The carbohydrate has had a bit of a hard time recently. Carbs make us fat, sugar is evil, and we should all switch to a high-fat diet or we will get diabetes. While that may sound extreme it certainly isn’t a rare opinion. We, humans, love to see things in black and white and nowhere is a better example of this than in the fitness and nutrition world.

People love to put themselves in one group or another. Try telling a cyclist they should do some strength work, or tell a bodybuilder a bit of cardio won’t make their training go amiss and you’ll quickly find yourself in an argument. It is a similar situation with the popularity of low-carb diets. There is some basis for advocating a reduction in carbohydrate consumption, especially refined carbs, and simple sugars. But does that mean we should all go from the classic high-carb diet to a ketogenic diet?

The more we learn about the human body the more we realize that, while there are some basic concepts that work for everyone, the “one size fits all” diet just doesn’t exist. Rigidly sticking to any dietary dogma is not going to be very helpful in your journey towards your training goals let alone your mental well-being. You have to be flexible with your diet and this is the fundamental concept of periodized nutrition.

Most people who read this site will be familiar with the concept of periodization of training, the progressive approach to planning training as you move towards your goal. Periodized nutrition (or nutrition periodization) can be thought of as tailoring your diet to meet the demands of your current training regimen. In the same way that you should be planning your training, you should be planning your nutrition. Below I am going to give an example of when deciding to reduce your carbohydrate intake is a good idea and also when it is not.

Evaluate Your Carbs

When thinking about how much or how little carbohydrate to include in your diet you should ask yourself two questions:

1. What is my current goal?
2. How hard is my current training regimen?

These may seem like very simple questions, but they can keep you focused on benefitting as much as possible from your diet. Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to gain weight? Are you a football/rugby player who plays a match every weekend and trains twice a week? Do you have a marathon next month? Are you training for an Ironman? Whatever your current goal is it will have a direct effect on how hard your training sessions are and also your dietary needs.

Nutrition Coach Wayne Bradley of Valladolid, Spain

Notice how I have said “current goal”—it is possible to have several athletic goals throughout the year. For example, somebody who has an Ironman event in August may want to lose a few kilos in January, therefore their training and diet will look very different in the winter than it will in the late spring.

When to Go Low Carb

Without getting lost down a biochemistry rabbit hole we can work with the generalization that if we take on more energy than we expend we will gain weight. Obviously, from the science point of view it is more complicated than that, but from a practical point of view of it really doesn’t have to be complex.

But why should we reduce carbs and not fat or protein? The simplest answer is because the carbohydrate usually makes up the largest proportion of our diet (often at least 50%), so if we reduce our carbohydrate intake we are reducing our overall energy intake.

The more complicated answer is when carbohydrate (glucose) is being used as a fuel it reduces lipolysis, the process by which fat is used as a fuel. To add to this when energy intake is higher than demand (i.e. we are eating more than we need to once muscle and liver glycogen stores are filled) the excess glucose is converted to fatty acids and sent to the adipose tissue to be stored as body fat.¹

So, carbohydrate hinders fat utilization and can be stored as body fat pretty easily. In terms of protein intake, while it is also possible for excess protein to be converted to fatty acids and stored as fat, this rarely happens and current evidence suggests that during dieting protein intakes should actually be increased in order to preserve muscle tissue.²

I’m fairly certain I don’t need to explain why preserving muscle tissue is a good thing. In our clinic, we often see an overreliance on animal protein so we change some for vegetable sources to increase fiber content of a diet. But in terms of total amount of protein, we rarely see someone who is overdoing it.

When my partner and I are assessing somebody’s diet who wants to lose weight the first two places we look are alcohol intake and what we call “junk” or “wasted” calories. Alcohol is an obvious one, but it is difficult to deal with because often you can’t get an honest answer from your client about their alcohol intake and/or they are unwilling to significantly reduce it. But if you are serious about your diet and your training goals then reducing your boozing will only have positive effects.

Moving on to the wasted calories, in our experience, these are nearly always excess carbohydrate, usually in the form of added sugars, which can easily be removed from the diet. Breakfast cereals, fizzy drinks, pasta, rice, and potatoes—these are all things that can be reduced or removed from your current diet quite easily without having to go to the extreme of a ketogenic diet.

