g+ of the amino acid leucine found in protein to optimally stimulate MPS - this is the "leucine threshold". 

Consuming 30g+ of protein from a quality source is a safe bet to ensure you've hit this threshold.

"But why not just eat all my protein with a single meal?"

Upon consuming protein, once enough protein is taken in to saturate the muscle, the “muscle full” effect happens:  

1. ~30 mins after consuming an adequate bolus of protein, rate of MPS ~triples. 

2. At ~90 mins, rate of MPS peaks, before returning to baseline levels at ~2 hours.  

This return to MPS baseline occurs regardless of how much protein is still available in your bloodstream.

So you need to re-stimulate MPS in a few feedings across the day to consistently keep rate of MPS higher. As long as you get 4 feedings with 3-5 hours in between, and one pre-bed, you’re probably in a good place here.

Jorn Trommelen and the Stronger By Science team did an excellent job illustrating smart protein timing to maximize MPS in their article on perfecting protein intake:

2. Carb Timing 

The reality of aggressive dieting is, carbs will be limited.  

One more time, you want to do everything possible to ensure you’re still crushing your training. 

This means it’s smart to center most of your daily carb intake pre + post workout. This will have you better fueled during your training, and better recovering afterwards. 

3. Steps

The most underrated key to quick fat loss. 

As we know, fat loss comes down to energy balance:

→ Calories in > Calories out = Weight gain

→ Calories in < Calories out = Weight loss

Everything we've discussed relates to manipulating calories in. 

But that doesn’t matter much if calories out are constantly varying. 

See, along with the decrease in leptin while dieting comes a down-regulation in N.E.A.T (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) - movements like pacing fidgeting, blinking, etc. make up the calories you burn via N.E.A.T.

Calories from N.E.A.T. do make up a good chunk of the calories you burn in a day...

...so when our body senses less energy (food) coming in, it tries to prevent fat loss by reducing N.E.A.T.

One of the best ways to counteract this is to set a daily step goal. 

If you’re not currently hitting a step goal, I would simply make an effort to walk a reasonable amount over the next few days, track your streps, and determine a realistic number you can hit daily. 

Over the next 12 weeks, ensure you hit this to prevent any dramatic down-regulations in calories out (And stalled fat loss).

FINISHING THE RAPID FAT LOSS PHASE

By the end of Week 5, you’ve lost 5-7.5% of your body weight. (So a 150lb woman could have lost 7-9lbs.)

Good work. Now it’s time for the diet break.

[WEEK 6] DIET BREAK

You’re going to dramatically increase your calorie intake for the next week, back to maintenance levels. 

Here’s what to do: 

1. Determine your average rate of loss over the last 3 weeks. 

2. Remember the “3,500 calories below maintenance equals 1 lb of fat loss" guideline we talked about before? Use this to determine how large of a deficit you’re currently in based on rate of loss (e.g. if losing 2 lbs per week, you're in a 7,000 calorie per week deficit), and reverse engineer from there to establish what your maintenance calorie intake currently is. 

3. Bump calories back up to your maintenance intake, ideally keeping protein and fat intake the same as they have been for the last 5 weeks, and ramping up carbs. (So if you were in a 1000 calorie per day deficit, you’d increase carbs by 250g per day, for the next week.) 

WHY TAKE A DIET BREAK?

1. Refill Muscle Glycogen Stores

Muscle glycogen is essentially carbohydrate stored in your muscle and liver. 

Having larger stores of this is beneficial to your ability to train hard. 

But of course, as carbs get more limited on a diet, muscle glycogen stores decrease, which in turn can hurt your ability to train hard. 

Taking a diet break allows you to refill muscle glycogen stores, and improve training quality dramatically.

2. Decrease In Hunger

A recent study on one week diet breaks by Jackson Peos and colleagues (6) seemed to show they're an effective tool to decrease hunger and desire to eat:

3. Mental Preparation For The Final Fat Loss Phase

A large part of the benefit of diet breaks is psychological. 

Typically, the larger the deficit you’re in, the more challenging it’ll be to maintain mentally. This is further compounded by the fact that you’re still training hard at least 4 times per week. 

Fortunately, taking a one week diet break has been shown to decrease irritability and increase alertness, and will have you refreshed and ready to push again. (5)

FINAL DIET BREAK CONSIDERATIONS

1. Food Choices

The biggest diet break mistake people make is thinking a diet break is a time to just constantly eat lots of calorie-dense foods. 

This pretty quickly puts you over your calorie goal, and isn't a realistic picture of how you need to eat long-term to sustain your results. 

Stick mostly to the foods you normally eat, just in greater quantities. When you try to work in too many calorically-dense foods, you can easily eat more calories but be less satiated than when you're on your diet. 

2. Weight Gain 

You’ll likely feel a bit fluffier and weigh a bit more. Your body is holding more water, and your gut content has increased. This doesn't mean you’ve gained fat back. 

If calories in are equal to calories out (which is the goal in a diet break), you won't gain fat.

3. Mindset

This isn't just a time where you eat whatever and don't track. Think of this time as practicing maintaining, refuel your body, and prepare mentally for the next 6 week fat loss phase.

[WEEKS 6-12] THE FINAL PUSH

You’ve already put in a lot of work over the last 6 weeks. Time to finish this cut strong.  

You'll be taking a bit different approach for the next 6 weeks vs. what you did the first 6.

→ Rate Of Loss: .5-1% of body weight per week.

Now that you're getting very lean, we're following the recommendations given by Eric Helms and colleagues for natural bodybuilders. (6)

This slower rate of loss means you'll likely be able to eat more than before. 

This will help keep training quality high, and also make the remainder of the diet much easier to stick to mentally (as you have more calories to work with). 

→ Calculating Calorie Intake

1. Determine how many lbs per week you need to be losing to hit the desired rate of loss.

2. Determine your current maintenance calories.

3. Eating 3,500 calories below maintenance equals 1 lb of fat lost. So if you need to lose 1lbs per week, you need to eat 3,500 calories below your maintenance intake across the week. 

→ Calculating Macros

These stay the same as before - the same considerations for nutrient timing apply as well.

• Protein: 1-1.5g/lb
• Fat: .3-.4g/lb
• Carbs: The rest

IMPLEMENTING THE FLOATING REFEED DAY

One new element that we’re adding here is a “floating refeed” day. 

Consider this a mini diet break.  

Basically, it’s a single optional day at maintenance that you can use once per week, on the day of your preference.  

In an ideal world, you’d apply the same macro approach as the diet break here (increasing calories mostly via carbs) to replenish muscle glycogen stores, which again helps out your training. 

But, the real benefit of the floating refeed is as an adherence tool to stick out these last 6 weeks of your diet. So it's ok if you'd prefer to add in more fat and less carbs, as long as you control calories. 

Knowing that you have the flexibility to work in a few more glasses of wine, or a bit more food at your favorite restaurant while out to dinner if you want to once per week allows our clients to see the diet through. 

Here’s how we’d normally set this up in an online client's metric tracker:

That said, remember that this is optional - if it doesn’t feel needed, and you’d rather see quicker fat loss, you’re welcome to stay in the deficit.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

Over the 6 weeks of the final fat loss push, you can realistically lose another 2.5-5% of your body weight.

This puts your total at 7.5-12.5% of body weight lost over the last 12 weeks.  (An initially 200 lb man could have dropped all the way to a shredded 175. An initially 150 lb woman could have dropped all the way to a lean 132.)

You’ve also been able to maintain (if not build) muscle, and likely have uncovered your best physique yet.

Next, it's crucial that you have a plan for the diet after the diet. (Check out our Reverse Dieting Guide here.)

These are the same science-backed strategies we implement with our online clients undergoing the physique transformation process. 

If you're ready to be coached 1-1 by our team to your best physique ever, click here now to apply for online coaching with our team.

It's time to take your muscle building workout plan up a notch. It's no secret that the best way to build muscle is by lifting weights, but how much weight? What exercises should you do? How often should you train? All of these questions can be answered and more below.

In the video below, Jeff Hoehn (check out the strategies we used when coaching Jeff through his photoshoot prep here) and I talk through the keys you need to consider within your training to start building muscle faster ↴

KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR YOUR MUSCLE BUILDING WORKOUT PLAN

There are four main principles you need to focus on in order to build muscle faster:

1. Progressive Overload

2. Specificity

3. Intensity

4. Fatigue Management

Let's dig into each.

PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD FOR BUILDING MUSCLE

To quote Renaissance Periodization’s excellent Scientific Principles Of Hypertrophy Training:  

“In order to produce improvements in performance, training must be challenging enough to the targeted systems or tissues to stimulate adaptation.” 

Your body is an adaptation machine - it’s constantly striving to get better at managing the stressor it’s faced with.  

The first time you squatted 135 lbs for 10 reps, it was probably quite a stressful event for your body. The stress of this event triggered your body to adapt and grow stronger/more muscular, to be better prepare for similar events like this in the future.  

Now, if you continued to squat 135 lbs for 10 reps, you would eventually reach a point where the stress (we’ll often refer to this stress as “stimulus” in this blog) created by this event was so small, that your body no longer felt the need to further adapt.  

This is the principle of overload: you’ll literally often need to add load, reps, or sets across your training career in order to keep pushing your body to further adapt and grow. This is also why doing the same sets, reps, and loads for months will quickly lead to stagnation. 

3 THINGS YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT OVERLOAD:

1. You need to be tracking your workouts to ensure that you're actually progressing over time. Our online clients use the Truecoach app. You can use a Google Sheet, pen & paper, or whatever you prefer. But you need clear reference points for past performance on specific movements to ensure you're doing more in the future.

2. Progressive overload doesn't mean add weight to the bar every time you train. Getting stronger over time in the 5-30 rep range is good, but simply moving heavier loads in itself won't actually stimulate muscle growth.

If your ability to execute a movement with good form deteriorates as you add load, you're actually going to get less muscle building stimulus from the movement than you would with a lighter weight.

Excellent execution of movements is the "foundation" that a muscle building workout must be built on.

3. Adding weight to the bar isn't the only way to create progressive overload. We can also use strategies like:

• Adding a rep with the same weight
• Adding another set
• Changing tempo
• Improving technique

So how do I know if I should add or decrease load?

→ DECREASE LOAD: Typically, if mind-muscle connection with the target muscles decreases with a load increase, and/or if joints start to hurt more.

→ ADD LOAD: You can max out the prescribed rep range and hit your RIR (reps in reserve) target for said movement, and don't experience a large drop-off in mind-muscle conncetion or increase in joint stress with added load.

SPECIFICITY FOR BUILDING MUSCLE

The way you’re training needs to be specific to your #1 desired outcome from your training.

For example...   

→ Your #1 goal is building muscle, but your program has you doing lots of olympic lifts for sets of 1, 2, or 3… you're violating the principle of specificity. 

We know that:  

 a.) When it comes to the concept of Stimulus-to-Fatigue Ratio (more on this soon), most olympic lifts are a poor match for stimulating muscle growth.  

b.) The low rep ranges you’re working with will likely be insufficient to stimulate new muscle growth. 

→ Your #1 goal is building muscle, but your program is based on burning lots of calories, or utilizes extremely short rest periods… you’re violating the principle of specificity. 

You could grow a bit of muscle from training like this - but the largest adaptation you’ll be forcing is the progression of your aerobic system, not muscle growth.  

→ Your #1 goal is building muscle, but a large amount of your time is spent focused on running, HIIT style training, biking, etc… you’re violating the principle of specificity. 

Nothing at all wrong with any of these modalities of training, and this isn’t to say they shouldn’t be done at all while simultaneously training for building muscle.  

But they’re far from the most effective way to stimulate muscle growth. With your #1 goal being muscle growth, the majority of your time should be spent focusing on the modality of training that will yield the most progress per unit of time invested. 

→ Your #1 goal is building muscle, and your program is focused on creating overload over time in the 5-30 rep range, while training relatively close to failure (usually stopping with 1-3 reps in the tank), and taking adequate rest periods (usually 1.5-3 mins)... you’re honoring the principle of specificity for muscle growth.

INTENSITY FOR BUILDING MUSCLE

Here, we're going to define intensity as...

"How hard you're pushing yourself in any given set."

You can be hyper-specific to your goal of building muscle... but if intensity isn't adequate, you won't actually grow.

On the flipside, training too hard can also hinder growth... because you can create too much fatigue in your training for your body to recover from (and thus stunt your ability to grow).

The duality of this means we need a smart tool to make sure online clients are pushing themselves hard enough in their training, but not too hard.

Enter: Reps In Reserve (RIR)

RIR gauges how many reps you have in the tank at the end of a set. 

Ask yourself at the end of a set: 

“How many more reps could I have squeezed out with good form if I absolutely had to?” 

Your answer is your Reps In Reserve (RIR), or how many reps you feel you had left before failure. 

The closer you take a set to failure, the more muscle fibers you recruit and fatigue. It’s thought that the last few reps of a set are by far the ones you get the most out of - the most "effective reps", because they do the most to disrupt homeostasis and spark new muscle growth.

But again, this is a balancing act between doing enough and doing too much.

So the most effective place to spend most of your time is likely with ~2RIR on average across a mesocycle/training phase (this could mean training at 2RIR every week, or moving from 3RIR to 0-1RIR across a training phase).

TO ENSURE YOU'RE TRAINING HARD ENOUGH TO BUILD MUSCLE:

It's important to audit your proximity to failure on each of your work sets in your training.

Generally, if you can do the exact same weight for the same reps across 3-5 sets it's a good sign you're either:

a.) Not pushing your first few sets hard enough

b.) Push your last few sets too hard

This is especially true for men, who have a slower recovery ability between sets. 

Women typically have the ability to recover quicker (both between sets and between training days), so are more likely able to repeat performance like this across multiple sets.

FATIGUE MANAGEMENT FOR BUILDING MUSCLE

One of the most underrated parts of an effective hypertrophy program is understanding how to manage fatigue well enough to allow your body to grow.  

When you look at the SRA Curve (stimulus - recovery - adaptation) below...

 [Image credit: bretcontreras.com]  

...you’ll see that after experiencing the stress/stimulus of hard training, there’s a large amount of recovery that must happen simply to get your muscles back to their previous baseline before new growth can occur.

Too many hard working individuals like you fall into the trap of ignoring fatigue management and crushing yourself in the gym constantly.  

This often leads to your muscles barely being able to recover enough to get back to their previous baseline, due to the huge amount of fatigue created in your training.  

This is why so many people are working VERY hard in the gym, but still don’t look like they train.   

Fatigue management isn’t just making sure you get plenty of sleep, eat enough, and manage life stressors - it’s also very intertwined with your exercise selection… because the movements you select are what determine the magnitude of fatigue that is created/must be recovered from in order to grow.  

KEYS TO MANAGING FATIGUE FOR BUILDING MUSCLE:

1. Intermediate and beyond trainees lifting 4x/week+ should take deloads every 4-6 weeks.

2. Don't always train to failure. Again, across a mesocycle you should be averaging about 2RIR.

3. Apply the concept of stimulus-to-fatigue ratio (SFR). SFR is basically just a way of determining if the amount of muscle building stimulus you're getting from a movement is worth the amount of fatigue generated by doing said movement... or if you're better off plugging in a different movement with a better ratio of stimulus to fatigue.

Basically, we're weighing...

STIMULUS

• How good was the pump from said movement?
• How good was the mind-muscle connection?
• How much muscle disruption was incurred from the movement?

FATIGUE

• How much joint and/or connective tissue stress is the movement causing?
• What's the mental and physical fatigue toll caused by the movement?
• How taxing is the movement for non-target muscles and joints?

Some movements inherently create a lot of fatigue - especially those that load the spine heavily. 

With these movements, it's smart to continue training the few of these that give you a great training stimulus, and find less fatiguing variations of the same movement pattern (I.e. a cable row instead of a barbell bent row) for those that don't.

Finally, it's important to realize that stimulus-to-fatigue ratio will change for movements over time.

It's normal for a movement to start to "stall" after months of progressing it - SFR will decrease, and it's likely smart to plug in a different variation.

Signs it’s time to swap out a movement for a different variation:  

1. Movement has stalled out - No progression with a movement (i.e. adding reps or load) across a mesocycle.

2. Experiencing pain or discomfort with said movement.  

3. Fatigue generated by said movement is extremely high, and seems to be detracting from the rest of training, when an equally stimulative/less fatiguing movement could fill its place.

EXERCISE SELECTION FOR BUILDING MUSCLE

When the goal is building muscle with your workout, you want the "rate limiter" (the thing that forces you to eventually stop a movement) to be the specific muscle group(s) you're targeting.   

Let's say you're doing heavy Farmers Carries to train your core, and refuse to wear wrist straps.  

As a result, your grip always gives out long before core fatigue would cause you to stop the movement. 

Thus, this has become a pretty poor exercise for actually building a stronger core... but if the goal was building grip strength, it'd be a great fit.  

Some common examples of rate limiters on exercises that are stopping you from building lean muscle:  

→ Grip strength: See example above.  

→ Unstable exercises: The classic example of doing squats on a bosu ball applies here. You don't "fail" the movement because of fatigue in your quads, you fail due to a lack of stability. 

→ Cardiovascular Fatigue: The most common example of this is simply cutting rest periods too short between sets, or stringing together too many exercises in a row with inadequate rest (this is a big part of why we always prescribe specific rest periods for our online clients). 

BEST REP RANGES FOR BUILDING MUSCLE

When assigning rep ranges we know a few things…  

• When performing sets of less than 5 reps, you’ll need to do more total sets to make up for the low total volume per set.  
• Sets 5 shy of failure all the way to failure are thought to be “hypertrophic reps” that stimulate muscle growth… so you’ll likely get more growth from doing a set of 5 to failure vs. 4, as you’re adding one more hypertrophic rep. 
• We know that 30% of your 1 rep max for a movement seems to be the “floor” for the lightest we want to take a weight, as using weight lighter than this seems to be less effective for stimulating growth. So doing no more than 30 reps in a set is also a good idea for muscle growth.
• Most compound movements are better suited to the lower end of this spectrum (5-15 reps). 
• Most isolation movements are better suited to the higher end of this spectrum (10-30 reps). Going too heavy on a Bicep Curl or Lateral Raise usually just involves sloppy technique and recruit other muscles that shouldn’t necessarily be heavily involved.
• Training in the 5-10 rep range is likely a bit harder on your joints and tendons (due to the heavier loads used), so we probably shouldn’t spend all of our time here. 

So we can conclude that the best rep range guidelines for muscle growth:  

1. Train in the 5-30 rep range. 

2. Compound lifts should primarily be trained in the 5-10 and 10-20 rep range. Isolation lifts primarily in the 10-30 rep range. 

3. Too much time in any one of these rep ranges is probably slightly less productive than a mixture of the 3. 

4. It’s a good idea to vary these rep ranges across your training day.  

Meaning it’s smart to do your heaviest work (in the 5-10 range) when you’re freshest (at the start of a session).  

If you save your heavy Romanian Deadlifts until the very end of a lower body day after doing sets of 10-20 Walking Lunges and Leg Extensions, and 20-25 Leg Curls… the decrease in performance you’ll see vs. if you did your RDLs at the start of the session will be huge.  

But you wouldn’t see the massive drop-off in performance in all of the movements mentioned from doing the RDLs first in the session.

And that's how to start training to build more muscle, faster.

For a deeper dive into all of the concepts we discussed here, check out our Hypertrophy Training Guide.

Check out Jeff Hoehn's content:

→ Jeff's Instagram

→ Jeff's Website

→ The Mind-Muscle Connection Podcast

If you're ready to stop collecting information and start transforming your body, click here now to apply for online coaching with our team.     

We apply proven, science-backed nutrition & training methods through individualized coaching to help you get the body you want, and teach you on how to keep it for a lifetime.

