4 Tips to Improve Your Hypertrophy Training
For many people, the reason they got into the gym is to build more muscle. Whether it’s to make fat loss easier, to look better, build strength, or improve your health, it’s a noble goal to pursue.
You may already know that you need to do some form of resistance training in order to build muscle. However, there’s a few tricks you can apply to your training that will make it that much more effective. In the remainder of this article, we’ll talk about what those tricks are and how you can apply them.
Tip #1: Emphasize the lengthened portion
When you are moving a weight: muscles contract and lengthen in order to move that weight. The lengthened portion of the rep seems to be particularly important for hypertrophy, research suggests. For example, seated leg curls seem to be better for hypertrophy than lying leg curls, because the hamstrings are placed in a more lengthened position [1]. Similarly, all three heads of the triceps seem experience greater rates of hypertrophy when trained in an overhead position; also because they are more lengthened in this position [2].
What does this mean for you? For starters, when you are performing a rep, you should lower the weight as much as you can so that you lengthen the muscle as much as you can:
1) In a squat, you’d want to squat as low as you can.
2) In a curl, you’d want your arms to straighten at the bottom of the rep.
3) In a deadlift, you’d want to bend over as much as you can.
4) In a bench press, you’d want to bring the weights down as low as you can
5) Etc.
It’s also likely helpful to incorporate pause reps in the more lengthened position of a rep. This will end up with you spending more of your time here than in the contracted position. For instance, you could squat as low as you can, pause 1-2 seconds, and then return to the top.
Tip #2: Use as full range of motion as possible
This tip essentially goes hand in hand with the previous tip. The main idea here is once you hit that fully lengthened portion of the rep, bring the weight all the way through to the fully contracted position. McMahon et al. [3] studied how different ranges of motion impact hypertrophy over time. They found that subjects who utilized a longer range of motion experienced greater hypertrophy than those who used a shorter range of motion.
Tip #3: Control the weight, but don’t obsess over the eccentric
The eccentric portion of a rep is when the weight is being lowered and the muscle is lengthening. A common mistake people make is dropping the weights too fast on the way down. This results in gravity doing the work as opposed to your muscle; which obviously is counterproductive. So, it’s beneficial to lower the weights more slowly (1-2 seconds on the way down) to ensure it is your muscle lowering the weight.
A notorious myth is that lowering the weights extra slow is better than a controlled 1-2 second eccentric. It’s thought that this results in greater time under tension; however, does that really make sense? If you lower the weight more slowly, you will be able to do less reps. If you lower the weight more quickly, you will be able to do more reps. At the end of the day, the time under tension ends up being the same in both scenarios.
Research is starting to more clearly show that the duration of the eccentric is less important as long as it is controlled. Pearson et al. [4] had their subjects perform leg extension 2x/week. One group used a 3-second eccentric and the other used a 1-second eccentric. Over the course of the study, both groups had virtually identical improvements.
With this in mind, I’d even argue that a faster, albeit controlled, eccentric is more appropriate. I say this because it provides an easier metric to track in terms of progressive overload.
Tip #4: Progress on the same exercises instead of changing up your workouts every time
To understand this, first understand what muscle is. Skeletal muscle is our bodies’ adaptation to being exposed to an increasingly challenging stimulus over time. So, in order to elicit the growth of muscle, you must progress your abilities on a given exercise. For example, in order for you to be able to add weight to your bench press or squat, you must build muscle. So, focus on getting better at the exercises you’re already doing instead of doing different exercises every workout.
This idea of progressive overload can take many different forms. For a good list of different metrics to track check out this article: Progressive Overload Explained
References
Greater Hamstrings Muscle Hypertrophy but Similar Damage Protection after Training at Long versus Short Muscle Lengths
PubMed ID: 33009197
Triceps brachii hypertrophy is substantially greater after elbow extension training performed in the overhead versus neutral arm position
PubMed ID: 35819335
Impact of range of motion during ecologically valid resistance training protocols on muscle size, subcutaneous fat, and strength
PubMed ID: 23629583
Does Varying Repetition Tempo in a Single-Joint Lower Body Exercise Augment Muscle Size and Strength in Resistance-Trained Men?
PubMed ID: 34351728