Ultimately, if you want to lose weight or improve body composition and/or your training load is not particularly high then a reduction in carbohydrate intake will be helpful. In terms of numbers, between 3g and 5g per kg of body weight is the current recommendation.³

If you keep a diary of your intake on an online tracker, which if you are trying to diet I recommend that you do, then you will notice you can hit that 3-5g/kg amount pretty easily, so we always recommend getting most of your carb intake from vegetables and legumes before touching the pasta, rice, etc. to ensure a good intake of fiber and micronutrients.

Another area of interest within nutrition periodization and low carb living that has increased in popularity recently is the idea of “training low.” This is essentially training with limited access to or complete avoidance of carbohydrate, or training in a state of glycogen depletion. The proposed benefits include increased protein synthesis and increased fat oxidation, the double Holy Grail for strength and endurance enthusiasts alike.⁴

There are several methods of training low, but the most widely used is probably fasted training. I would wager that most early morning exercisers (or those that ride/run to work) perform fasted training without intention. It is basically training before you have breakfast.

Early research is promising regarding this method of training, especially in terms of increased fat oxidation. However, it is too early to give specific recommendations in terms of duration, frequency, etc. If you want to include fasted training into your program I would recommend keeping the duration quite short (around 60 minutes) and keep the intensity low.

When Not to Go Low Carb

At first glance, the reasoning behind advocating a low carb even ketogenic diet is pretty sound. We only have a small amount of stored carbohydrate (stored as glycogen in the muscle and liver), whereas we all have a practically limitless supply of body fat. Why not teach the muscles to preferentially use fat as a fuel and leave the precious carbohydrate to tissues that use glucose either exclusively or preferentially, such as red blood cells or the brain?

The problem with low carb or ketogenic diets is with performance. Several studies have shown that following an LCHF (low carb high fat) diet will certainly increase your capability to use fat as a fuel, but sadly this does not translate into improved performance.⁵

The advocates of the LCHF movement often cite research showing improved TTE (time to exhaustion) after reducing carb intake to a minimum and becoming what they term “keto-adapted”—the process by which your body has begun to use ketones as a major fuel source.⁶

There is a rather large “but” here and it is the fact that TTE studies are not performance studies. TTE is as it sounds, a participant exercises at a given intensity until they are completely exhausted and have to stop. Can you think of a single sport where the athletes all start at the same time and keep going until they drop one by one? You won’t be able to because such a sport does not exist.

The results from TTE studies are usually extrapolated to endurance sports, but the aim of endurance sports is to get from point A to point B in the quickest possible time. This is an important point because it renders TTE and LCHF studies useless in another way and that is that often the studies are performed at a moderate intensity (from 50% – 70% VO2 max), which, if anyone has run a marathon, done a triathlon or raced a bike will know that these are all performed at an intensity much higher than 70% VO2 max, often with periods of near maximal effort.

Once we get past a certain intensity, whether we are “keto-adapted” or not, our bodies will begin to use only carbohydrate as a fuel source because the process of using fat is just too slow.

Of course on paper the LCHF idea sounds perfect, we use more fat at the lower intensities and save more of our glycogen for when the going gets tough. The problem is that it appears that becoming keto-adapted hinders our ability to use muscle glycogen, so when we need it most we can’t access it.⁵

In a recent study by Louise Burke at the Australian Institute of Sport⁷ she revealed a performance decrease when elite race walkers switched from their habitual diet to an LCHF one, it is worth noting they used a performance test (a race) not TTE.

In terms of resistance training, while lifting weights does result in glycogen depletion, it is not currently thought to be the limiting factor in performance unless you are training more than once in a day or have not recovered properly and are starting a session with depleted glycogen.⁸

Even though many people do not train more than once a day, those that have a physically active job who then train in the evenings should keep in mind that they need to replenish their glycogen stores if they plan a hard session after work. This should be taken into account by team sports players, especially sports such as rugby where players would probably train in the weight room during the week and then play a match on the weekend.