You know that feeling when you finally get into the groove of a diet and you’re looking fabulous? And then, all of a sudden, at 3 pm or at night time, your stomach starts growling so hard it feels like it's going to punch through your ribcage. 

It makes it hard to sleep, and impossible not to reach for some snacks. 

Hunger is a self-inflicted wound in the battle of dieting. 

It's hard not to fall prey to it, especially when you're surrounded by food around the office or at home with your kids. 

Hunger can make any morsel of food look appealing and that might get you into trouble because you'll eat anything that looks appetizing even if it's not a fit for your macro plan. 

I’ve been there before. We all have. You're on a diet, and you can't get through the day without hunger pangs driving you crazy! 

But don't worry - I've got this! This blog is gonna give you some foods and tactics that will help take the edge off your ravenous appetite so you can stay on track for weight loss success.

WHY DOES DIETING MAKE US SO HUNGRY?

→ HORMONES

There are two main hormones that control our hunger and fullness: 

1. Ghrelin: The “hunger hormone”, and it is released when the stomach is empty.  When the stomach is filled, it is suppressed.

2. Leptin: The “fullness hormone”.  It is a little more complicated than ghrelin.  Leptin is correlated with fat cells.  The more adipose tissue you have, the more leptin you have.  The leaner you are, the less leptin you have.  For this reason, once you get lean enough you will feel more hunger more often. 

There are other hormones in the body that inhibit hunger like insulin, pancreatic polypeptide, amylin, peptide yy, and cholecystokinin (CCK), which are all released in response to eating food. 

All of these hormones are decreased as you lose weight.  

Our bodies are not optimized to want to lose weight... rather, they’re optimized to not starve to death, and they’re very good at it. 

→ STRETCH RECEPTORS

There are neurons, or “stretch receptors” in the intestines that tell our brain we are full and can stop eating.  

The food passes through the stomach and into the intestines where the intestinal wall is stretched, and the receptors send the signal through the vagal nerve to the brain that enough food has been eaten that you can stop and that releases the hormones listed above that inhibit hunger.  

When you reduce your calories but don’t switch up any food choices you reduce food volume, so you don’t have as much stretch in the intestines. 

→ EMOTIONAL HUNGER

A lot of hunger and cravings come from habits or emotions.  A lot of people turn to food for comfort, to fill time, to celebrate, or just out of habit at certain times of the day.  

If you have a snack at 8 pm every night before bed you’ll eventually get hungry at that time out of sheer habit, not out of true physical hunger. 

MINIMIZING HUNGER

→ FASTING

Ironically, fasting can be a useful tool when trying to stay full on a diet.

You have a smaller amount of calories to eat when trying to lose fat, so consolidating those calories to a smaller window during the day means you can eat a larger meal during the eating window.  

A lot of people aren’t hungry or don’t prefer to eat breakfast in the morning anyway, and if that’s you you may want to try intermittent fasting.  

Many find it easier to be really hungry for a couple of extra hours in the morning rather than a dull hunger all day long.

How to implement fasting: 

Let’s say your target calories for the day is 2000. 

Instead of...

• 7am: 500 calories 
• 11 am: 500 calories 
• 3 pm: 500 calories 
• 6 pm: 500 calories 

You could try...

• 1 pm: 800 calories 
• 3 pm: 200 calories (small snack) 
• 6 pm: 1000 calories 

This way you get to have larger meals later in the day because you’ve saved up calories by skipping breakfast.  

If you are someone who has any binge-eating tendencies this tactic could backfire, so know your personality and if this would work for you or cause problems. 

→ INCREASING PROTEIN

Protein is the most satiating macronutrient.  

Aside from maximizing muscle retention, and having a high thermic effect, protein is great to set high in a fat-loss phase because it is filling.  

Set your protein anywhere from 0.8-1.2 grams per pound of bodyweight (or higher if you really like protein and it doesn’t cause you any digestion problems).

→ HIGH VOLUME FOODS

High volume means a food takes up a lot of space for very few calories.  This means for less calories, you can get the stretch receptor response that cues your brain that you’re full.  

These foods usually have a high fiber and water content, which also helps fill you up. 

Some examples of high volume foods: 

• Salad:

  Salads are great because they take a long time to eat, they are full of water and fiber, you can mix in lots of other vegetables, and they’re a good vehicle for lean proteins.  Whenever a client is having a lot of hunger, we always suggest adding a big salad to their day.

• Cruciferous vegetables:  Cruciferous veggies include things like broccoli, cauliflower, and brussel sprouts.  They are high fiber and very few calories.  You don’t want to overdo these because they could cause digestive distress, but they’re very filling. 
• Fruit: Yes, fruit is not only OK to have on a diet, it’s great to include plenty of fruit!  Fruit is full of water, fiber, and micronutrients.  It’s great for killing a sweet tooth, too.  If you want to stick to the highest volume fruits, go for things like berries, oranges, watermelon, or apples. 
• Popcorn:  Popcorn is great because it takes a long time to eat, and it’s very low calories for a large serving size.  Air-popped popcorn is only 31 calories per cup and has 1.2 grams of fiber.  Just be aware of any toppings like butter or oil. 
• Oatmeal:  Since oatmeal is cooked with water, it ends up being a large amount of volume per calorie.  A half-cup of oatmeal ends up being about a cup when cooked and has 150 calories.  For comparison, a cup of granola has 560 calories. 
• Broth-based soups: Broth-based soups are great because they take time to eat, the broth is very low calorie, and you can include lots of vegetables and protein. 

→ FIBER

Including fiber in your diet is a good idea to keep you full longer.

Fiber has two types: 

1. Soluble: Soluble fiber mixes with liquid in your gut and forms a gel that expands. (Think of chia seeds that bulk up and form a gel that expands.  Same concept.) This means you get the stretch of your gut that causes fullness quicker with fewer calories.

2. Insoluble: Insoluble fiber doesn’t form a gel-like soluble, but it does activate the stretch receptors in the colon and helps you feel fuller for longer.  

Fiber also comes packaged in foods listed above in the volume food section that will also provide fullness. 

Good Fiber Sources: 

• Berries 
• Apples 
• Bananas 
• Carrots 
• Beets 
• Broccoli 
• Artichoke 
• Oats 
• Quinoa  
• Potatoes & Sweet Potatoes 
• Broccoli 
• Brussel Sprouts 
• Squash  
• Spinach 
• Okra 
• Asparagus 
• Kale 
• Mushrooms 
• Chia Seeds 
• Cacao/cocoa

→ SINGLE MACRO FOODS

Single-macro foods go right along with volume foods because eating foods with predominantly one macronutrient typically means you’re eating more food volume. 

Example: 

Which one has more volume and is more filling?  

A.) 4 oz chicken breast + a whole avocado 

Or...

B.) 4 oz ribeye 

Both have the same amount of fat, and the chicken and avocado meal actually has more protein. It's easy to conclude that the first option will likely yield much more fullness per calorie.

Here’s another example:

A.) 1 cup plain fat-free greek yogurt + 24 almonds + 1 cutie 

Or...

B.) 1 Protein bar 

Both of these options also have the same macros. 

The first option in each example is more filling because you’re having a protein source, a carb source, and a fat source, instead of having one food with mixed macros.  

This means you get more food volume/it’s more filling. 

→ WATER & FIZZY DRINKS

Water and other zero-calorie drinks will fill your stomach which will temporarily help you feel full.  

A lot of people will also feel hungry when they really just need to drink some water. Carbonated drinks have the added benefit of bubbles which make these drinks extra filling.  

This can include things like flavored carbonated water and diet soda, which are also sweetened so if you have a sweet-tooth these can help curb that craving as well. 

→ SLOW DOWN

Have you ever heard that it takes 20 minutes for your brain to realize you’re full? It’s true, and if you’re speed-eating you may eat past the point of fullness by mistake. 

You’ve probably experienced a time where you ate too quickly and ended up feeling stuffed a while after finishing, even though you felt comfortably full when finishing the food.  

Slowing down the pace of your eating means your intake won’t outpace your brain.   

There are a few different ways to force you to slow down when you have a habit of eating quickly:

1. Eat with your non-dominant hand. If you do this you probably just aren’t coordinated enough to eat too fast. 
2. Chew a certain number of times. This is probably annoying, but it can work because you may not be chewing your food thoroughly enough if you’re eating fast.  Bonus side-effect of this is you may experience less bloating because you’ll be gulping down less air if you’re chewing thoroughly. 
3. Set your fork/spoon down between bites, or take a couple of breaths between each bite. This automatically adds time between each bite so you can’t go too fast. 
4. Eat without distraction. You may be eating too fast just because you’re distracted.  If you eat mindfully and without doing anything else at the same time you will probably naturally slow down.

→ ZERO OR LOW-CALORIE FOODS

Zero and low-calorie foods can be a way to swap out high-calorie items like condiments, sauces, and other “extras”.  

Some examples of these foods:

• G. Hughes sugar-free BBQ, Teriyaki, Ketchup, and Honey Mustard sauces 
• Sugar-free syrup 
• Powdered peanut butter 
• Almond or other nut milks 
• Low-fat dressings 
• Sugar-free Jello 

Foods like these can allow you to use those calories for other more-filling foods.  

For example, instead of using up 50g of carbs on pancake syrup, you can use sugar-free syrup and have those carbs in the form of potatoes later in the day which will fill you up a lot more than syrup. 

One word of caution to keep in mind with these foods.... 

They do contain calories most of the time even if they say they don’t.  When a food has a negligible amount of calories per serving, the company is allowed to put 0g carbs/fat and 0 calories on the label even though the entire bottle may add up to hundreds of calories.  

These foods also commonly use sugar alcohols which can cause big-time digestive problems, so be careful with the amount you are using. 

→ GUM

Two of the types of hunger we talked about earlier were... 

1. Emotional

2. Habitual

...and gum can help with both of these.  

If you know you have a habit of snacking on something at 8 pm every night and this is a habit you want to break, putting a piece of gum in your mouth at 7:45 gives you something to chew on and taste, and it makes the food less appetizing.  

You would have to consciously take the gum out of your mouth to eat the snack, which brings mindfulness into the equation so you’re not grabbing something and eating it without thought. 

Hunger may be unavoidable toward the end of a diet or if you are getting very lean, but it doesn’t have to be unmanageable or constant.  

With the use of some of these tactics, you can mitigate the discomfort of severe hunger pangs to make sticking to your diet more doable so you can reach your body composition goals.  

Two other critical factors to whether your diet succeeds or not? 

1. Accountability 

2. Structure & a clear plan to follow 

Our online coaching service provides you with both. To apply to work with our team, click here to schedule a strategy call. We’ll create a tailored plan to get you to the physique you’ve always wanted, and expertly guide you through every step of your transformation.

"Reverse dieting supercharges your metabolism - you can lose, maintain, and gain on super high calories." 

"If you (or one of your clients) can’t lose fat on low calories, you need to reverse diet." 

"You NEED to reverse diet after weight loss to prevent gaining the weight back."

"My client increased their calories and got RIPPED reverse dieting!" 

Lots of claims are thrown around about reverse dieting... but are they true? 

If you haven’t reverse dieted, are you missing out on some serious metabolism boosting benefits, and dooming yourself to a life of under-eating?  

You have questions, today’s blog has answers.

WHAT IS REVERSE DIETING?

Reverse dieting is a common practice in the fitness and bodybuilding worlds 

Generally, the reverse dieting process looks something like… 

Post-diet, you very slowly increase calories (usually by 50-100 calories every 1-2 weeks). 

EXAMPLE: 

Let’s say a coach was working with a client who had gotten unsustainably lean for a photoshoot. 

This client’s current predicted maintenance calorie intake (the amount they can eat to maintain their current body fat) is 1800 calories, and the client is currently eating 1200. 

Using the traditional reverse dieting model, rather than immediately returning the client to their current estimated maintenance, they would be given calorie increases of 50-100 calories every 1-2 weeks. 

Thus, it would likely take 10-20 weeks to return the client to their estimated maintenance. 

HOW DOES REVERSE DIETING (SUPPOSEDLY) WORK?

So the thinking behind this method is… 

By slowly increasing calories, you give your metabolism time to speed up to match the small increases.  

Not only does this keep fat gain to a minimum, but also builds up your metabolism, (sort of like gradually increasing weights in the gym makes you stronger) allowing you to both maintain and lose on more calories in the future. 

While all of this sounds great… that’s unfortunately not how metabolism works. 

UNDERSTANDING METABOLISM

Metabolism: The sum of all the stuff your body does to burn calories.

We can divide metabolism up into 4 pieces: 

→ Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) -  The calories burned for basal processes to stay alive -  like your heart pumping, breathing, etc. Even if you spent the whole day in bed, our BMR wouldn’t change. 

BMR accounts for ~60-70% of daily calories burned. 

→ Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) - It takes calories (energy) for your body to digest the food that you eat. TEF also varies depending on the food you eat. (Protein: 20-35%, Carbs: 5-15%, Fats: 0-5%.) 

TEF accounts for ~10% of daily calories burned. 

→ Thermic Effect of Exercise (TEE) - The calories you burn exercising. 

TEE accounts for ~5% of daily calories burned. 

→ Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) -  Calories burned through movement outside of exercise. (Fidgeting, walking around the house, etc.) 

NEAT accounts for ~15-25% of daily calories burned, but varies drastically person-to-person. 

WHY METABOLISM CHANGES (ADAPTIVE THERMOGENESIS)

Now that you understand the basics of metabolism, let's talk about how changes. 

As you get leaner on a diet, your metabolism decreases because…

→ Your body is smaller, so BMR decreases. 

→ You're eating less food, so TEF decreases. 

→ TEE decreases, because it takes fewer calories to move your smaller body. 

→ NEAT generally decreases, as you feel lethargic due to lack of calories. 

→ Levels of the hormone Leptin decrease. This leads to an increase in hunger (increasing the odds you’ll overeat), and a subconscious decrease in energy expenditure. 

This is known as adaptive thermogenesis. As you eat more and gain more fat, the opposite happens - metabolism increases, hunger decreases.

Your metabolism isn't some invisible force screwing over your fat loss efforts. 

It's also not something we can just "ramp up" indefinitely with reverse dieting. It's mostly just a product... 

1. Your current body size

2. Your current food intake

3. Your daily movement

SO DOES REVERSE DIETING REALLY WORK?

Now that you have a solid understanding of metabolism and how we burn calories. Let’s separate fact from fiction by working through some common claims about reverse dieting.

Common Reverse Dieting Misconceptions

→ REVERSE DIETING MISCONCEPTION #1: Reverse dieting “supercharges your metabolism”, allowing you to diet and maintain on higher calories in the future. 

To eat more calories than you could before and maintain your weight, you must be burning more calories than before. 

You now know the 4 ways our body can burn calories (metabolism)... 

1. Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) 
2. Thermic Effect Of Food (TEF) 
3. Thermic Effect Of Exercise (TEE) 
4. Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT)

So being able to eat more and maintain, requires an increase in one or more of these factors. 

→  Basal Metabolic Rate: Typically higher the larger you are. We can really only increase this by gaining weight, which means either... 

a.) Adding fat 

b.) Adding muscle 

Adding fat WILL speed up your metabolism… but the goal of most reverse diets is to avoid fat gain. 

Adding muscle mass is part of why people’s metabolisms can increase slightly over time.  

Muscle is metabolically active tissue, meaning that adding extra muscle increases the calories you burn at rest. But, it’s not a huge difference. (Daily, you’ll burn ~6 calories more with each additional pound of muscle you gain.) 

Most of the metabolism boosting benefits of adding muscle come from the fact that moving a heavier body burns more calories. 

→  Thermic Effect Of Food: Calories burned during digestion increases as you eat more.  

But since a relatively small percentage of the total calories you eat in a meal are burned through TEF, eating more calories strictly to increase TEF doesn’t make sense - you’re now taking in more calories not burned during digestion as well. 

Increasing the % of calories consumed from protein is a smart strategy to increase TEF, and it does seem that protein is harder for your body to store as fat. 

But to avoid digestion issues, eat enough fat to stay healthy, and (for most of us) eat some delicious carbs… a diet of strictly protein isn’t realistic. Most people tap out eating more than 1.2-1.5g protein/lb. 

→  Thermic Effect Of Exercise: When you eat more, you can... 

a.) Train more. Eating more calories (to an extent) means better recovery, and therefore the ability to train more frequently with overdoing it. 

b.) Train more intensely. More energy (calories) in also typically increases our ability to output energy (again, to a certain extent).

Both of the factors mean that eating more usually leads to more calories burned through training. That said, the increase in calories burned here won’t be massive enough to skyrocket your metabolism. (And you have to remember, you're eating more calories to create these effects in the first place.) 

→  Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis: People’s NEAT varies a lot with how it responds to increases and decreases in calories (more on this later). 

A large part of NEAT (how much you tend to fidget, pace, and blink) is genetic. We can get clients focused on moving more (i.e. hitting a step goal)... but again, this requires the client actually physically moving more to burn more calories. 

So unfortunately, there’s nothing here we can “supercharge” by reverse dieting. If you want to be able to eat more and maintain your weight, you can... 

a.) Move more 

b.) Increase your body size 

→ REVERSE DIETING MISCONCEPTION #2: Lots of people get super lean on reverse diets. 

You’ve probably seen many posts on social media about someone who seemingly got shredded while reverse dieting. 

Let’s use a hypothetical coach and client example to illustrate why things might not be quite as they seem: 

• A client starts coaching with the goal of getting leaner. They’re “eating 1400 calories”, but not seeing any fat loss. 
• The coach increases said client’s calories to 1700 per day.  
• The client immediately starts consistently losing 2 lbs per week. 

Is this reverse dieting vodoo magic? 

Let’s consider what it takes to lose weight:

The most foundational principle of fat loss is calories. 

Calories in (calories consumed) must be less than calories out (a.k.a. calories burned through metabolism) to lose fat. 

This is the law of thermodynamics, and something we can’t ignore. 

• We know if the client wasn’t losing eating 1,400 calories per day, calories in were equal to calories out. So the client was eating 1,400 calories, but also burning 1,400 calories per day. 
• We also know losing 1 lb of fat per week requires eating 3,500 calories less than maintenance. 

So to go from maintaining on 1,400 calories per day, to losing on 1,700 calories per day… 

• Something about eating 300 calories more per day would have had to increase the clients metabolism by an extra 1,300 calories per day to cause them to lose 2 lbs per week vs maintaining before. 

To ensure this is still making sense:...

• Client not losing on 1,400 calories per day means that calories in currently = calories out. So the client is only burning 1400 calories per day.  
• Losing one lb of fat requires eating 3,500 calories below maintenance calorie intake (maintenance intake is 1400 for this client). Eating 500 calories below maintenance every day for a week = 1 lb of fat lost by the end of the week (500 x 7 = 3,500). 
• If the client is truly eating 300 calories more than before, and losing 2 lbs more per week, this requires the client burning an extra 1,300 calories per day vs. before. 
• [MATH: Client was previously eating 1,400 calories and maintaining, so calories in were = to calories out. Losing 2 lbs per week requires calories in to be 7,000 calories below calories out across the course of the week. Plus the client has added 300 more calories per day to their intake that must be accounted for.]

So to go from maintaining at 1,400 to losing at 1,700, the clients calories out/metabolism would have increased by an extra 1,300 calories per day or 9,100 calories more burned per week. 

As a refresher, the sum of calories out/metabolism is: 

1. Basal Metabolic Rate: Largely inflexible without gaining back lots of fat. Could see a small increase in calories burned due to increase in thyroid, but nothing significant. 
2. Thermic Effect of Food: Even if the 300 calorie increase was purely protein (the food with the highest thermic effect), calories burned via TEF would only increase by 100 (at most) - not even enough to make up for the total calorie increase.
3. Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis: As we’ve talked about, many people do see a large up-regulation in NEAT as a response to eating more. But an increase in 1,300 calories burned via NEAT is literally hours of extra movement from the client. 
4. Thermic Effect of Exercise: Similar to the above, people can train harder and more frequently with more food, which will burn more calories. But burning an extra 9,100 calories per week through exercise would likely require more than doubling the client’s current training load.

In a scenario where we’re assuming the client isn’t training and/or walking for hours more per week… there’s no possible mechanism by which the client is suddenly burning an extra 9,100 calories per week. 

What’s often happening here, is simply the effect of being coached. 

These people likely aren’t eating more calories than they were before when you look at an entire week (rather than a single low calorie day)... but rather have improved their measurement accuracy, food quality, and are eating macro ratios align with their goals now.  

Plus, they’re now likely following smart, well-structured training programs. 

This is something we see all the time with new clients (re: the above example), but it is NOT actually caused by the fact that people are eating way more calories. 

So really, instead of saying...

"Thanks to the reverse diet, this client is now eating 500 calories MORE per day and is RIPPED." 

It should be... 

"Hey, I got this client to measure her food super accurately, and she realized she was eating more than she thought. She's also following a smart training program now, and is more consistent - with both training and nutrition. All of this added up to a pretty big body composition change." 

So, can you lose fat reverse dieting? 

Absolutely. 

If you're increasing calories, but still eating fewer calories than you're burning, you'll keep losing fat. But again, it's not magic.

Sometimes over a reverse diet, people will initially see quicker weight loss, despite being in a smaller calorie deficit. 

This is because dieting can lead to higher cortisol levels, and water retention. A lot of times weight can be stuck for weeks, even though we know a client is in a calorie deficit, due to the amount of water they're retaining. 

More calories often will reduce stress levels, in turn reducing cortisol and water retention. 

→ REVERSE DIETING MISCONCEPTION #3: Your metabolism is extremely slow after a diet, and reverse dieting is the only way to prevent regaining the fat. 

You hear horror stories about people getting super lean... and then regaining the fat overnight. 

Reverse dieting is usually pitched at the solution to this. 

Now, there is truth to the idea that after a long fat loss phase, your body is primed for fat gain...

1. As we lose weight, our fat cells shrink. Smaller fat cells produce less leptin, which leads to an increased appetite (as leptin decreases, ghrelin - the hunger hormone - increases) and decreased energy expenditure. 
2. If you’re super lean post weight loss, your body wants to restore a body fat percentage that seems “healthy”. Again, some body fat is a prerequisite for many of the hormones you need to feel good - extremely lean individuals often just don’t have enough. 
3. You experience this "want" as excessive hunger signals and low energy. This combo makes eating excess calories hard to avoid... if you enter the post-diet phase without a plan. The weight regained is preferentially stored as body fat. 

Basically, the fact that you're really damn hungry, moving less, and burning fewer calories with your now smaller body creates a situation where rapid regain is likely if you don’t have a plan post-diet. 

Having a plan post-diet is incredibly important, and a huge part of why our clients get such sustainable results. (It just doesn't have to follow that traditional reverse dieting model.) 

*IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND*

The above description sounds terrifying, and makes it seem like regaining body fat would be inevitable post-diet...

But realize that this is your body's protective mechanism that kicks in when your body fat percentage has dipped below what your body deems as healthy.

For most individuals, this means getting extremely lean for a photoshoot or bodybuilding show (what we'd consider "unsustainably lean").

You can get to a sustainably lean physique without having to fight your body as hard as described above.

So yes, while your metabolism does "adapt" and down-regulate to match your smaller body size, it is not broken or "damaged". 

The myth of metabolic damage has been thoroughly dispelled. 

→ REVERSE DIETING MISCONCEPTION #4: Many overweight individuals are eating <1,000 calories per day, and need to reverse diet before being able to lose. 

You'll also often hear people say something like… 

"But I'm only eating 900 calories, and still can't lose fat!" 

This is a big driver of the popularity behind reverse dieting, actually. 

I know I struggled with this at the start of my coaching career, both with myself and with clients. We were both seemingly eating low calories, but not losing. 

The truth? 

We're usually just not good at tracking calories accurately. 

In fact, a 2002 study showed the even Registered Dietitians underestimate their calorie intake by 223 calories per day. 

I always use the example of a client who started coaching in 2019. 

She couldn’t seem to lose any fat, despite tracking her food, and only eating 800 calories per day. 

We immediately increased her calories drastically, and she lost 15 lbs in the span of a few months. 

Now, was it the actual calorie increase that caused her to lose?

Nope.  

This client also happened to have a job where she worked around food all day, and was forgetting to track the little bites and nibbles she took - which turned out to be well over 500 calories per day. 

Plus, a higher calorie plan was easier for her to stick to - she got more consistent. (Another reason why a more moderate approach to dieting generally works better.) 

This is the crux of why so many people that “Can’t lose on ____ low calories” suddenly seem to be able to lose on when eating more food. 

Eating super low calories tends to drive people towards “falling off” for 1-2 days per week (and effectively negating any calorie deficit they’d created with the low calorie days). These individuals always feel like they’re dieting hard, but never actually see any progress. 

Most (not all) will find a more flexible approach is easier to be consistent with, and thus will yield quicker fat loss after just a few weeks.  

I’ve been on hundreds of calls with new online clients over the last few years, and at least 3/4ths of the time, said client (often a coach themselves) will report that they’re eating a surprisingly low amount of calories, and not able to achieve the physique they want. 

Even with advanced clients, we’ll discover large gaps in their tracking (often not tracking at all or largely guesstimating the weekends). 

We could easily claim… 

“This client started coaching eating ___ low calories (but really they just weren’t tracking everything they were eating), but now they’re losing eating much higher calories (but really they’re eating less than before, just tracking accurately).”  

The other side of this equation is NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis).  

As you’ll remember from above, NEAT does make up a big chunk of your metabolism.  

Research seems to show that the biggest difference between the metabolisms of lean and obese individuals is the amount of calories they burn through NEAT. 

As shown above, NEAT has been shown to vary up to 2,000 calories per day between the lean and obese. 

A large part of how many calories you burn through N.E.A.T. is genetic - some people naturally fidget and pace more. 

But we can somewhat make up for this by setting daily movement goals (exactly what we do with all of our online clients focused on fat loss). 

Most people who are tracking food accurately but still aren’t losing aren’t tracking the other end of the equation: daily movement. 

If calories in (food intake) are constant, but calories out (calories burned through movement) is constantly fluctuating or unaccounted for, it makes complete sense why someone wouldn’t see the results expected from eating a specific calorie intake.

They’re only accounting for half of the calories in - calories out equation. 

If you’re working with an obese individual who’s seemingly eating very low calories and not losing weight, it would be wise to: 

1. Educate them on the importance of accurate tracking, adequate protein, and daily movement goals.
2. Encourage them to get bloodwork done, to ensure the client doesn’t have something like a thyroid issue (which reverse dieting won’t fix) that could be causing stalled fat loss.

Again, dieting is hard on the body when individuals push to get very lean (i.e. prepping for a bodybuilding show), and full hormonal recovery can take 6 months or more.

But that’s a completely different context than an individual who has seemingly been dieting for a decent period of time, but is still in an unhealthy body fat range. 

In cases like this, it will seem like the client is eating more and losing (due to more accurate tracking and more movement)... but actually stopping fat loss reverse diet simply because the client has been “dieting” for an arbitrary amount of time is likely detrimental to the client. 

→ REVERSE DIETING MISCONCEPTION #5: Individuals that have previously dieted on low calories but reverse dieted up to super high calories will have it "easier" next time they diet. 

From my experience as a nutrition coach, most client's metabolisms fall into one of two categories: 

→ Adaptive Metabolisms: For these people, when you eat more, your body automatically increases NEAT to compensate. (Think: subconscious fidgeting, blinking, pacing, etc.)  

Their body adapts to higher calorie intake by increasing calories burned through movement - so weight stays the same, even with calorie increases.  

People like this can typically maintain at a relatively high calorie intake, but the reduction in NEAT when they decrease also means they have to drop calories lower than expected to lose fat. 

→ Rigid Metabolisms: These people see very little or no increase in NEAT as a response to overeating. Thus fat gain is a bit easier. 

But on the bright side, these people usually don't have to decrease calories as much to lose fat (because calories burned through NEAT doesn't decrease as much as it would for an adaptive metabolism). 

To prove this idea, A 1999 study fed 16 people 1,000 calories over their maintenance intake per day. 

• Weight gain between individuals varied from .8 lbs to 9.3 lbs - a huge difference in 8 weeks. 
• The change in NEAT between individuals also varied wildly, from -98 cals up to +692 cals per day.  

Basically, the 16 people in the study had crazy different responses to eating the same calorie surplus. There's a huge variance in how people's energy expenditure (via NEAT) will respond to overfeeding or underfeeding. 

This is another reason why we see so many stories about people who were previously dieting on very low calories, but now can maintain on so many more, thanks to reverse dieting. 

They’re simply people with more adaptive metabolisms...

• When they’re fed less, they tend to move a lot less. 
• When they’re fed more, they tend to move a lot more. 

So those with adaptive metabolisms almost always seem like “hyper-responders” to reverse diets, because they usually have to diet on lower calories, but ramp NEAT way up when eating more (and thus can maintain on higher calories). 

This creates a large gap between the calorie floor they must drop below to lose fat, and the calorie ceiling they can increase to without gaining fat - the disparity in total calorie intake will usually be quite impressive. 

Thing is, even though the clients' reverse diet calories will seem very impressive, they’ll still have to take calories low the next time they diet. 

Now, if the client built a decent amount of muscle between diets, is more mindful of their step goal, and/or is eating much more protein than before, they will be able to lose on higher calories than before. 

But if the client had been doing things in a mostly “smart” manner before, their calorie intake needed to get to the same level of leanness will likely be very similar to last time. 

[*COACHES NOTE: with clients you know have more adaptive metabolisms, it makes sense to be more aggressive out of the gate in a fat loss phase, rather than wasting time with small calorie adjustments.] 

A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO REVERSE DIETING

The mistake a lot of people make is trying to reverse way too slowly, and often trying to stay at an unhealthy level of leanness. 

What ends up happening is, you spend months extra in a deficit (which usually correlates to feeling & training terrible). This leads to months of wasted time that could have been productive training and making progress in the gym. 

The reality is, we all have a certain body fat percentage we need to be at to feel good, train hard, and actually allow our body to prioritize building muscle. 

No amount of reverse dieting can make up for the fact that if you're sitting below this point, you won't build muscle, feel good, or have healthy hormones. 

Basically, being a bit more aggressive coming out of a diet (to a degree) makes sense. 

When reverse dieting we need to consider the desired outcome - which is to get your hormones & training back to a good place, right? 

Problem is, if you're just reversing you out of a diet extremely slowly, you're still in a deficit for another 10-20 weeks. 

That means another 10-20 weeks where hormones & training suck, until we eventually reach maintenance, and then your body can start to recover. 

This begs the question... 

"If the goal of the reverse diet IS to recover, why not just take you to your (new & lower with your smaller body) maintenance quicker?"

Unless your goal is simply to maintain, the sooner you can get back to productive training, the sooner we can get back to building the physique you want long-term. 

Spending actual time eating more food and building muscle is the best way to increase your metabolism, and make getting lean easier in the future. 

Next time you get lean, you'll have more muscle mass (even if you don't lose fat, INCREASE muscle mass decreases your body fat - which will make looking lean easier). 

HOW TO REVERSE DIET (OUR APPROACH)

Ready for a plot twist? 

 Our online clients still (usually) follow a reverse diet protocol post-diet. 

But rather than slowly backing out of a deficit to maintenance (which seems to be pretty pointless), reverse dieting is simply our way of finding how high we can push a clients calories post diet without them gaining excess fat. 

Understanding where this ceiling is: 

1. Makes it easier for clients who are content with their current bodies to keep their results - they know the most calories they can eat and maintain on. 
2. Tells us where we need to set calories to hit a target rate of gain for clients entering a building phase. 

So as you’ll remember, across the course of the diet, your metabolism is going to down-regulate due to adaptive thermogenesis. 

When we start feeding you more and your body senses more energy coming in post-diet, your metabolism will start to speed back up again. 

• You're eating more, so the thermic effect of food will be increased.  
• Because you were eating more, you'll have more energy. So N.E.A.T. will increase. 
• Due to increased energy, you'll also like train harder (and thus burn more calories). 
• Many will add back some weight via muscle mass, muscle glycogen, and gut content. A heavier, more muscular body is one that'll burn more calories, both when moving and at rest. 

So, what we're doing in the reverse dieting process is trying to match these gradual increases in metabolism with your calorie intake.  

Let's dive in to a general outline of the reverse dieting process we use with most clients: 

1. How To Start Reverse Dieting

When you've achieved your fat loss goal, we'll start by bumping your calories to 80-90% of your new estimated maintenance intake. 

Let's say you started the diet 30 pounds heavier than you are now. 30 lbs ago, you maintained your weight on 3000 calories... but again, your metabolism slows across the diet.  

This means your new maintenance intake will be lower than your starting maintenance intake was... so don't jump back to where your maintenance calories at the start of the diet were.  

To make calculating your new maintenance easy, let's say you've been losing one pound per week for the last four weeks.  

• We know that to lose a pound of fat, you need to be eating in about a 3,500 calorie deficit. And let's say you've been eating 2000 calories per day.
• Since you're losing 1 lb per week, we know you're about 3,500 calories below maintenance per week, or 500 calories below maintenance per day.  
• We can assume to maintain your weight, you could eat 2,500 calories per day/3,500 calories per week.  

So to start the reverse diet, we're going to bump you up to 80-90% of this estimated maintenance, just to make sure you don't overshoot that and actually gain fat.  

We prefer this large initial jump with clients, because being in a calorie deficit is very taxing both physically and psychologically. It's very stressful, and not something you want to spend unnecessary time doing. 

So we're going to bump you up close to your new estimate and maintenance as quickly as possible.  

2. How To Tell If The Reverse Diet Is Working

Gauge how your body responds to the initial jump in calories.

We're watching clients body weight changes, measurements change and biofeedback closely.  

Here's what we're looking at:

→ Body weight: The first week of the reverse diet, most women will gain about 2-4 lbs of weight. Most men will gain about 3-5lbs. 

You're taking in more carbs, and eating more total food.  

Glycogen stores are being refilled - basically, your muscles are going to take in more carbohydrates, which are also going to soak up more water. This will help training performance & recovery.

Plus, you literally just have more food weight (gut content) in your belly.   

The thing to realize is, this isn't fat gain. It's glycogen, water, and gut content. 

→ Measurements: As always with our online clients, we're assessing how measurements are changing - NOT just looking at weight.  

These are the measurements our online clients take...

We're looking for these to more or less stay the same, except for the 2" below the navel - this is the measurement that's most reactive to gut content, so it's was normal for this to be up a bit. 

It's also normal week to week to see +/- .25"-.5" measurement increase or decreases, but they'll bring themselves back to baseline over the next 1-2 weeks if you're truly at maintenance - so avoid overcorrecting here. 

→ Biofeedback: We want to see hunger and cravings decreasing, motivation, energy levels, training performance, and recovery (all things we have our online clients track) improving. 

→ Mindset:  It's super important to stay just as focused, and pay just as much attention to detail during the reverse diet as during the fat loss phase (this is a big part of why being coached through this process yields such good results). 

This is how we get you to the point where you can maintain you current body composition at a higher calorie intake in the future, but you have to absolutely attack this process. 

Again, after achieving your initial fat loss goal, it's very easy to lose focus and regress. 

This is why you always want to have a target that we're working towards 3-6 months down the road. 

With clients, we're always establishing... "where are we headed in the next 3 months? What are we working towards?" 

This is how we help you as a client keep your results long-term. You're always focused on the next target.  

3. When To Increase Calories In A Reverse Diet

After week one of the reverse diet, we'll gauge how your body reacted to the jump in calories, and adjust accordingly. 

Typically, the first two weeks of the reverse, macros will stay the same. After the first week of initial increases, we're looking for measurements and weight to essentially stay stable during week two.

4. How To Increase Calories In A Reverse Diet

Given weight and measurements stayed stable OR biofeedback is still poor,  we're going to add another 50-150 calories (depending on the size of the individual), and see how your body does with this. 

Through this entire process, we're constantly assessing your weight, body measurements, and biofeedback...

How's your training performance? is hunger decreasing? How's your mood? How's your motivation?

... All things that should be improving as we're feeding you more and more.  

For some online clients, this process can continue for quite some time. but most typically, it'll last 4-8 weeks. 

→ Macros: No matter the nutrition phase, clients are going to be somewhere from 0.8 - 1.2g protein per lb body weight 

.8g/lb is the consensus "threshold" we want to hit for protein, but we prefer to have most clients closer to 1-1.2g/lb.  

Looking at protein quality (especially in a building phase), most will start to implement more grains, and other plant-based sources that contain trace protein. 

Problem is, the amino acid profile for plant-based sources of protein isn't as good for building/maintaining muscle,  so it makes sense to set protein slightly higher than the 0.8g/lb target. 

For fat intake, is that client below .3g/lb? 

We know that below this intake, hormone production is going to be less than optimal, and you're more likely to develop fatty acid deficiencies. Think of .3g/lb as the "fat threshold". 

So if you're below this mark, bumping fat up to .3g/lb+ will be the first priority when increasing macros.  

If you're already consuming .3 - .4 grams of fat/lb, we're going to start the reverse dieting process primarily by increasing carbs. 

As long as you can check these "threshold" boxes for protein and fat, increasing carb will produce the quickest improvements in how you feel as a client. 

• Training performance will improve.  
• Recovery is going to be better.  
• You're going to have more energy.
• Libido will increase.  
• Carbs decrease cortisol and aid hormone production as well. So stress is going to be lower all, and you'll feel better all around. 

Typically, we'll increase carbs to 1.2 - 1.5g/lb as the first priority (assuming you're at the protein and fat thresholds).  

What we do from there is very much where the individualization aspect of online coaching comes in.  

• If you're more focused on continuing to improve your body composition, we'll continue to drive carbs up. 
• If you're more focused on maintenance/lifestyle flexibility, do you prefer more carbs or more fat? Whichever you tend to prefer, is what we're going to increase more... ~75% of what they prefer, 25% of the other macro.

5. When To Stop A Reverse Diet

Two things to look for here:  

→ Trunk measurements and weight are staying relatively stable: Again, fluctuations of +/- .25"-.5" are normal, but larger increases for multiple weeks here indicate you've likely passed maintenance. 

That said, realize that most clients will also be capable of building some lean muscle at maintenance. 

This is especially true for newer online client that have never spent an extended period of time eating more and following a smart training program like our online clients do. 

So sometimes we'll see an increase in weight across the course of weeks. This is why it’s important that we’re also tracking body measurements. 

Most online clients will have a “trouble spot” they really wanted to focus on losing fat from during the diet.  This seems to be the last place that said client loses fat from their body.  

• It’s likely that the end of this clients diet phase was finally  shedding the fat from their “trouble spot”... after that, said client is content with their current level of leanness, and ready to focus on maintenance.  
• Conveniently, the last place we seem to lose fat from also seems to be the first place we regain it. 

This means that in a case where your client is gaining a bit of weight, but you think it could be lean muscle not fat, it makes sense to look at measurement increases at the client's “trouble spot” as a sign that they’re potentially gaining fat (for 90% of clients it will be navel measurements, but occasionally hips). 

If we start to see consecutive weeks of measurement increases at the trouble spot, it’s a good sign that body fat is being gained.  

→ Biofeedback is normal: We all have a certain body fat percentage “floor”... below this body fat percentage, you'll struggle with hunger, being food focused, low energy, poor hormones, & building muscle is very unlikely.  

As we've discussed, many of your hormones are a product of the amount of body fat you’re carrying, so no matter how much food you’re eating, you’ll still feel shitty below your “body fat floor”. 

While you can dip below this “floor” for short periods of time (e.g. for a photoshoot), living below it is not healthy or sustainable. So the reality is, occasionally clients will have to add back a bit of body fat in order to return biofeedback to healthy levels and quit feeling like a zombie. 

If a clients' biofeedback (weekly measures my clients submit for things like sleep, stress, motivation, mood, training performance, etc.) is still poor, they likely need to continue the reverse diet.  

Two great example of this are online clients Jeff and Dave, both who recently got very lean for photoshoots: 

As you can see, both clients were very lean. In their specific cases, this was lean to a point that wasn't sustainable, becuase biofeedback was poor. 

They weren't going to be able to build muscle/continue to improve their physiques long-term in this state. 

This is a great example of where adding body fat is needed. 

On the flipside, normalized biofeedback is a good sign you can end the reverse diet process.  

Whether you’re a coach or coaching yourself, I hope this article helped clear up some confusion around reverse dieting. 

If you're ready to fully commit to a customized training & nutrition protocol, and finally take your physique to the next level, click here now to apply for online coaching with us. 

Powerbuilding: Blending elements of powerlifting and bodybuilding into a synergistic training program that improves both strength and aesthetics simultaneously. 

For example, a client following a powerbuilding program could be starting their training day off with heavy deadlift triples (sets of three), and then ending the day with hamstring curl myo-reps.

While most bodybuilding training programs will also help you get stronger, powerbuilding magnifies the extent to which you're able to build strength, and makes it more specific to the big 4:

1. Squat

2. Deadlift

3. Bench

4. Overhead Press

So while the hybrid powerbuilding approach isn't for everyone... it's a smart approach for those who truly want the best of both worlds (strength + aesthetics).

In the video below, Jake Boly and I talk through the fundamentals of an effective, science-based powerbuilding program ↴

A few of my main takeaways from chatting with Jake, and I want to make sure he receives the credit for the main points here (these are my interpretation of the thoughts and guidelines he shared in an attempt to flesh things out):

1. There should be an inverse relationship between intensity and volume in your program. 

→ When intensity (load) is high for compound lifts, volume (number of hard sets) needs to drop for accessories.

The 3 main variables we're manipulating in an online client's program are:  

VARIABLE #1 - Frequency: How often you train a muscle group or movement pattern.

VARIABLE #2 - Volume: The number of hard sets you train a muscle group or movement pattern with.  

VARIABLE #3 - Intensity: The load you are training with. 

If all 3 variables are high across your training week, you'll do too much to recover from.  

But, if all 3 variables are low, your training won't provide enough stimulus to grow.

Specific to powerbuilding - There will be mesocycles where intensity is high (and thus volume needs to be moderate) and phases where volume is high (and thus intensity needs to be moderate).

EXAMPLE:

In a strength focused mesocycle, you might start off your bench day training heavy sets of 2 or 3 for 4-6 sets, and stopping close to failure.

While effort should still be there for your bodybuilding work later in the day (stopping most sets with 1-3 reps in the tank), volume needs to be lower.

→ When in a bodybuilding/hypertrophy phase, using a more moderate rep range (i.e. 4-7 reps) + tempo work (i.e. 4 sec negative, 1 sec pause at bottom of squat) for compounds is a great way to auto-regulate loading/keep fatigue lower, allowing you to push harder with your bodybuilding work later. 

→ In mesocycles focused on maximal strength, your accessory lifts should primarily focus on building up your compound lifts

EXAMPLE: 

On a bench day, you'd devote more volume to accessories that emulate the primary compound of the day (in this case, the bench press).

So after benching, your accessory work for chest would likely be another chest press variation (i.e. a Dumbbell Low Incline Press) vs. something less specific to the bench press (i.e. a chest fly). 

2. Most lifters need less volume than they think they do, and more quality work per set.

This is something we see constantly with new online clients, and exactly why we require most new clients to record lots of form videos for us.

Often, individuals who are crushing themselves in the gym but not seeing results are simply missing the level of execution needed to stimulate the gains they desire.

3. Exercise selection is very important when designing a powerbuilding program. Excessive fatigue accumulation is the biggest pitfall the holds most powerbuilding programs back.

Imagine your body sitting at a strength/musculature baseline going into a training session. 

When you train, the fatigue created by said session causes your body to dip below this baseline.

→ If your body can return to said baseline, you'll maintain your previous level of strength/muscularity.

→ If your body has the recovery ability (and the stimulus from the session was adequate) your body will actually end up slightly above the previous baseline when the recovery/growth process is completed. This creates a new, higher baseline.

This is the concept of the SRA Curve - your body must be able to fully recover from all of the fatigue created by a session before it can actually create additional growth.

It's important to understand that movements that put a lot of stress on the spine (axial loading) will incur an especially high fatigue cost.

The crux of powerlifting training is heavy barbell movements that load the spine heavily... so to avoid wrecking your body and actually make progress, you need to be smart when considering the fatigue cost of your hypertrophy/bodybuilding-focused lifts.

Generally, it’s a good idea to limit the amount of movements that involve a significant amount of spinal loading (e.g. most... deadlift variations, barbell squat variations, standing press and row variations) to 1-2 per session.  

4. Mesocycles not focused on the Big Four lifts can be helpful to avoid burnout & build a well-rounded body.

As a reminder, the Big Four lifts are:

1. Barbell Back Squat

2. Barbell Bench Press

3. Barbell Deadlift

4. Barbell Overhead Press

If your primary goal is to be aesthetic and strong (rather than hitting a specific total by __ date), it’s smart to sub in different variations of the same movement patterns to avoid burnout, injuries, and imbalances. 

This is where understanding movement patterns is essential:

To provide a few examples: You could spend a mesocycle focused on progressing your Dumbbell Bench Press instead of Barbell, a Bulgarian Split Squat instead of a Back Squat, or a Trap Bar Deadlift instead of a Conventional Deadlift.

Like all things training and nutrition, this should be individualized.

But in general, many will do well training 4x/week (in an upper/lower fashion) + 1 optional day.

An example week:

→ DAY 1: Deadlift Focused Day

→ DAY 2: Bench Focused Day

→ DAY 3: Squat Focused Day

→ DAY 4: Overhead Press Focused Day

→ [OPTIONAL] DAY 5: Accessory Day

As you can see, each of the first four days are focused on one of your primary compound lifts. The order isn't especially important here, but it's smart to put your most fatiguing lifts towards the start of the week.

On the optional day, it'd be smart to avoid much barbell work, and focus more on the missing pieces from earlier in the week. 

Things like:

- Single leg and single arm work

- Knee flexion (leg curls), upper back work (back flies, facepulls, band pull-aparts), and core stability work.

- Vanity work (bicep curls, crunches, leg extensions, etc.)

This day allows you to make sure you have a strong foundation to build the Big Four on, and can help add more volume to push you towards your aesthetic goals.

A smart way for most individuals new to powerbuilding to write their first three mesocycles of training.

→ MESOCYCLE #1 [Moderate intensity & volume, more skill based]: Ease into things, keep intensity lower with compounds and focus on mastering the skill of the compound lifts. This should be skill focused, with more tempo work, and a priority on quality reps.

→ MESOCYCLE #2 [Strength or Hypertrophy focus - opposite of Mesocycle 3]: Specific drive towards strength or hypertrophy, and generally alternate every other block once you've mastered skill of compounds. 

If you're feeling more worn down from the previous mesocycle, going to hypertrophy is smartest.

→ MESOCYCLE #3 [Strength or Hypertrophy focus - opposite of Mesocycle 2]:  The opposite of the previous mesocycle (so if Mesocycle #2 was Hypertrophy, Mesocycle #3 is Strength, with more focus on the compounds + intensity). 

Two of the sample powerbuilding days Jake laid out in the interview:

FULL BODY DEADLIFT DAY 

→ Deadlift (concentric loading emphasis)

→ Romanian deadlift (eccentric loading emphasis)

→ Vertical pressing (i.e. Overhead Press, Dumbbell Shoulder Press)

→ Accessory for pull (i.e. Dumbbell Row, Cable Row) 

→ Accessory for lateral delts (i.e. Dumbbell Lateral Raise) and/or core (i.e. Hollow Body Hold)

UPPER BODY BENCH DAY

→ Barbell Bench

→ Bench Press Variation w/ added autoregulation (i.e. 1.5 reps or tempo work on incline) 

→ Lighter pulling movement (i.e. Dumbbell Row, Cable Row) 

 → Chest focused accessory (i.e. Cable Chest Fly)

→

Tricep focused accessory (i.e. Dumbbell Incline Skullcrusher)

→ Core (i.e. Hollow Body Hold) and/or Bicep accessory (i.e. Dumbbell Incline Curl)

And that's how you achieve the best of both worlds: strength and aesthetics.

Check out Jake Boly's Content:

→ Instagram

→ Youtube

→ Pheasyque Lab

→ That Fit Friend

If you're ready to stop collecting information and start transforming your body, click here now to apply for online coaching with our team.    

We apply proven, science-backed nutrition & training methods through individualized coaching to help you get the body you want, and teach you on how to keep it for a lifetime.

Hypertrophy training is the best way to train for men and women wanting to build muscle.

Muscle hypertrophy Is an increase in the size of muscle cells, and thus hypertrophy training describes a style of training that maximizes muscle hypertrophy.

The problem is, most men and women don’t know how to train in a manner that’s effective for their aesthetic goals. 

So, they spend endless hours working hard in the gym and the kitchen… but never move any closer to the body the want. 

If you're sick of not looking like you lift (despite all your hard work), today's blog has the solution.

You'll learn how to build the most effective hypertrophy training program tailored perfectly to your individual needs & goals.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

→ What Is Hypertrophy And Why Does It Occur?

→ The Most Important Principles Of Hypertrophy Training

→ How To Write A Hypertrophy Program

→ Understanding Effective Reps & RIR 

→ Best Movement Patterns For Hypertrophy 

→ Exercise Selection For Hypertrophy 

→ Stimulus-To-Fatigue Ratio  

→ Movement Sequencing For Hypertrophy 

→ Best Rep Ranges For Hypertrophy 

→ When To Change Exercises For Hypertrophy

→ Progression/Overload Schemes Within A Mesocycle  

→ Mesocycle-To-Mesocycle Progression  

→ The Best Training Splits For Hypertrophy

Muscular Hypertrophy is a term for the increase in muscle size, due to an increase in the size of the cells that make up said muscle.

Basically, hypertrophy is another word for muscle growth. 

The real question is… 

Why does hypertrophy occur?

It's thought that muscle growth is stimulated by three primary mechanisms:

1. Mechanical tension

2. Metabolic Stress

3. Muscle Damage

[Image adapted from JPS Education]

MECHANISM #1: MECHANICAL TENSION

To simplify, imagine the actual "tension" your quads experience when you unrack the bar for a back squat.  

With heavier weight, tension on your quads increases (not to say that heavier is always better).  

Similarly, the longer the sets goes on, the larger the amount on tension your quads have experienced.

Now let's say that you did your squats with poor form, so that most of the tension was shifted away from your quads, and you felt a large increase in stress on your lower back.

Although you completed your set of squats, you probably didn't effectively apply tension to your quads to stimulate growth.

→ Adequate mechanical tension is thought to be the most important mechanism of muscle growth.

MECHANISM #2: METABOLIC STRESS

The burning, pumped feeling you get when you doing a high-rep set of curls, or a superset with short rest periods. Metabolites that are accumulating in your muscle cells, leading to cell swelling, hormonal changes, and a variety of other factors that are thought to influence muscle growth.

→ While always training exclusively for "the pump" seems to be a less effective strategy for hypertrophy, it does seem to help to have some metabolic stress-inducing work included in your training.

MECHANISM #3: MUSCLE DAMAGE

Usually experienced as soreness, it's currently unclear whether muscle damage actually triggers muscle growth, or is simply a byproduct of training in a manner conducive to growth.

So while some soreness likely should be present relatively often when training for hypertrophy, your program shouldn't be built around "getting sore".

When writing your hypertrophy program (or assessing if your current program is truly effective for your physique goals), there are four key components that your program must have to yield the well above-average physique you want: 

1. Specificity 
2. Overload 
3. Fatigue Management 
4. Individualization 

Let’s dive into each quickly. 

PRINCIPLE #1: SPECIFICITY 

Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands 

Better known as the S.A.I.D. principle, this is the cornerstone of smart program design.

Basically, the way you’re training needs to be specific to your #1 desired outcome from your training. 

Let’s talk through a few common examples to illustrate this: 

→ Your #1 goal is building muscle, but your program has you doing lots of olympic lifts for sets of 1, 2, or 3… you're violating the principle of specificity.

We know that: 

a.) When it comes to the concept of Stimulus-to-Fatigue Ratio (more on this soon), most olympic lifts are a poor match for stimulating muscle growth. 

b.) The low rep ranges you’re working with will likely be insufficient to stimulate new muscle growth (again, more on this soon).

→ Your #1 goal is building muscle, but your program is based on burning lots of calories, or utilizes extremely short rest periods… you’re violating the principle of specificity. 

You could grow a bit of muscle from training like this - but the largest adaptation you’ll be forcing is the progression of your aerobic system, not muscle growth. 

→ Your #1 goal is building muscle, but a large amount of your time is spent focused on running, HIIT style training, biking, etc… you’re violating the principle of specificity.

Nothing at all wrong with any of these modalities of training, and this isn’t to say they shouldn’t be done at all while simultaneously training for hypertrophy. 

But they’re far from the most effective way to stimulate muscle growth. With your #1 goal being hypertrophy, the majority of your time should be spent focusing on the modality of training that will yield the most progress per unit of time invested.

→ Your #1 goal is building muscle, and your program is focused on creating overload over time in the 5-30 rep range, while training relatively close to failure (usually stopping with 1-3 reps in the tank), and taking adequate rest periods (usually 1.5-3 mins)... you’re honoring the principle of specificity for muscle growth.

PRINCIPLE #2: OVERLOAD

To quote Renaissance Periodization’s excellent Scientific Principles Of Hypertrophy Training: 

“In order to produce improvements in performance, training must be challenging enough to the targeted systems or tissues to stimulate adaptation.”

Your body is an adaptation machine - it’s constantly striving to get better at managing the stressor it’s faced with. 

The first time you squatted 135 lbs for 10 reps, it was probably quite a stressful event for your body. 

The stress of this event triggered your body to adapt and grow stronger/more muscular, to be better prepare for similar events like this in the future. 

Now, if you continued to squat 135 lbs for 10 reps, you would eventually reach a point where the stress (we’ll often refer to this stress as “stimulus” in this blog) created by this event was so small, that your body no longer felt the need to further adapt. 

This is the principle of overload - you’ll literally often need to add load, reps, or sets across your training career in order to keep pushing your body to further adapt and grow.

This is also why doing the same sets, reps, and loads for months will quickly lead to stagnation. 

PRINCIPLE #3: FATIGUE MANAGEMENT 

One of the most underrated parts of an effective hypertrophy program is understanding how to manage fatigue well enough to allow your body to grow. 

When you look at the SRA Curve (stimulus - recovery - adaptation) below...

[Image credit: bretcontreras.com] 

...you’ll see that after experiencing the stress/stimulus of hard training, there’s a large amount of recovery that must happen simply to get your muscles back to their previous baseline before new growth can occur. 

Too many hard working individuals like you fall into the trap of ignoring fatigue management and crushing yourself in the gym constantly. 

This often leads to your muscles barely being able to recover enough to get back to their previous baseline, due to the huge amount of fatigue created in your training. 

This is why so many people are working VERY hard in the gym, but still don’t look like they train.  

See, fatigue management isn’t just making sure you get plenty of sleep, eat enough, and manage life stressors - it’s also very intertwined with your exercise selection… because the movements you select are what determine the magnitude of fatigue that is created/must be recovered from in order to grow.  

More on this when we discuss Stimulus-to-Fatigue Ratio. 

PRINCIPLE #4: INDIVIDUALIZATION 

Our coaching company is obsessed with providing our online clients a truly individualized experience, because we believe that individualization is the key to transformation. 

There’s a reason this article is composed of principles you need to understand and apply to your training, rather than me just simply telling you… 

“Here’s the best hypertrophy program for EVERYONE. Do ___ movements for ___ sets & reps at __ RIR, and EVERYONE will see the quickest possible progress.” 

...because it doesn’t work like that! We each have unique limb lengths, injury histories, volume (number of hard sets) tolerances & needs, life stressors, recovery abilities, goals, and more. 

So while many can get decent results following a generic program, your training needs to be individualized to you to yield the amazing results you’re chasing. 

A few of the key considerations when writing (or assessing) your hypertrophy program: 

1. Understanding Effective Reps & RIR
2. Movement Patterns 
3. Exercise Selection 
4. Stimulus-To-Fatigue Ratio 
5. Movement Sequencing 
6. Rep Ranges 
7. Progression/Overload Schemes Within A Mesocycle 
8. Mesocycle-To-Mesocycle Progression 
9. When To Swap Out Movements
10. What training split should you follow?

Of course, each of these topics requires a deep dive to make sure you fully understand how to write the most effective training program for hypertrophy.

One of the fundamental things you need to understand for hypertrophy training is a concept called Reps In Reserve (commonly referred to as RIR). 

RIR gauges how many reps you have in the tank at the end of a set. 

This is the tool our clients and most hypertrophy trainees use to make sure they're using the appropriate amount of effort.

To Gauge Reps In Reserve:

Ask yourself at the end of a set: “How many more reps could I have squeezed out if I absolutely had to?” 

Your answer is your Reps In Reserve (RIR), or how many reps you feel you had left before failure. 

Utilizing reps in reserve properly ensures your training is providing an effective stimulus for growth. 

See, the closer you take a set to failure, the more muscle fibers you recruit and fatigue.

It’s thought that the last few reps of a set are by far the ones you get the most out of - the most "effective reps", because they do the most to disrupt homeostasis and spark new muscle growth. (This is the concept of "effective reps").   

We know that if we push the intensity too far (0 RIR/lots of sets to failure), we’ll create too much stress to recover from. 

But we also know that if your RIR is too high (probably 5+), you won’t get much out of your set, as it will be very short on "effective reps". So it’s smart to spend the majority of your time training around an 1-3 RIR.

There are four key movement patterns that create the foundation we build our online clients training programs around. They're essential to helping you achieve your most functionally strong, aesthetic body composition ever. 

The cool thing about this approach is, as long as you're training… 

1. A knee dominant movement 
2. A hip dominant movement 
3. An upper body push 
4. An upper body pull

...you've trained every major muscle group in your body. 

So building your training days around this framework is a good indicator that you're distributing volume as needed to truly create your best body composition ever. 

PATTERN #1: KNEE DOMINANT MOVEMENT 

Here, you're training patterns primarily centered around movement at the knee joint.  

These are primarily going to be quad-dominant, but will also work some glutes & hamstrings, and often some core. 

Most often, this will be a squat or lunge pattern. 

→ Important Consideration: Unilateral Work

There are tons of different variations we can program here, both bilateral (using both legs at the same time) and unilateral (using only one leg at a time). 

One of the biggest issues in most people's knee dominant movement selection is a glaring lack of single-leg work.  

No single leg work isn’t a problem for hypertrophy in and of itself, but can indirectly hurt your progress.

I've found this to be especially true for online clients coming from a CrossFit style of programming in pursuit of hypertrophy...they'll back squat and front squat multiple times per week but spend very little time (if any) on single-leg work. 

They eventually develop imbalances training bilaterally too often (one leg becomes stronger than the other) which leads to pain and an inability to train intensely enough to build the muscle you want. 

This is exactly why most online clients always have at least one single leg knee dominant pattern in their program. 

PATTERN #2: HIP DOMINANT 

Here, you're training patterns focused on movement at the hip joint. 

These are primarily going to be glute and hamstring dominant, but train some quads, and often core as well. 

This will most often be a "hinge" pattern.  

In comparison to the squat/knee dominant movement pattern, the hip dominant movement pattern often gets neglected. 

Many have been misled to believe the knee dominant movements are good glute builders (e.g. back squats for glutes), which really isn't often the case... but leads people to neglecting the movements that are actually great glute and hamstring builders (hip dominant movements). 

→ Important Consideration: Low Back Stress 

One of the main issues most run into with hip dominant movements?  

Many create a relatively large amount of stress on the lower back. Anecdotally, most online clients have a pretty limited tolerance for movements that put a lot of strain on the lower back, before running into issues with low back pain. 

So this is something we want to take into consideration when creating your program. More on this when we discuss Stimulus-To-Fatigue Ratio. 

→ Important Consideration: Many lunge patterns can be made into a hip dominant hybrid 

By focusing on intent, many of our lunge variations become great movements for glute/hamstring development. 

For our online clients chasing aesthetics and performance, this is one of our favorite ways to kill two birds with one stone, as you're now training the oft neglected glutes/hamstrings + adding in more single leg work. 

Cues to think about here: 

- You want to achieve a bigger stretch on the glutes and hamstrings. A forward lean + focusing on initiating the movement by pushing your hips back is helpful here. 

- One the way up, focus on driving your weight through your front heel + extending at the hips (think: pushing your hips up/forward towards your knee) instead of extending at the knee (pushing your knee back toward the hips). 

Since your glutes and hamstrings are primarily responsible for hip extension, this will make the movement more hip dominant.

PATTERN #3: UPPER BODY PUSH 

Here, you're training patterns focused on movement at the shoulder joint, and pushing a load away from your body.  

These are primarily going to be training your chest, shoulders, and triceps. 

We can split your upper body push movements up into two variations:

1. Horizontal presses - These will be more "chest dominant", but will also train your front delts (the front of your shoulders) and triceps.

2. Vertical presses - These will be more shoulder dominant, but will also train a good amount of triceps, and some chest (varying depending on your torso angle).

It's incredibly unlikely that you're not including some upper body pushing in your training, and for good reason. If you're chasing an aesthetically pleasing body composition, a strong chest and well-developed shoulders are a must. 

→ Important consideration: Dumbbell work 

Dumbbells are one of the best training tools for someone like you, who's chasing hypertrophy. 

Barbells are great for adding load (and don't get it twisted, they're a big piece of our online client's programs), but they also keep you locked in one specific position as you press.  

This can become problematic, because this position often causes irritation or pain for online clients with banged up shoulders (a.k.a. 90% of us).  

The beautiful thing about dumbbells is, they allow much more customization in your pushing. You have more free movement, and can experiment with which positions feel best for your unique anatomy and injury history. 

They also will often allow a better range of motion, which will typically yield more hypertrophy stimulus per rep. 

This is not to say that you shouldn’t use barbells (again, they’re a big part of our client’s programs), but many individuals will find dumbbell work easier on their joints. 

PATTERN #4: UPPER BODY PULL 

Here, you're training patterns centered around movement of the shoulder blades and shoulder joint, and pulling a load towards your body/pulling your body towards a bar (e.g. a pull-up bar). These are primarily going to be training your back and biceps. 

You can split your pulling movements into two different variations:

1. Horizontal Pulls 

2. Vertical Pulls

→ Important consideration: Execution 

Your back is made up of a plethora of muscles. But generally with your pulling work, you're focusing on targeting either your Lats or your Rhomboids...

Both vertical and horizontal pulls can be both lat focused or rhomboid focused, depending on your execution of the movement. 

For example: 

- A pulldown will be more lat focused if you stay relatively upright, and focus on driving the elbows low to the hips (if you look at the picture above, you'll see that this would lead to the lat muscles shortening). 

- A pulldown will be more rhomboid focused if you lean back, flare your elbows, and focus on driving your elbows back + squeeze your shoulder blades (if you look at the picture above, you'll see that this would lead to the rhomboid muscles shortening). 

- A dumbbell row will be more lat focused if you focus on driving your elbow low to your hip as you row the weight up. 

- A dumbbell row will be more rhomboid focused if you allow your elbow to flare more, and focus on pulling your shoulder blade back as you row. 

...you get the idea. 

Now, while the specific ratio of rhomboid to lat focused pulling movements depends highly on you as an individual, most will build their best physique with a relatively balanced blend of both.

Because you'll be seeing it a lot going forward in this article, you need to be familiar with the term mesocycle.

Mesocycle is a term often used within program design to describe a "block" or "phase" of training, usually lasting 4-6 weeks.

Multiple mesocyclyes are usually strung together to form a larger macrocycle, geared to push your body towards one specific adaptation (i.e. hypertrophy) like shown below:

More on how to successfully string together multiple mesocycles for hypertrophy below. 

(Click here now to check out our blog on Periodizing A Year Of Physique Development.)

The single biggest piece 95% of you intermediate and beyond trainees like you struggling to achieve the results you'd expect (or any at all) are missing?   

An understanding of how to apply the concept of stimulus to fatigue ratio (SFR) to your training. 

Understanding SFR allows you to get the most aesthetic/hypertrophy gains out of every set, rep, and unit time invested in the gym.  

Even better, applying SFR allows you to tailor your training to the movements that are most effective for you as an individual… no more force-feeding movements that leave you feeling beat up and little else for months.

Some movements just inherently “feel better” to you than others, and you probably can’t explain why.  

Let’s say you love Romanian Deadlifts (RDLs). 

You feel like your glutes & hamstrings are smoked after performing 2-3 sets, you have a good amount of soreness in said muscles the next few days (a.k.a soreness is present, but far from crippling), and have seen good glute/hamstring gains since substituting the movement in for conventional deadlifts.  

You also notice that while 2-3 sets of conventional deadlifts left you feel absolutely exhausted, your RDLs don’t seem to be nearly as fatiguing, and you can get more out of your subsequent training because of this. 

→ This is an example of a movement that currently has a good stimulus to fatigue ratio for you.  

Not only do your RDLs seem to be stimulating more muscle growth than your conventional deadlifts did, but you’re also generating less fatigue - so you’re able to be more effective with your training across the rest of the training day, week, and mesocycle.  

Now, let’s say that your friend/training partner hates RDLs. 

While you feel a massive amount of tension and stretch in your hamstrings with each rep, they just feel their lower back. On top of that, they’re absolutely exhausted after 3 sets of RDLs (despite likely not feeling any “disruption” in their glutes and hamstrings), which carries over negatively to the rest of their training day, week, and mesocycle.  

→ This is an example of someone who the RDL has a poor SFR for.

After determining that this is not simply an execution error (which is common, and exactly why form videos are such a key component of our online coaching service to help clients master execution), your friend would see better gains from plugging in a different hip hinge variation with a better SFR. 

MEASURING STIMULUS TO FATIGUE RATIO 

So the question is, how do we determine which movements have a good SFR, and which movements you should swap out?

The graphic above illustrates the components of both stimulus and fatigue that we're taking into consideration. 

At the end of the day, we're looking for the movements that have the best ratio of stimulus to fatigue. 

COMPONENTS OF STIMULUS  

→ Mind-Muscle Connection: Can you “feel” the target muscles working throughout the movement?   

In my experience, this is one area people tend to overthink. It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of… 

“I don’t feel a good mind-muscle connection… I need to go slower/light/think harder about the movement!”  

...and while control, focus, and intention are important, you also need to realize that developing a good mind-muscle connection is rarely a product of “thinking harder”. 

Most often, the lack of a mind-muscle connection during a movement is a result of poor execution of said movement. Either... 

1. You’re not taking the movement through a full range of motion (ROM)

- ROM is getting shorter as the set goes on  

2. You’re not controlling the negative component of the movement for 2-4 seconds  

3. You’re not pushing yourself to be more explosive through the actual “lifting” portion of the movement  

4. You’re not pushing the movement to your Reps In Reserve (RIR) target 

5. You’re in your first set of said movement (where mind-muscle connection is usually lower)  

6. You’re focusing too hard on breathing/bracing, and your cardio system is becoming the limiting factor before the actual muscle  

7. Your technique is inadequate to apply tension to the target muscles

...or any combination of the above. 

In a nutshell, the mind-muscle connection is a byproduct of proper execution of a movement (and this is where the lack of a mind-muscle connection usually stems from), and not necessarily the result of “thinking harder”.  

Also, be aware that the more joints and muscle groups involved (the more compound the movement, we could say), the less you should just feel a single muscle working in isolation (e.g. it’s OK if you’re feeling ALL of your lower body during squats, as long as the target muscle - probably quads - is the rate limiter.) 

All that said, at the end of the set you should feel like the target muscle “did the work”, and definitely experienced a lot of tension from the load you lifted. 

→ Pump: Blood & fluid traveling to your muscles as a result of repeated, intense contractions, resulting in a muscle that’s engorged with blood and feels “pumped”.

You’ve probably experienced the pump after a few sets of bicep curls of hip thrusts where a strong mind-muscle connection/lots of tension & burn was present, and afterwards, the muscle felt much more “full” than normal.  

Now, similar to the mind-muscle connection, it would be wise not to focus solely on the pump as a proxy for a good/bad exercise. 

The pump does seemingly have some benefits to muscle growth - but if you were training strictly for great pumps, you’d likely spend your training time exclusively doing high rep isolation work. 

We know that focusing on progressing mechanical tension (lifting heavier loads over time) with variations of squat/hinge/lunge/push/pull is going to be the quickest way to build muscle.   

So similar to the mind-muscle connection, your training shouldn’t be focused on/designed for solely achieving a great pump. But rather, a good pump in the target muscle(s) usually comes as a byproduct of proper execution, and the target muscles experiencing lots of tension. 

A good (or great) pump by the end of a few work sets of a movement is a good sign that you’re ticking the boxes needed to stimulate growth.

→ Disruption: Likely the most foreign term to you here. 

Basically, “disruption” refers to how disrupted a specific muscle tissue feels post-training… both immediately and over the next few days.  

Disruption could be experienced as:  

- Tightness in the target muscle(s)  

- Stiffness in the target muscle(s)  

- Soreness (both close after the session and/or over the next few days) 

Similar to the other proxies (pump and mind-muscle connection), while you’re not directly “training to get sore”... you should generally be able to tell that you trained a muscle after your session - it should feel “disrupted”. 

If you’re never sore (especially in lagging muscle groups), never feel fatigued, and don’t seem to be building said muscles: it’s a good sign that something is off in your execution or effort with the corresponding movements. 

If you’re never sore (especially in lagging muscle groups), feel extremely fatigued, and don’t seem to be building said muscles: it’s a good sign you need to find movements with a better SFR. 

On the other hand, we all have “strong” muscle groups that we have no trouble developing a mind-muscle connection or pump with. 

These muscles still seem to grow, and can definitely “feel” the tension/disruption during a training session, but will rarely be noticeably sore over the next few days unless you hit them with a lot of training volume (hard sets) or novel exercises.  

For “strong point” muscles like these, the lack of noticeable disruption in the days after a session is much less to worry about than for weak point muscles.

So in simplest terms, you should usually be able to tell by the way a muscle feels…

“Oh yep, trained that today.”

It doesn’t need to be excessive soreness, but the “disrupted” sensation should be present. 

COMPONENTS OF FATIGUE 

The Yang to Stimuli’s Yen. 

If we didn’t have to worry about managing fatigue, and only needed to focus on the stimulus, we could basically just do whatever movements “felt best” for endless sets until we all had the physiques we wanted. 

Unfortunately, this isn't the case... fatigue/fatigue management is a critical part of exercise selection you must understand in order to get the results you want.  

This is because we know that once you’ve hit a threshold level of effort and execution, volume (a.k.a number of hard sets - usually thought of in a weekly context, per muscle group) is going to be the main driver of muscle growth. 

Fatigue management is crazy important for achieving the physique you want from both ends of the spectrum: 

→ STIMULUS: It doesn’t matter how much deadlifts stimulate your back, hamstrings, and glutes… if your posterior training is basically a no go for the rest of the week because you’re so fatigued post-deadlift… you probably won’t be able to rack up enough volume to actually grow your posterior.  

→ FATIGUE: Actually building new muscle from all of the volume you just hit requires first recovering from the stimulus you created with your training. It doesn’t matter if stimulus is super high… if the amount of fatigue created alongside it is too much to recover from, you’ll fail to grow. 

Makes sense, right?  

Cool, let’s dive into the components of fatigue.  

→ Stress On Joints & Connective Tissue: Let’s say that as of late, doing a neutral grip pull-up is causing you a lot of elbow pain. 

Whereas you used to feel a great pump, mind-muscle connection, and disruption from the movement… now you really just notice that your elbow is hurting. 

Joint pain is the “rate limiter” here. Again, once you’ve cleared up any concern of a potential error in execution, it’s probably a good idea to sub a different movement in.   

The thing to realize here is, all movements will stress your joints and connective tissue to an extent, but… 

1. If during or after the movement you’re experiencing a large amount of pain in said joints/connective tissues, pain is (or will soon be) the rate limiter for the movement. 

You’re better off finding a pain-free sub (again, assuming your execution of said movement is on point).  

2. If you feel a bit of joint discomfort, it might be worth playing around with grip position/width, foot position/width, etc., as oftentimes you’ll be able to find a position that feels great for you as an individual, with good stimulus and no joint pain. 

With things like positioning of hands/feet, try to avoid any dogma about where things “should” be (this is of course different than saying to ignore biomechanics), and feel free to play with things and find the position that feels best for you.  

→ Perceived Effort: Basically, how hard a set feels.  

This can be actual physical exhaustion, the amount you have to “ramp yourself up” mentally to do a set (which also has a physical toll), or a combination of both.   

It’s key to understand that effective training will feel hard, and the ability to push yourself is important. If you’re looking to build your best physique and avoid any challenging training, good luck.  

But, it’s also important to ask… 

“Could I be getting as good of/a better stimulus with less fatigue using a different movement here?”  

Conventional deadlifts are another movement that have come up a lot in this article as one that doesn’t have a great SFR for most people with primarily hypertrophy goals. 

This is because if we look at our criteria we use with online clients for exercise selection:

The conventional deadlift doesn’t meet many of the criteria we’re looking for here for good movements for building muscle... but it also happens to be one of the single most fatiguing movements you can do in the gym.  

As always, context is important here. There are many other variations of the deadlift (we’re very fond of Romanian Deadlifts, Trap Bar Deadlifts, and Stiff Leg Deadlifts), and many of our clients with strength or powerbuilding focused goals still training the conventional deadlift. 

But everything in this blog is through the lens of what 90% of our clients are chasing - primarily hypertrophy-based goals. 

→ Non-Target Muscle/Joint Stress - Are other muscles heavily (or even moderately) taxed when training a movement? Some non-target muscles will inevitably be fatigued a bit no matter what movement you’re training.  

This is not necessarily a bad thing. 

One of the main benefits of focusing on big compound lifts is exactly that - they allow you to effectively train a large amount of muscle(s) at once, and make your training much more efficient.   

But, if doing Barbell Bent Over Rows fatigues your low back so much that low back fatigue is the limiting factor when you train your lower body two days later, you’re likely better off subbing in a chest-supported row variation (or at least one that involves less spinal loading).  

This is the crux of looking at non-target muscle stress. It’s less about looking at how said “unused” muscles are impacting the current movement you’re training, and more about how they’ll impact your ability to train effectively the rest of the week and mesocycle.  

In general, it’s important to understand that movements that put a lot of stress on the spine especially are going to create a higher fatigue cost, which is why the advice of…

“Just do lots of heavy squats, deadlifts, and barbell pushes/pulls”  

…doesn’t pan out for most.  

Generally, it’s a good idea to limit the amount of movements that involve a significant amount of spinal loading (e.g. most... deadlift variations, barbell squat variations, standing press and row variations) to 1-2 per session.  

While these are often the most stimulative movements, they’re also the ones that’ll rack up fatigue the quickest. 

HOW TO ACHIEVE THE BEST STIMULUS TO FATIGUE RATIO 

A few pieces of advice that we implement with our online clients to help them get the best SFR (and thus, results) from their hypertrophy training: 

1. Use a full range of motion (relative to the joint the muscles you’re training are acting on). 

This will often require you to use a lighter load, which - while a hit to your ego - will both reduce the fatigue cost (lighter weight = less stress on joints and nervous system) and increase the stimulus (a more full range of motion = more stimulus with each rep) simultaneously. 

2. Make movements more stable. 

Because unstable movements are an easy way to wrack up a lot of fatigue/expend a lot of effort, with little direct stimulus to the target muscle.  

For example, if you struggle with balance on your Bulgarian Split Squats, add hand support like shown below: 

- Probably don’t do handstand push-ups to try to build your delts (range of motion is cut short here as well).  

- I don’t think I need to explain Bosu Ball Squats. 

3. Use a decent amount of chest supported and seated movements. 

These will reduce axial loading a.k.a. load/stress on your spine, and as a whole, keep fatigue lower. 

It’s about finding a balancing of the few movements with significant axial loading the provide a great stimulus for you, and the reducing axial loading the rest of the time. 

4. Potentially quit bracing so hard.  

A tip I recently picked up from Steve Hall of Revive Stronger - many of us have learned to focus hard on bracing our core, to keep our backs safe while lifting. 

And while proper bracing is helpful (especially in the context of a heavy deadlift or squat), it’s often overdone, even in the context of a higher rep set of Back Squats of Romanian Deadlifts.  

A full stop + massive valsalva maneuver breath at the top of every rep is VERY fatiguing.   

Now, I’m not necessarily recommending you implement this (it’s up to you to weigh the risk vs. reward with your own training/injury history), but we’ve personally found that often times focusing on bracing/breathing so much actually creates a LOT more fatigue than is needed. 

5. Use “lifting tools”. 

These can be seen as ways to prevent other muscles from becoming the rate limiter, so that the fatigue you’re racking up is at least coming with a very good stimulus for the desired muscle(s).  

Things like...  

- A lifting belt. Very optional, but useful to reduce stress on the low back during movements that can create a lot of axial loading. I personally like/use this belt. 

- Wrist straps/Versa Gripps. If anything here is a “must have”, these are it. If your grip is giving out on pulling movements, Romanian Deadlifts, etc. before the target muscle (hint: it probably is), you’re racking up a lot of fatigue for very little stimulus. These help make the target muscle the rate limiter. Highly recommend checking out Versa Gripps. 

- Olympic Lifting Shoes. Another very optional one. If you have trouble hitting a squat depth that allows for a lot of knee bend without also putting excess stress on your low back, these can help.Or you can simply elevate your heels. 

I can’t give enough credit to Renaissance Periodization for these concepts. I highly recommend you check out their related YouTube Series and Hypertrophy Book to gain a much better understanding of the application of SFR and smart training principles.

This very much ties in with the concepts discussed above in the stimulus to fatigue ratio section, so we’ll try to avoid overlap here.

But when writing your program, you need to understand that some exercises are inherently better than others for hypertrophy.

The 5 key things we look for in a movement when designing a hypertrophy program for an online client…  

EXERCISE SELECTION KEY #1: TARGET MUSCLE GROUP IS THE RATE LIMITER 

When the goal is building lean muscle, you want the "rate limiter" (the thing that forces you to eventually stop a movement) to be the specific muscle group(s) you're targeting.  

Let's say you're doing heavy Farmers Carries to train your core, and refuse to wear wrist straps. 

As a result, your grip always gives out long before core fatigue would cause you to stop the movement.

Thus, this has become a pretty shit exercise for actually building a stronger core... but if the goal was building grip strength, it'd be a great fit. 

Some common examples of rate limiters on exercises that are stopping you from building lean muscle: 

→ Grip strength: See example above. 

→ Unstable exercises: The classic example of doing squats on a bosu ball applies here. You don't "fail" the movement because of fatigue in your quads, you fail due to a lack of stability. 

→ Core strength: Let's look at the Bird Dog Row:

Great movement for core stability? Absolutely. 

But if you were programming this as one of your primary rowing variations, it just wouldn't make sense. The rate limiter is your core, not your lats or rhomboids. 

→ Cardiovascular Fatigue: The most common example of this is simply cutting rest periods too short between sets, or stringing together too many exercises in a row with inadequate rest (this is a big part of why we always prescribe specific rest periods for our online clients). 

EXERCISE SELECTION KEY #2: COMPOUNDEDNESS 

Credit to Menno Henselmans for this term (which I'm pretty sure isn't a real word). 

Basically, compoundedness means that a movement works multiple muscle groups & joints simultaneously... A.K.A. compound movements.  

Compoundedness is important because it leads to more "bang for your buck" & efficiency when it comes to building muscle (this is also part of why the 4 movement pattern framework from earlier works so well). 

To illustrate, let's compare Leg Extensions vs. High Bar Squats.  

To get the same magnitude of training stimulus from 4 sets of High Bar Squats, you would have to do MANY more sets of Leg Extensions. So from an efficiency perspective, programming at least some or the High Bar Squats makes sense. 

(*Note: I talk a lot about the High Bar Back Squat in this blog, but realize that you could plug in any variation of the squat pattern here that meets the exercise selection criteria... Hack Squats, SSB Squats, Leg Presses, etc.) 

Now, this isn't to say that you shouldn't do isolation exercises. They're an important part of a program designed to help you build lean muscle. 

But most of us simply don't have the time required to build the body composition we want through a program composed purely of isolation work. 

When you start online coaching with us, your program is built primarily around the 4 movement pattern framework from earlier. 

This allows you to efficiently accrue the volume (number of hard sets) needed across a training week to progress your entire body. 

EXERCISE SELECTION KEY #3: RANGE OF MOTION 

As mentioned earlier, typically the greater the range of motion an exercise allows, the more effective it will be for stimulating muscle growth. 

Let's again use the High Bar Back Squat as an example: 

The High Bar Squat is a movement we program for online clients to target the quads.

The role of the quads in the squat is knee extension... a.k.a. straightening your legs/standing up from the bottom of the rep. 

The more knee flexion (bending at the knee) you can achieve on the way down (which will also equal a lower squat), the more quad stimulus you'll get from every single rep, because your quads are being forced to work through a greater range of motion.  

So let's say you could either... 

Option 1.) Squat just to 90 degrees with 225 lbs on your back for 8 reps at 1RIR.

- OR - 

Option 2.) You could squat well below parallel with 185 lbs on your back for 8 reps at 1RIR. 

Option 2, despite being less load, would still stimulate more muscle growth in your quads due to the greater range of motion.

As an added bonus, a movement with a greater range of motion (again, consider the example of deep squats vs. squats to parallel) will also be less taxing on your joints and nervous system, because you're using a lighter load (but achieving the same or better stimulus). 

→ Thus, the stimulus-to-fatigue ratio of a movement with a larger range of motion is generally better. 

EXERCISE SELECTION KEY #4: ECCENTRIC COMPONENT  

The eccentric portion of a movement is typically thought of as the "lowering" part of a movement, whereas the concentric portion of a movement is the actual "lifting" portion of the movement.  

It's pretty rare that most movements are missing the concentric focus... but many movements are noticeably missing an eccentric, OR many lifters aren't intentional about controlling the eccentric portion of the movement. 

The problem here is, we know that muscle damage has a strong correlation with muscle growth. We also know that the eccentric portion of a movement is where a large degree of muscle damage is happening. 

So movements without a controlled eccentric will be much less conducive to muscle growth. 

Again, we could compare a conventional deadlift vs. a romanian deadlift, and conclude that the RDL is likely superior for hypertrophy, because it has a controlled eccentric and greater stretch under load. 

→ On another note, many trainees simply fail to focus on the eccentric portion of a movement as much as the should. It's smart to focus on controlling the eccentric of each rep for 2-4 seconds.

EXERCISE SELECTION KEY #5: ABILITY TO OVERLOAD 

Finally, we know that the ability to progressively increase load on a movement over a long period of time is essential to stimulating continuous growth from said movement. 

One problem with many movements is simply how difficult they are to add load to over time. 

 Consider the Push-Up vs. the Barbell Bench Press. 

The Push-Up is harder to load in small increments (or much at all outside of weight vests), whereas the Barbell Bench Press can be loaded in very small increments, and thus is easier to progress long-term. 

→ This is especially important for online clients that fall into the intermediate and beyond category, as microloading (increasing load via very small increments) is often the only realistic way to add load. 

APPLICATION: EXERCISE SELECTION FOR HYPERTROPHY 

Now that you have a good understanding of the keys to smart exercise selection, let's get into a bit more real-world application.

Let's say you're trying to build your quads, and are trying to decide between a Goblet Squat vs. a Box squat vs. a High Bar Squat.

Remember, you're looking for a movement that ticks these boxes: 

• Target muscle group is the rate limiter

  𝥁 

• Compoundedness

  𝥁 

• Solid range of motion

  𝥁 

• Eccentric component

  𝥁 

• Ability to overload 

→ If we look at a goblet squat: 4/5 of the components are there... but upper back strength is almost always the rate limiter when loads are held in the goblet position, rather than quads. 

→ If we look at the box squat: right away we see that range of motion is severely limited by the box... so again, probably not the best option specific to building lean muscle.  

→ If we look at the High Bar Squat: we see that it effectively ticks all of these boxes, and is likely the best option of the three. 

When it comes to rep ranges, you’ve probably heard something like… 

“Train 1-5 reps for strength, 8-12 for muscle growth, 15+ for endurance.” 

...and while the general recommendation of training in the 8-12 rep range for hypertrophy definitely isn’t bad, it’d be wise to be a bit more structured with your rep ranges than this. 

When assigning rep ranges we know a few things… 

→ When performing sets of less than 5 reps, you’ll need to do more total sets to make up for the low total volume (typically defined as number of hard sets, but here think load x reps) per set. 

→ Sets 5 shy of failure all the way to failure are thought to be “hypertrophic reps” that stimulate muscle growth… so you’ll likely get more growth from doing a set of 5 to failure vs. 4, as you’re adding one more hypertrophic rep. 

So from these first two points, we can conclude that it makes sense to train with 5+ reps for hypertrophy. 

Next… 

→ We know that 30% of your 1 rep max for a movement seems to be the “floor” for the lightest we want to take a weight, as using weight lighter than this seems to be less effective for stimulating growth. 

While you probably don’t know exactly what your 1RM Lateral Raise is (and thus don’t know 30% of your 1RM), a good rule of thumb is - if you can do 30+ reps with a weight, it’s likely below 30% 1RM. 

So we can conclude that doing no more than 30 reps in a set is also a good idea for hypertrophy. 

→ Most compound movements are better suited to the lower end of this spectrum (5-15 reps). Taking a set of Back Squats or Romanian Deadlifts much past 15 reps often leads to your cardio system, low back, or form breakdown being the rate limiter - not the muscles you’re trying to target. 

→ Most isolation movements are better suited to the higher end of this spectrum (10-30 reps). 

Going too heavy on a Bicep Curl or Lateral Raise usually just involves sloppy technique and recruit other muscles that shouldn’t necessarily be heavily involved in the movement, just to get the weight up.  

→ Training in the 5-10 rep range is likely a bit harder on your joints and tendons (due to the heavier loads used), so we probably shouldn’t spend all of our time here. 

→ It’s hypothesized that to effectively recruit and train all muscle fiber types (both fast twitch and slow twitch) as effectively as possible, relatively lower rep (i.e. 5-10) heavier sets and higher rep (i.e. 20-30) lighter sets (all still trained to 0-3RIR) are needed. 

(Although realize that considering fiber-type specific training is probably getting to the point of splitting hairs, and not something that you need to consider if you follow the guidelines in this article). 

So putting all of this together, we can conclude that the best rep range guidelines for hypertrophy training should be: 

1. Train in the 5-30 rep range. 

 2. Compound lifts should primarily be trained in the 5-10 and 10-20 rep range. Isolation lifts primarily in the 10-30 rep range. 

 3. Too much time in any one of these rep ranges is probably slightly less productive than a mixture of the 3. 

 4. As a good rule of thumb, it’s probably smart to spend approximately 25% of your training time in the 5-10 range, 50% in the 10-20 range, and 25% in the 20-30 range.

This will help ensure that you’re not spending too much time in the more physically taxing 5-10 range (while still reaping the benefits), nor gassing yourself out/investing a lot of time per set in the 20-30 range. 

Of course this will change across mesocycles, but the above recommendations are a good place to start. 

5. It’s a good idea to vary these rep ranges across your training day.  

Meaning it’s smart to do your heaviest work (in the 5-10 range) when you’re freshest (at the start of a session). 

If you save your heavy Romanian Deadlifts until the very end of a lower body day after doing sets of 10-20 Walking Lunges and Leg Extensions, and 20-25 Leg Curls… the decrease in performance you’ll see vs. if you did your RDLs at the start of the session will be huge. 

But you wouldn’t see the massive drop-off in performance in all of the movements mentioned from doing the RDLs first in the session. 

So naturally, most training sessions for hypertrophy should follow an undulating periodization-esque model. Something like… 

→ First 1-2 movements in the 5-10 range 

→ Next 2-4 movements in the 10-20 range 

→ Final 1-3 movements in the 20-30 range

“Ok, all of this is great… but how do I know how many sets to do?”

...of course, we’ve got you covered.  

When it comes to hypertrophy, the 3 main variables we're manipulating in an online client's program are: 

1. Frequency: How often you train a muscle group or movement pattern.

2. Volume: The number of hard sets you train a muscle group or movement pattern with. 

3. Intensity: The load you are training with. 

→ Now, if all 3 variables are HIGH across your training week, you'll do too much to recover from. 

→ But, if all 3 variables are low, your training won't provide enough stimulus to grow lean muscle.

For hypertrophy, it seems that when a threshold level of intensity (<5RIR) and frequency (2x/week+) are reached, adding more volume (to an extent) is the best way to stimulate more muscle growth.

Thus, volume is the main factor we manipulate with online clients to help stimulate more muscle growth. 

Our clients focused on hypertrophy are usually training in the 5-30 rep range, and stopping sets with 1-3RIR (reps left in the tank), as are most individuals following a (smart) hypertrophy program. 

The general consensus when it comes to measuring volume is that it’s easiest to simply think of as number of hard sets per muscle group. (Given you’re within 5-30 reps and 1-3 RIR).  

For example... 

If you hit 3 sets of Barbell Bench Press on Monday, and 4 sets of Dumbbell Incline Chest Press on Thursday, your weekly chest volume is 6 sets. 

So to answer the question of how much volume should I do… 

It depends. Remember, individualization is an essential part of building the most effective hypertrophy program for clients. 

The amount of volume you need for optimal muscle growth can vary wildly from your friends, depending on training age, recent training history, genetics, current recovery capacity, and much more. 

This could be an incredibly long discussion… but let’s keep it succinct, and answer another question while we're at it...

"HOW MANY MOVEMENTS SHOULD I DO MUSCLE GROUP PER TRAINING DAY FOR HYPERTROPHY?"

The thing to understand he is, there is a ceiling to the amount of effective volume that we can do per training day. 

To quote James Krieger’s amazing article Set Volume for Muscle Size: The Ultimate Evidence Based Bible: 

“On average, muscle growth tends to be best around 6-8 hard sets per muscle group per training session when taking long rests. That can be 12 - 24 weekly sets for a frequency of 2-3 days per week.”

Now, realize that these numbers are averages (so some individuals will need more volume, some less) - but the averages give us a great starting place. 

→ Once we pass the 6-8 sets threshold, we’re a lot more likely to enter the realm of “junk volume” (volume that continues to adds to the fatigue our body must recover from, but doesn’t help stimulate more muscle growth). 

 → When you consider the stimulus to fatigue ratio from earlier, you also have probably realized that the first set of an exercise is rarely the most stimulative - sets 2 & 3 are really where things pick up.

So it also makes sense that we wouldn’t want to do less than ~2-3 sets per movement, which means that we’ll also likely want to be doing something like 3-5 exercises per muscle group per week, and no more. 

From this, we can conclude a fairly good starting point for your volume would be something like: 

→ 6-8 hard sets per muscle group, per session, split between 2-3 movements 

→ 12-24 weekly hard sets per muscle group, doing something like 3-5 exercises per muscle group per week. 

In practice, this usually plays out as a client having more training days devoted to a specific body part(s) that they want to grow, and thus volume closer to the 24 sets per week mark for those parts, with less for lower priorities. 

For example... 

A client wanting to focusing on glutes and hamstrings might be following a 5x/week Lower/Upper/Lower/Upper/Lower split. By nature of having a 3rd lower body day, they’ll be able to squeeze in an extra 6-8 hard sets of effective volume for lower body vs. upper. 

Also, realize that there will be some volume overlap. I.e. many pressing movements will also hit the delts, so if you’ve done several presses already, most can get by with 3-5 sets of side delt work with Lateral Raises, rather than devoting 2-3 movements to side delts. 

The above rings true for delts, triceps, and biceps. 

So understanding this, a push day in a push/pull/lower split could look something like: 

a.) Barbell Bench Press 4x7-10  

b.) Dumbbell Incline Bench 3x10-15 

c.) Dumbbell Skullcrusher 4x10-15 

d.) Dumbbell Lateral Raise 4x20-30 

Signs You're At Or Near Your Ideal Volume (Number Of Hard Sets): 

→ Your strength is consistently increasing (you're usually able to add a rep or a bit of load vs. last week's performance on the same movement). 

→ You're consistently a bit (but not excessively) sore. 

→ You're getting good pumps. 

 Signs You're Doing Too Much Volume: 

→ You feel beat up/run down. 

→ Motivation to train is low. 

→ Strength is stagnant or decreasing. 

→ No pumps.

(It's key to understand context here - sometimes this is something we'll do intentionally the last 1-2 weeks before a deload.) 

Signs It's Time To Add More Volume: 

→ Recovery is good.  

→ Strength is stagnating. 

→ You're rarely sore. 

→ No pumps. 

Movement sequencing is an important part of program design, and something we consider to be sure our online clients get the absolute most out of their training sessions. 

We can relate this back to our earlier conversation about rate limiters… 

We want the “rate limiter” of a movement to be fatigue in the specific muscle group we’re targeting. 

If you’re training 6-8 hard sets of triceps before training your chest/a bench press variation… it’s likely that tricep fatigue will be the rate limiter for your bench press, not your chest.

You likely won’t get an effective stimulus for your chest in this session. 

But if we flip this example on its head (train chest first), this is no longer an issue. When you move on to triceps, you’ll be able to fatigue them perfectly fine. 

So generally, it’s a good idea to start a training session with one of the two most fatiguing movements. From there, move down the chain from largest to smallest muscle groups or most fatiguing to least fatiguing movements. 

For upper body training this usually looks like… 

 1. Chest or back (usually alternate which comes first in between 2 days in a training week) 

2. Chest or back (usually alternate which comes second in between 2 days in a training week) 

3. Biceps 

4. Triceps 

5. Delts 

(3-5 are fairly interchangeable.) 

For lower body training, this usually looks like… 

1. Quads or Glutes/Hamstrings (as both are typically trained in hinge patterns) 

2. Quads or Glutes/Hamstrings (usually alternate which comes first in between 2 days in a training week) 

3. Glutes or Hamstrings (whichever wasn’t the primary focus of the above glute/hamstring movement) 

4. Calves

This isn’t a black and white answer, because there’s really two different scenarios we run into with clients, which changes our approach to this. 

SCENARIO 1: Client has plenty of time per session (i.e. 60-90 minutes to devote to training), and of course has a primary goal of hypertrophy. 

In this case, we’d likely take a muscle-by-muscle approach. So for example, if the client was training upper body, something like: 

a.) Barbell Bench Press (Chest) 

b.) Cable Chest Fly (Chest) 

c.) Dumbbell Row (Back) 

d.) Lat Pulldown (Back) 

e.) Dips (Triceps) 

f.) Barbell Curl (Biceps) 

g.) Lateral Raises (Delts) 

Scenario 2: Client is very short on time, but still with the primary goal of hypertrophy. Their upper body day could look something like: 

Superset a.) a.) Barbell Bench Press (Chest) X Dumbbell Row (Back)

Superset b.) Cable Chest Fly (Chest) X Lat Pulldown (Back)

Superset c.) Dips (Triceps) X Barbell Curls (Biceps) 

d.) Lateral raises 

In Scenario One, going from the first chest exercise or back exercise to the second, developing a stronger mind-muscle connection will typically be easier, as focus and fatigue is kept “local” (to a specific muscle group) - this could in theory improve the SFR of your training. 

In Scenario Two, the program ensures that they can do the most important thing by far to building muscle - getting in adequate volume (with appropriate proximity to failure and rep ranges).

As alluded to earlier, it also makes sense to alternate which muscle groups/movement patterns are emphasized/paired with the most taxing movements across the week. 

This better helps you manage fatigue (and in turn, build muscle) without burning out your recovery resources or getting injured too quickly. 

For example, if you have 3 lower body training days per week, all starting with glute/hamstrings movements like… 

→ Day 1: Good Mornings 

→ Day 2: Romanian Deadlifts 

→ Day 3: Deficit Sumo Deadlifts 

...by the end of the week, you’re going to have created a massive amount of fatigue and stress on your lower back. 

You won’t be able to train like this long, as recovering your glutes/hams from all the above work will be very challenging. 

On the flipside, if your 3 lower body training days were something like… 

→ Day 1: Romanian Deadlifts 

→ Day 2: Start with quads, before moving into a Barbell Hip Thrust

→ Day 3: 45 Degree Back Extension 

...you’d experience much better gains across a mesocycle. 

Typically, it makes sense to divide training days across a week into something like: 

1. Horizontal Emphasis Days: Most taxing movements are generally horizontal pushes & pulls (i.e. Barbell Bench Press and Barbell Bent Row).  

2. Vertical Emphasis Days: Most taxing movements are generally vertical pushes & pulls (i.e. High Incline DB Press & Weighted Pull-Up) 

3. Quad Emphasis Days: Most taxing movements are quad focused (i.e. main quad move is a Barbell Back Squat, main glute/ham move is a 45 Degree Back Extension) 

4. Glute/Ham Emphasis Days: Most taxing moves are glute/ham focused (i.e. main glute/ham move is a Barbell Romanian Deadlift, main quad move is a Leg Press) 

Of course programming like this means that the “emphasis” muscles will also likely be worked in the lower end of the hypertrophy rep ranges (7-10) while the others will be in the 10-20 and 20-30.

If you’re cutting rest periods too short between sets, you won’t get the most out of your hypertrophy training program. 

We need time to allow for local and systemic fatigue to dissipate before being able to effectively push the next set. 

It takes longer for systemic fatigue to dissipate than local fatigue… meaning that the target muscle(s) you trained on the previous set will feel relatively recovered sooner than your body has reduced system-wide/nervous system fatigue enough to effectively push your next set. 

 So just waiting until the targeted muscle groups stop burning isn’t an effective strategy.  

Not surprisingly, this is an area that has also been researched quite heavily.

For example, this 2016 study by Brad Schoenfeld and colleagues assigned 21 resistance trained men to two groups: 

→ Group 1: The “short rest group” took 1 minute rest between all sets. 

→ Group 2: The “long rest group” took 3 minutes rest between sets.

Both groups trained exclusively in the 8-12 rep range. 

After 8 weeks of training like this, the “long rest group” had made better strength and hypertrophy gains than the “short rest group”. 

We have many more studies that seem to draw the same conclusion… taking about 2 minutes rest for most isolation exercises, and 3 minutes or more for compound exercises rest is generally superior for hypertrophy training. (3)(4) 

General rest period guidelines: 

→ Compound lifts: Rest 2-4 minutes 

→ Isolation lifts: Rest 1.5-2 minutes 

Cutting rest periods shorter than this often results in you being able to do less overall volume, and/or your aerobic system or systemic fatigue becoming the “rate limiter”, not the specific muscle group(s) you’re trying to target.

If you don’t want to actually time your rest periods, I love Mike Isratel of Renaissance Periodization’s recommendation of simply resting until breathing returns to normal. 

The exception here is when you’re following a metabolite style of training (basically, the goal is to get a crazy pump) - where often rest periods are intentionally cut short to create more metabolite accumulation in targeted muscle groups.

You’re  actually hurting your progress if you’re constantly changing movements in your training program.

⠀ 

See, when you implement a new movement, it takes your body time to learn the "skill" of the movement.

⠀⠀ 

After the first few weeks of progressing a movement is when online clients really start to learn what loads/reps are needed & become “skilled” enough to achieve true effective reps (the last few reps of a set that fatigue your muscle fibers enough to stimulate growth). This is where the most progress happens.

So if we're switching up the entire program every month, clients are getting ~1-2 weeks of training that's actually effective every month. 

Plus, if you're always switching movements, there's no way to track progress across months. It's like using a different scale every time you weigh yourself. 

Whether you’re a coach, or coaching yourself, adding movement variation is a fine line to walk. 

Some variation absolutely makes the program exciting & engaging, but I’ve found that the MOST motivating things for online clients is actually making tangible progress, which often comes with less variation month-to-month.

So, when it comes to movement variation, these are my general guidelines for online clients chasing hypertrophy: 

→ 1-2 metric-based movements to start each session: These are compound lifts that we’re focusing on progressing for many multiple mesocycles. Rep ranges might change, but movements DON’T for long periods of time. 

→  2-4 auxiliary movements: One new movement per muscle group with each new training phase is a good rule of thumb, but can be more if it’s a client that just enjoys more variation. 

→ 2-4 isolation movements: Generally “simpler” movements that take less skill, and thus can be varied more frequently. 

But really, if you’re more concerned about maximizing hypertrophy than you are being entertained by new movements… as long as the stimulus to fatigue ratio of a movement is good, it’s smart to keep progressing it. 

This means...

1. Pump, disruption, and mind-muscle connection are all high 

2. You’re consistently getting a bit stronger at the movement 

3. You’re not experiencing pain associated with the movement

Signs it’s time to swap out a movement for a different variation: 

1. Movement has stalled out - No progression with a movement (i.e. adding reps or load) across a mesocycle. 

2. Experiencing pain or discomfort with said movement. 

3. Fatigue generated by said movement is extremely high, and seems to be detracting from the rest of training, when an equally stimulative/less fatiguing movement could fill its place.

Truly effective training for hypertrophy requires much more than just "going into the gym and working hard".  

You can achieve the well above-average physique results you want. 

But it'll require a well-planned, science-based, and systematic approach to progressing your training. 

Time to resolve that need, by teaching you the science & application behind the three best training program progression models for hypertrophy & aesthetics.

MODEL #1: STATIC RIR LINEAR PROGRESSION

To my knowledge, credit for this progression model goes to Brian Minor.

As the name states, you're keeping RIR static across a mesocycle.

Applying A Static RIR Linear Progression: 

STEP 1: Prescribe a rep range (aim for higher end of rep range) & RIR target for a movement in Week 1 of a mesocycle. Record reps/loads/RIR.

STEP 2: Going forward, add load to the movement weekly (e.g. +10lbs from last week - this will be very dependent on the client & movement), and aim to hit the same RIR target as last week, while keeping reps open-ended. 

In practice, with online clients, this could play out something like...

[Week 1]  

→ Prescription: 3x6-10 @ 2RIR.  

→ Client #'s: 225 x 10/9/9 @2RIR. 

[Week 2]  

→ Prescription: Add 5lbs from last week, and hit 3 sets @ 2RIR.  

→ Client #'s: 230 x9/8/6. 

[Week 3] 

→ Prescription: Add 5lbs from last week, and hit 3 sets @ 2RIR.   

→ Client #'s: 235 x8/8/5. 

[Week 4]  

→ Prescription: Add 5lbs from last week, and hit 3 sets @ 2RIR.    

→ Client #'s: 240 x7/6/5. 

In a nutshell, this creates a linear progression like we all learned about in the fantastic Muscle & Strength Pyramids books...

...but helps clients avoid the pitfalls of the traditional linear progression model because it's auto-regulated by RIR instead of specific rep targets.

In a linear progression model, you're tied to hitting a certain load AND rep increase to keep up with the progression. 

This can often lead to form breakdown in order to try to continue to keep up with the progression... basically, we can't progress linearly every week. 

Adding the weekly load increases and RIR targets instead without specific rep targets allows this to be more auto-regulated.

→ So if you are progressing well (e.g. able to match last weeks reps with an extra 5 lbs), great. 

→ If not, you don't have to cut form/overshoot RIR to "keep up". 

The downside of this model?

It's very easy to not push yourself hard enough if you're not accurate (or honest) with your RIR. 

This is a great progression scheme for online clients chasing both hypertrophy and strength, and works very well for your big compound lifts.

MODEL #2: DYNAMIC DOUBLE PROGRESSION MODEL WITH STATIC RIR

Another model that I first learned about from Brian Minor. So it's no surprise that this progression scheme is similar to model #1... We're assigning a rep range & RIR target, and looking to progress reps and/or load with said rep range, while maintaining the same level of effort (RIR).

[Week 1]   

→ Prescription: 3x8-12 @ 2RIR.   

→ Client #'s: 155 x 11/9/8. 

[Week 2]    

→ Prescription: 3x8-12 @ 2RIR. 

→ Client #'s: 155 x 11/10/8.  

[Week 3]  

→ Prescription: 3x8-12 @ 2RIR. 

→ Client #'s: 155 x 12/10/9. 

[Week 4]   

→ Prescription: 3x8-12 @ 2RIR. 

→ Client #'s: 165 x 9/155 x 11/9.  

The beauty of this progression model is the way it allows you to auto-regulate your training, and increasing loads/reps as your body adapts to what you've been doing in the past, without being "locked" in a linear progression you can't keep up with. 

The biggest downside (as above) is that it's very easy to not push yourself hard enough if you're not accurate (or honest) with your RIR.

MODEL #3: PROGRESSIVE RIR MODEL

To my knowledge, a similar progression style to this was first championed by the folks over at Renaissance Periodization. 

Here, you're progressing your (or your client's) RIR target across a mesocycle, usually decreasing weekly. 

This will often play out as something like...

[Week 1] 

→ Prescription: 3x8-12 @ 3RIR.

 → Client #'s: 175 x 10/9/8. 

[Week 2]

→ Prescription: 3x8-12 @ 2RIR.

→ Client #'s: 175 x 11/10/8. 

[Week 3] 

→ Prescription: 3x8-12 @ 1RIR.

→ Client #'s: 175 x 12/10/9. 

[Week 4]

→ Prescription: 3x8-12 @ 0-1RIR. 

→ Client #'s: 185 x 10/175 x 11/9. 

[Week 5]  

Deload. 

The reality of being an intermediate or advanced lifter is, we often need progression schemes built into our program to force us to get more uncomfortable, and keep pushing. 

One of the primary benefits of this approach is the fact that since you're decreasing your RIR target weekly, in theory you should be able to push to add a rep or increase load slightly (relative to the same set and exercise) vs. what you did last week. 

 Using this progression model also removes the common fear of... 

"You're not actually training as hard as you think you are/not hitting your RIR target"

...because adding a rep or a bit of load every week to follow the RIR progression eventually forces you to reach failure (0-1RIR).  

The beauty of this progression scheme is, it ensures you're always pushing for progression. 

The last few weeks of a mesocycle before a deload will be intense, but the RIR progression allows clients lots of productive time training, without always being so close to failure that fatigue constantly outweighs recovery. 

The con with this progression scheme? 

It's much too easy to fall into the mindset of always needed to "beat the logbook"...  Because in theory, if we're decreasing proximity to failure on a movement by 1RIR from last week, we should be able to add a bit of load or a rep vs. last week. 

Thus, it can be very frustrating to the client to see areas where they can't "beat the logbook".

The thing you need to understand to get the most out of this progression scheme:

You won't always be able to beat the logbook, nor do you always need to for progress. 

You shouldn't be sacrificing form to add a rep/load.  

Expecting to be able to add a rep or a bit of load every week to a movement for years is expecting to linearly progress.  

If this was the case, we'd all be able to squat 600+ lbs by this point - we just don't see linear progress week to week in the real world. 

So understand that you won't see linear progression week-to-week with this model... and that's ok. 

You don't have to beat the logbook in a training session in order for it to stimulate further growth. 

There are many confounding variables outside of just your training that can impact performance (sleep, stress, nutrition, etc.). And the fact that you haven't been able to add load or a rep vs. last week doesn't mean that you didn't make progress in the last week. 

As long as you are within your range of needed volume and effort within your training day (and are taking care of the recovery part of things outside of the gym), you're stimulating further muscle building - these muscular adaptations just haven't added up to you being able to do another rep or more load yet. 

APPLICATION FOR HYPERTROPHY

There is no perfect progression model.  

Each of the above has pros & cons, and by no means should you feel like you can only use one of these progression methods. 

The key here is effectively walking the line between pushing hard enough to keep building the physique you want, without pushing so hard that you can't effectively recover from your training.  

So each of these models can work very effectively. But understanding context and your (or your clients) individual needs is key.

This is where most individuals “fall off” on their own. 

All the guidelines we’ve talked about previously explain to you how to set up your first mesocycle of science-based training… but not what to do in the mesocycles after that. 

Not to worry. Here’s a general outline of how we’d structure this for many online clients: 

MESOCYCLE ONE

Here, you’re simply following the guidelines above. 

MESOCYCLE TWO 

Your body is an adaptation machine... it’s extremely skilled at “getting used to” whatever you throw at it.  

Specific to your current goals in a hypertrophy program, this means that the same amount of training volume you used last month won’t stimulate quite as much in terms of building as it did a month ago. 

So to counter this, we typically "layer on volume" (a term I’m borrowing from Steve Hall) monthly.  

[*NOTE: This strategy is definitely speaking to the more intermediate-advanced crowd. Beginners, you don’t need to stress this much.]  

Here’s what I mean... 

Let’s say that through your first mesocycle (a.k.a. training phase), you were doing sets of 7-10 Dumbbell Bent Over Rows. Maybe 3 sets, maybe 5 sets, depending on your needs. 

In the second mesocycle, we might add in something called a "down set" to slightly increase volume. 

Here’s how implementing down sets looks in the Truecoach app our online clients use:

So basically, you’re doing a few “heavier” sets, followed by “lighter” down sets.   

Now, we’ve been defining volume as “number of hard sets”, but the most technical definition is “Sets X Reps X Weight”. 

So generally, a down set will lead to slightly higher rep ranges and more training volume than the heavier set.   

By implementing more down sets as your hypertrophy phases goes on, we’re effectively “layering on volume” without having to dramatically increase (if at all) the number of hard sets you’re doing/time in the gym.  

As an added benefit, working with these slightly lighter loads will be less taxing on your joints, and prevent you from getting beat up as the hypertrophy phases progress.

MESOCYCLE 3

Similar to last month, when you start your third mesocycle/training phase (these don’t always align perfectly with the calendar month, as most of our client’s mesocycles last 5-6 weeks when including a deload), slightly increasing the number of down sets relative to your second mesocycle would be smart to continue to layer on volume. 

MESOCYCLE 4

Over the last three mesocycles, you’ve been layering on more and more volume… but this can’t keep increasing linearly forever.  

So your training volume “peaks” (relative to your recent training history) during this metabolite phase. 

We’re adding in more down sets, and often slightly decreasing the % of load used in down sets (i.e. decrease by 15% instead of 10%).   

To add to this, we’re implementing more intensification techniques - things like… 

→ Supersets: Two movements done back to back with little/no rest. In the metabolite phase, we’re most often using this in a “pre-exhaust” fashion to target a specific muscle group (I.e. Leg Extensions x15-20 supersetted with Walking Lunges x15-20).  

→ Dropsets: Taking a set to/near failure, decreasing the load, and immediately repping out more. This can also be done by moving from a mechanically weaker to stronger position as a set goes on. 

For example:

Here, adjusting the bench moves you from a weaker to stronger position as fatigue sets in, allowing you to extend the set for an absolutely brutal training effect. 

→ Myo-Reps: Start by taking a weight to or very near failure in the 9-20 rep range. Rest 3-5 breaths, before hitting 3-5 more reps. Repeat in this fashion for 3-5 mini-sets of 3-5 reps.  

...lots of different techniques we implement in a metabolite phase, but you get the gist of it. 

As mentioned earlier, we define “metabolic stress” as the burning feeling you get when you do an intense set.  

So obviously in the metabolite phase, this metabolic stress is what you’re chasing... but realize that your entire training program should NOT be supersets, downsets, and myo-reps.  

Continue to progress your compound lifts with top sets and down sets. After training your primarily lifts, choose 1-2 muscle groups for training day to implement metabolite techniques with. 

MESOCYCLE 5

As we’ve talked about, your volume needs to elicit considerable progress increase over time, as your body adapts to your current amount of training volume.  

The problem here?  

As we increase training volume over time (given intensity is adequate), our body adapts more and more to this style of training. This means we need to keep increasing volume to further push growth.

Another interesting adaption is your muscle fibers. Your muscles are composed of primarily two fiber types:  

→ Type 1 “slow twitch” fibers: These fibers are geared for endurance. They fatigue slowly, but also are poor at creating explosive movement, and have very limited potential for muscle growth.  

→ Type 2 “fast twitch” fibers: These fibers are geared to be explosive. They fatigue much quicker than Type 1 fibers, but also have a much greater capacity for growth. 

Whereas it used to be thought that muscle fibers were stuck as either slow twitch or fast twitch, it's now been shown that your muscles sit somewhere on a spectrum of slow to fast, and move more towards one of the other, depending on your lifestyle and how you train. 

When we’re training for hypertrophy, which is generally includes lots of relatively higher rep (10+) work,  it’s thought that our muscle fibers actually shift more towards “slow twitch” characteristics, as an adaptation to the fact that you’re hitting your body with primarily higher rep sets, where endurance can become more of a priority than being explosive.  

Since slow twitch fibers have a smaller capacity for growth, a shift towards slow-twitch is obviously not conducive to your muscle growth.

This is where Strength Phases or Resensitization Phases come into play.

The goal here is shifting your focus away from building for a period of time, in order to re-sensitize your muscles to lower training volumes. This decreases your “volume needs” in the future, and will allow you to make more progress with lower training volumes.

[*Again, Steve Hall and the team at Revive Stronger deserve the credit for pioneering the idea of "Resensitization Phases". They have an excellent ebook on the topic here.]

Implementation:   

→ Reps: 4-8. 

As we'll discuss shortly, the goal in the resensitization phase is to decrease volume, and increase intensity. The lower rep ranges are more conducive to this.  

→ Sets: Decrease by ~40% of your minimum effective volume (the minimum number of hard sets you can grow on) per muscle group. 

For example, if you could start seeing glute gains at 15 hard sets per week, you would decrease to 9.  

→ Intensity (Meaning Load): Should be higher here. I like to use the resensitization phase as a “Strength Phase”. 

The increased load per set here helps compensate for the decrease in volume. 

It's also smart to use a progression scheme that brings your sets closer to failure (increasing intensity) over the course of 3-4 weeks, before deloading. 

But generally, you'll be training with anywhere from 3 to 1 reps in the tank.  

→ Length: 3-4 week blocks.   

Post resensitization phase, you can expect to come back to hypertrophy-focused training with increased sensitivity to training volume, better pumps, and overall quicker progress. 

MESOCYCLE 6

From here, you can essentially “start the process over” at mesocycle one.

The keys to choosing the most effective training split for you:  

1. It needs to provide adequate volume to stimulate the muscle building effect you’re chasing.  

2. It needs to allow for you to train every major muscle group/movement pattern 2x/week+. 

3. It needs to allow you to train in a manner that’s fun and engaging for your (underrated aspect of program design). 

 → Beginner-Intermediate: 4x/week Upper/Lower Split or Push/Pull/Push/Pull split  

For most individuals who have been following a smart, science-based training program for <1.5 years, both of these splits allow plenty of training volume to continue to progress.  

If you’re not new to the gym... but new to following an evidence-based training program like we build for our online clients, this is still an effective place to start.    

→ Intermediates: 5x/Week Upper/Lower/Upper/Lower/Upper or Lower/Upper/Lower/Upper/Lower or Upper/Lower/Push/Pull/Lower

You’ve been following a smart, science-based training program for ~1-2 years (which likely means you’ve already been following one of the 4x/week splits we mentioned earlier), but are starting to see progress slow considerably.  

Over time, your volume needs to elicit muscle growth rise - so most will need to add a training day eventually to keep progressing towards their goal physique.  

For clients in your position, a 5x/week training split is typically the best option. There’s lots of room here for customization as well:

For more upper body focus, go with an Upper/Lower/Upper/Lower or Upper/Lower/Push/Pull/Lower Split.

For more Lower body focus, run a Lower/Upper/Lower/Upper/Lower split

→ Intermediate-Advanced: 6x/Week Push/Pull/Lower/Push/Pull/Lower or Upper/Lower/Upper/Lower/Upper/Lower  

Been following a smart, science-based program for ~2-3 years or more now, and have also been taking a relatively intelligent approach to your nutrition?  

You can likely make great gains over the next few months following a 6x/week split. 

My personal favorite training split is the Push/Pull/Lower/Push/Pull/Lower - it allows for 2x/week frequency, lots of volume, and isn’t excessively draining. 

The Upper/Lower/Upper/Lower/Upper/Lower split is also very effective, as it allows you to rack up A LOT of volume per body part weekly - this can be a good thing OR a bad thing, as it can be extremely taxing.  

Now, a few things you need to understand about training 6x/week:  

1. You don’t have to train 6x/week to make great progress… even if you’ve been training a considerable amount of time. If this just isn’t realistic for the rest of your life, you can still make excellent progress following a 4x/week or 5x/week split.  

2. Even if you’ve been training a good amount of time, one of these higher volume splits might not be needed/the best fit for you. 

A big part of what we focus on within online coaching is teaching clients how to master execution and get MORE out of every single set… so often, the same amount of volume you’ve been doing creates more stimulus than ever before. 

If your nutrition and/or recovery haven’t been on point much during your training career, you likely don’t need to train 6x/week to see good progress.  

3. We can make a major difference by improving how you fuel your training and recovery… until we have these mastered, more training won’t create better results.  

Number of training days is really just a tool we use to regulate training volume. IF you have solid effort and execution of your movements within your training (it’s a big if), you’ll likely need to adjust training volume over time to maximize your results. 

And that's how to write a hypertrophy program that'll completely transform your (or your client's) physique.

If you're ready to take the guesswork out of achieving your best body composition ever, click here now to apply for Online Coaching with our team. You'll get fully customized training + nutrition protocols fit to your specific goals & lifestyle, and expert guidance through every step of the process.

More than 1 in 3 Americans are prediabetic, with most not even aware of the problem.  

In the fitness industry, you’ll mostly hear talk about insulin in the low-carb/keto/carnivore communities.  They will claim insulin is the root of all evil and you should avoid elevating it at all costs. 

However, if you want to build muscle, it’s necessary, and if you want to eat a well-rounded diet you need to have good insulin sensitivity.   

Cutting out all carbs is just a poor band-aid and doesn’t get to the root of the issue if you have poor insulin sensitivity. 

Backing up a bit, let’s explain what insulin is, and why we need it.

When you eat carbohydrates, those carbs are converted to glucose and you get a rise in blood glucose (meaning sugar in your blood).  Your body doesn’t like having that sugar level too high, so your pancreas secretes insulin. 

Insulin is a hormone that takes the glucose in your blood to the cells of the muscle, fat, and liver to be stored or used for energy.  

→ Good insulin sensitivity: Your blood glucose gets cleared quickly and taken where it needs to go.  

→ Poor insulin sensitivity: Your pancreas has to pump out more and more insulin to get the job done. Eventually, it stops secreting enough, and that’s when you have type 2 diabetes. 

You can think of insulin as a city bus.  

Glucose gets on, and insulin shuttles it to its stop in the appropriate cell.  

Having good insulin sensitivity means the bus is on time and able to accommodate all its glucose passengers.  

Poor insulin sensitivity means the pancreas has to send out more busses to get the glucose passengers to their destinations. 

Insulin resistance has several health consequences. Poor insulin sensitivity is associated with...

- High HDL 

- High blood pressure 

- Damaged blood cells 

- Cataracts and glaucoma 

- Risk of infection 

- Nerve damage

Improving insulin sensitivity is not only important for health and avoiding diabetes, it’s necessary for building muscle and losing fat too. 

When you eat carbs or protein, your pancreas releases insulin, which goes to the muscle cell, knocks on the door, and the cell opens up for carbs, protein, and creatine to enter.  

This process also increases muscle protein synthesis and decreases muscle protein breakdown*, and increases blood flow to the muscles. 

[*Muscle protein synthesis is a process in which protein is produced to repair muscle damage caused by intense exercise. It is an opposing force to muscle protein breakdown in which protein is lost as a result of exercise.]

This is why professional bodybuilders inject exogenous insulin, however, this is at very high doses and is NOT recommended as it can be fatal. 

Multiple studies (HERE, HERE, and HERE) have shown that having a high carb diet is superior to low-carb diets for building and maintaining muscle. This makes sense for a few reasons:

→ FIRST: Having carbs means you’ll have more energy in workouts, and more likely complete more reps, accruing more volume in your training 

→ SECOND: Having carbs means you’ll be getting an insulin response, which we’ve just discussed helps build and maintain muscle 

→ THIRD: Having carbs will blunt cortisol, a catabolic stress hormone, and increases testosterone, both of which will help build and maintain muscle

For these reasons, we recommend setting your protein at about a gram per pound, setting your fats close to the minimum of 0.3-0.4 grams per pound, and getting the rest of your calories from carbohydrates. 

Immediately pre-and post-exercise are the best times to include high carb meals because insulin sensitivity is improved after a workout that depletes the glycogen stores in the muscle.  

In fact, a glycogen depleting workout can improve insulin sensitivity for the next several hours.

While insulin is elevated it inhibits lipolysis (fat-burning), and also has the job of taking excess glucose to the fat cells for storage.  This is why insulin gets a bad reputation.  

But it’s very important to know that if you’re not in a calorie surplus, you won’t be storing fat because you won’t have a surplus of energy that needs to be stored.  

As mentioned above, pro bodybuilders take extreme doses of insulin, and they’re the leanest athletes in the world, so if it was the road leading straight to body fat they wouldn’t be taking it.

This graph from weightology.net shows how insulin rises and falls and when fat burning is blunted:

During and after a meal (green) you have elevated insulin, and may not be burning fat at that moment, but meals are followed by times where you dip back into fat burning before eating again, and then have a longer period of time overnight where you are burning fat while you sleep.  

When you are in a calorie deficit, the blue fat-burning time periods will be larger than the green, fat-storing time period and you will have a net fat-loss for the day.  

On days you’re in a calorie surplus, the green fat-storage time periods are longer and will net more than the blue fat-burning time periods.  This is true whether you are eating a high carb, low-fat diet, OR a low carb, high-fat diet.

In fact, insulin is not only NOT the villain it is believed to be for fat-loss, it can actually suppress appetite.  

When you get a rise in insulin (if you aren’t type-1 diabetic) you’ll also get a rise in a hormone called amylin which decreases appetite and stimulates lipolysis, the breakdown of fats into fatty acids.

Having a healthy insulin response, as discussed above, is a natural occurrence in a healthy, functioning body.  

Having spikes in insulin isn’t a negative thing in regards to your health and it can improve satiety and help build muscle mass, which in turn helps improve all kinds of health markers. 

That said, we want to maintain good insulin sensitivity to avoid negative health outcomes.  

Poor insulin sensitivity tends to come along with other metabolic diseases in a group.  These can include...

- Obesity 

- High blood pressure 

- High cholesterol 

- Type 2 diabetes

When several of these are present it is often referred to as metabolic syndrome.

Symptoms of insulin resistance are... 

- Waistline over 40 inches in men and 35 inches in women 

- High blood pressure (over 130/80) 

- High fasted glucose (over 100mg/dL) 

- High triglycerides (over 150 mg/dL)

- Low HDL cholesterol (under 40 mg/dL men, and under 50 mg/dL women) 

- Skin tags 

Risk factors of having poor insulin sensitivity are...

- Obesity 

- Inactive lifestyle 

- Chronic high carb diet without glycogen depleting exercise 

- Smoking 

- Family history 

- Poor sleep 

- Age 45+

Improving insulin sensitivity may not be easy, but it IS simple.  Doing the same things that promote “general health” will also improve insulin sensitivity.

1. CONTROL BODY WEIGHT & DECREASE BODY FAT

Keeping body fat under control is a major factor in improving insulin sensitivity.  

A leaner person is usually a more insulin sensitive person.  If you are currently overweight or obese, your first step is to create a calorie deficit (burn more calories than you eat) and to start an exercise regimen.  

To have accountability and a personalized plan to help you do this, you can apply for coaching to have our coaching team guide you. 

2. LIFT WEIGHTS / BUILD MUSCLE

The amount of muscle mass a person has is inversely related to insulin sensitivity and prediabetes.  An article called “Muscle Mass Knocks Out Insulin Resistance” cites a study from 2011 saying “For every 10% increase in muscle mass ratio, there was a 14% reduction in HOMA-IR and a 23% reduction in combined diabetes prevalence.” 

You can think of muscles as big storage bins for glycogen.  The bigger your muscles, the larger your storage capacity. When you eat carbs, they’re converted to glycogen and either taken to the muscle or the fat cell.  

The bigger the muscle, the more carbs can be stored within the muscle before needing to resort to the fat cells.  

Let’s say for example we have two athletes.  One has a lot of muscle mass and one doesn’t.  The athlete with a lot of muscle mass may be able to eat 350-400g of carbs per day, whereas the smaller athlete may only have the capacity for 250g of carbs per day.

3. GET MORE ACTIVE

This one may seem obvious, or a repeat of the first two points but it deserves it’s own spot.  

You can build muscle mass and even lose weight without being active enough throughout the day.  It’s not enough to get your workout done and then sit at your desk the rest of the day.  Getting more active includes the other time outside of your training session.   

This doesn’t mean you need to be working out all day.  

A study from 2016 called “Breaking sitting with light activity vs structured exercise: a randomized crossover study demonstrating benefits for glycaemic control and insulin sensitivity in type 2 diabetes” showed that breaking up your day of sitting with standing and light-intensity walking significantly improved 24-hour glucose. 

Another study from the American Diabetes Association found that three 15 minute walks after meals was an effective treatment for diabetics.

4. GET MORE SLEEP

Getting just 5 hours per night of sleep for a week significantly reduced insulin sensitivity in a study by the American Diabetes Association, and people with sleep disorders are twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes. 

Ideally, you should sleep between 7-9 hours per night. 

The most helpful thing for our clients has been establishing a good nighttime routine. 

Here’s what we suggest: 

Consider the last hour before bed your "wind down time" 

→ No TV, stay off your phone for AT LEAST the last 30-minutes before bed 

→ Don't touch your bed except to sleep in it 

→ Try to avoid as many artificial lights as possible. Doing things by candlelight helps your Circadian Rhythm, but is usually a bit unrealistic. Try just using a lamp light instead of a fully lit room.

In the last 30 minutes before you go to bed: 

 1. Journal - do a “brain dump” for anywhere from 5-20 minutes. Writing out all your thoughts prevents a racing mind when trying to fall asleep. 

2. Meditate 

Apps can be helpful if you’re new to meditation. 

App suggestions: 

- Calm 

- Headspace 

- Brain. FM 

3. When you get in bed stay off your phone, and just focus on belly breathing.  

How to do belly breathing: 

Put a hand on your belly. Inhale through your nose for a 5 count - focus on feeling your belly fill with air. Hold briefly. Exhale through your mouth for a 5 count. Focus on completely emptying your belly. Repeat x10.

5. REDUCE STRESS

Stress reduces your body’s ability to regulate glucose.

When you are stressed you release stress hormones called cortisol and glucagon.  

This state is called sympathetic, or “fight-or-flight”.  The stress hormones break down glycogen (stored sugar) into glucose (blood sugar) so it has the energy for “fight-or-flight”.  This is great if the stress you’re encountering is a bear...  but less ideal if the stress you encounter is an email from your boss while you’re parked in your work chair. 

Luckily a lot of the same activities that we’ve already discussed can also help address high stress: 

- Meditation 

- Walking 

- Belly breathing 

- Journaling 

You can also add on any of your favorite self-care strategies that relieve stress for you, and remove any sources of stress that are under your control.

6. EAT MOSTLY WHOLE FOODS

Whole foods (meaning foods that at one time grew from the earth or had a face) are usually not fast-digesting carbs. Eating meals that include protein, fat, and fiber will slow down digestion, which in turn slows the release of insulin. 

Another bonus of cooking meals at home comprised of whole foods is the spices and herbs that you probably use to flavor meals. 

Many different herbs and spices have been found beneficial to blood sugar control and insulin sensitivity. 

If you are prediabetic and concerned about your insulin sensitivity, give these strategies a shot and see the difference it makes in your glucose numbers. 

If this is something you are interested in learning more about, or want a coach to guide you through your fitness journey to improve your insulin sensitivity and health, apply for coaching with our team.  

While poor metabolic health and insulin resistance is something that absolutely is common, it is under your control and we can help you do something about it.

Muscles have different types of fibers, and each type has a different way of using energy and producing force.  

Because of the different energy systems, they have different contractile speeds and different fatigue rates.  While this may seem like high-level information that doesn’t directly impact your training or nutrition, having an understanding of the muscle fiber types and how they work will help you understand why we recommend training the way we do, and how you can eat to fuel your training performance and hypertrophy. 

After reading this blog, you’ll understand:  

→ The different types of muscle fibers 

→ How each type works 

→ Implications for training and nutrition

The Types of Muscle Fibers

You may have heard of “fast-twitch” and “slow-twitch” muscle fibers, and think of sprinters vs. marathon runners, respectively.  But there is a lot more to muscle fiber types than those two black and white categories.

There are actually 4 types of muscle fibers:  

1.  Type 1 
2.  Type 2 a 
3.  Type 2 x 
4.  Type 2 b

Before diving into the differences, I need to define some terms that I’ll use to describe and categorize the 4 types.

Aerobic: Producing energy with the use of oxygen 

Anaerobic: Producing energy without the use of oxygen

Motor

Neurons: These supply muscle fibers with nerves, and trigger a contraction within the muscle. 

Mitochondrial Density: Mitochondria in the muscle, when increased in size and number, can more efficiently convert energy to ATP, meaning more energy is available to working muscles.  Greater mitochondrial density = training harder and longer. 

Capillary Density: Capillaries are small blood vessels that transport blood in and out of the muscles.  When more oxygen is needed in the muscles, more blood flows there.  When there is more capillary density, more oxygen can get to the working muscle. 

Oxidative Capacity: How efficiently the muscle can use fat for energy. 

Glycolytic Capacity: How effectively the muscle can use carbs (glycogen) for energy. 

ATP: Adenosine Triphosphate, provides energy to working muscle cells.  Muscles store a small amount of ATP (enough for a few seconds of work).

Now that we know these terms I can explain the different types of muscle fibers and how they work.

TYPE 1 

Type 1 muscle fibers are also called slow-twitch.  

These are the muscle fibers that respond to aerobic activities like long-distance running, walking, or riding a bike.  

Their reaction time is slow, and resistance to fatigue is high.  Although these muscle fibers can contract for hours, the power they can produce is low, and they have the smallest motor neurons.

Other characteristics of type 1 fibers: 

- Mitochondrial Density: High 

- Capillary Density: High 

- Oxidative Capacity: High 

- Glycolytic Capacity: Low 

- Storage Fuel: Triglycerides

These characteristics mean you can perform long-duration exercise without relying on shorter-term fuel like glycogen.  However, you can’t produce much power, so it will have to be low-intensity.

These fibers have less potential for growth than type 2, faster twitch fibers, which is part of the reason you don’t see long-distance runners with jacked quads, even though they’re working them hard.

TYPE 2 

Type 2 muscle fibers are called fast-twitch.  

There are 3 sub-types of type 2 fibers: a, x, and b.

Type 2 a fibers have more endurance than type 2 x fibers, but less than type 1 fibers. They’re fairly resistant to fatigue, and are used for anaerobic activities that last between 5 and 30 minutes.

Other characteristics of type 2 a fibers:

- Mitochondrial Density: High 

- Capillary Density: Intermediate 

- Oxidative Capacity: High 

- Glycolytic Capacity: High 

- Storage Fuel: Creatine Phosphate, Glycogen

These are the fibers that would be used for activities like a timed mile run, a 5K race, or a 10-minute row for distance. 

 Type 2 x fibers are fast-contracting fibers that fuel anaerobic activities less than 5 minutes.  They are less resistant to fatigue but produce more power.

Other characteristics of type 2 x fibers: 

- Mitochondrial Density: Medium 

- Capillary Density: Low 

- Oxidative Capacity: Intermediate 

- Glycolytic Capacity: High 

- Storage Fuel: Creatine Phosphate, Glycogen

These fibers are used for activities like a quarter-mile sprint, a high rep set of squats, or a 2-minute assault bike ride. 

Type 2 b fibers are the least resistant to fatigue and contract the fastest, and have the largest motor neurons.  They’re used for anaerobic activities that last less than a minute.

Other characteristics of type 2 b fibers: 

- Mitochondrial Density: Low 

- Capillary Density: Low 

- Oxidative Capacity: Low 

- Glycolytic Capacity: High 

- Storage Fuel: Creatine Phosphate, Glycogen 

These fibers are used for activities like a 100m sprint, a 3 rep max lift, or a box jump.

TRAINING TO SHIFT MUSCLE FIBER TYPE

It used to be said in the fitness industry that you could change the types of muscle fibers you had by training in different ways.  

For example, if you trained for endurance you’d shift to more slow-twitch, and if you sprinted or trained with Olympic lifting you’d shift to more fast-twitch. 

The truth is you don’t shift your muscle fiber types with training.  In fact, a study by Fry et. Al in 2003 found that powerlifters and the general population had really similar proportions of muscle fiber types.

When you train for hypertrophy and your muscles grow, what happens is your type 2 muscle fibers grow in size, not in proportion. Type 2 fibers grow about 25-75% more than type 1 fibers in response to training.  They hypertrophy, but don’t multiply.  

So this means you probably shouldn’t worry about training to shift your muscle fiber types, just train for the adaptation you want.  If you want bigger muscles train for hypertrophy, if you want to improve endurance train for endurance. 

According to Henneman’s Size Principle, your nervous system starts by activating type 1 muscle fibers, and activates more and more of them until it needs to activate type 2, then activates more and more until you can’t produce any more force.  At that point, you have to end your set or sprint. 

Since your type 2 fibers are the ones with the most potential for growth, if you want bigger muscles you need to activate them.  

Taking Henneman’s Size Principle into account, that means you need to take your sets pretty close to failure regardless of the number of reps you’re doing.  

This is why most of the hypertrophy training we design for our clients takes most sets to 1-3 RIR.

This is where you want to consider what your rate limiter for a given exercise is.   

You want the thing that makes you stop the exercise to be the target muscle, not your lungs, grip, core, or any other muscle group. 

How to make sure the target muscle is your rate limiter:

→ Starting with a weight that allows for 6-15 reps means you’ll probably effectively activate your type 2 muscle fibers because you’ll be taking the muscle close to failure before your lungs give out. 

→ Using an exercise that doesn’t cause your grip to give out ensures you are taking the target muscle close to failure. Wrist wraps are a useful tool for preventing grip giving out. 

→ Selecting exercises like hack squat over front squat takes the core and upper back out of the equation. 

→ Use an exercise where stability isn’t a limiting factor.  For example, if you want to do a unilateral hamstring exercise, a b-stance Romanian deadlift may be better than a single-leg Romanian deadlift where you’re trying to balance.

This doesn’t mean the exercises that don’t have a target muscle as the rate limiter are bad, it just means for hypertrophy they may not be optimal. 

[For more on choosing the best exercises for hypertrophy beyond rate limiters, read the Exercise Selection 101 blog post.]

Type 1 fibers have a high capacity for oxidating fats, a low capacity for using glycogen as fuel, and store triglycerides as fuel. 

Type 2 fibers have a low capacity for oxidating fats, a high capacity for using glycogen as fuel and store creatine phosphate and glycogen as fuel.

This means if you are training for endurance and using more type 1 muscle fibers you want to have triglycerides available (You always have triglycerides available. Even lean people can run for days on stored body fat.) 

If you’re training in shorter-duration and using more type 2 muscle fibers you want to maximize the glycogen and creatine phosphate available as fuel. 

Since most of you reading this are training for strength, performance, or hypertrophy, this means you will primarily rely on carbohydrates for fuel while training.  

Regardless of your rep range or goal in weight training, you’ll be using your type 2 muscle fibers that need the glycogen.

If you’ve ever been in a fat-loss phase and ended up with relatively low carbohydrate intake, you know the feeling of trying to lift weights without enough glycogen stored.   

This is why as a general guideline we suggest:  

→ Setting your protein around 0.8-1.2 grams per pound of bodyweight  

→ Setting fat at the minimum effective dose of 0.3-0.4 grams per pound of bodyweight 

→From there, filling the remainder in with carbs

This ensures that as much as possible of your fuel comes from carbs, while still getting the health benefits you need from fat, and getting enough protein to build and preserve muscle mass.

So that explains the stored glycogen but what about adenosine triphosphate (ATP)? 

The first 10 seconds of an exercise are fueled by the phosphagen system.  This system replenishes stores of ATP, which provides energy to working cells.

ATP is broken down by removing a phosphate, which means it’s left with two phosphates and is now called adenosine diphosphate (ADP).  

To make more ATP, the ADP needs to find another phosphate.  Enter creatine phosphate.  Creatine phosphate will give one of its phosphates to ADP to create ATP to use for more fuel.  In short, more creatine = more potential ATP. 

Having more ATP to fuel anaerobic activities means you may be able to lift a little heavier, and you may get an extra rep or two here and there.  Over time, this adds up to more volume, hypertrophy, and more strength. 

Creatine is found naturally in red meat, but most take it in supplement form as creatine monohydrate.  

As an aside, beyond creatine’s effect on strength and power by generating more ATP, it can improve muscle protein synthesis, improve glycogen storage in the muscle, and can even have neuroprotective benefits. 

Because type 1 muscle fiber types don’t use creatine phosphate as a fuel source, taking exogenous creatine won’t improve your endurance.  However, because of its other benefits, I recommend everyone take it anyway unless contraindicated by your doctor.

Even though you can’t shift your muscle fiber types by the way you train, knowing the different types and the order in which they’re recruited is useful information in the pursuit of more muscle hypertrophy, and knowing how to properly fuel your activity to get the adaptation you’re training for.  

You may not need to know the capillary density of the muscle fiber types in order to actually build muscle, but knowing why your muscles work the way they do means you’re not just blindly following a program with certain rep ranges or RIR because you saw it somewhere, but you know why you’re doing it. 

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