You would want to ensure your glycogen stores are replenished come match day. To add to this, consuming carbohydrate (around 1g/kg body weight) after a workout with your usual post workout protein has been shown to decrease muscle protein breakdown.⁸ This is ideal for those of you who are wanting to gain muscle mass.

When performance is the goal of your training or you are mid-season or even if you simply want to gain muscle mass then following a low carbohydrate diet would not be optimal for your training needs. Current guidelines are 5-10g/kg body weight of carbohydrate. I would advise the lower end of that scale as realistically only professionals would require more than 7g/kg.³ And remember to include at least 1.6g/kg of protein from a mixture of animal and vegetable sources.

Periodize Your Nutrition to Work for You

When thinking about the periodization of your nutrition in relation to carbohydrate intake, following either a low or high carb diet throughout the year is not going to be optimal and may be in fact detrimental to your training and performance. If you want to lose weight and/or you are not currently training particularly hard, then reducing your carb intake is certainly worth considering.

Conversely, if your training load is high at that particular time, you are mid-season or if you want to bulk up, then you will need to consume a moderate to high amount of carbohydrate depending on how hard you are actually training. By “high training load” I mean 1-3 hours of daily training not spending most of your gym time taking selfies or spending your group rides sitting in the wheels pushing 130 watts.

References:

1. Gropper S.S, Smith J.L, 2012. Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism. Wadsworth

2. Stokes T. et al. 2018. Recent Perspectives Regarding the Role of Dietary Protein for the Promotion of Muscle Hypertrophy with Resistance Training. Nutrients. 10, 180.

3. American College of Sports Medicine, 2016, Nutrition and Athletic Performance. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. 48 (3) p543-568.

4. Jeukendrup, A, E. 2017. Periodized Nutirition for Athletes. Sports Medicine. 47 (Suppl 1)

5. Burke L.M, 2015. Re-examining High-Fat Diets for Sports Performance: Did we call the Nail in the Coffin Too Soon? Sports Medicine. 10, 1007.

6. Volek J. Phinney S. 2012. The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance. Beyond Obesity LLC.

7. Burke L.M, 2016. Low Carbohydrate, High Fat Impairs Exercise Economy and Negates the Performance Benefit from Intensified Training in Elite Race Walkers. Journal of Physiology 595 (9) p2785 – 2807.

8. Campbell B, 2014. Sports Nutrition, Enhancing Athletic Performance. Taylor and Francis Group LLC.

The post Periodized Nutrition: When to Go Low Carb appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Coach Baz Wakelin at Strong Lean Fit gym in Loughborough, United Kingdom

One thing I have certainly noticed through this long fitness journey is this almost firm and staunch commitment to the ”big lifts.” Many gym goers with a poorly executed plan to train using the squat, the deadlift, and the bench press yet performing these movements is something their body is not ready to complete.

I mean who would have a leg day and not squat, right?

While I am certainly an advocate of free weights, compound movements and regularly train them myself; I would not instantly recommend a beginner to go to the gym to hit those movements as soon as they join the gym.

The Big Three

Ok, let’s go through a scenario. You are new to the gym, main goals being: fat loss, strength, and overall fitness. You have gone in armed with your new workout. Part of this workout involves the squat and deadlift—arguably two movements that require a fluid posterior movement pattern. You have read that these exercises are a must in any workout routine.

To a degree, I would agree they are a must; the muscle recruitment required is substantial. However, when taken into account the amount of potential force directed through the lumbar erector spinae of a new lifter, then I would suggest other smaller accessory movements have a place instead.

The Deadlift

Although the objective is simply to get the bar from the ground, to just above the knees, the mechanics involved isn’t so simple. The substantial muscle recruitment involved would require a solid posterior chain (glutes, hamstrings, calves, upper, and lower back). Also, working and developing your hip hinge movement is also essential.

Consider smaller accessory movements first, as a way of preparing the body for this more complex of move. Here are some beginner/pre-deadlift exercises:

• Back hyperextension
• Single arm row
• Barbell bentover row
• Kettlebell swing

The Back Squat

If some people consider deadlift to be the king of exercises, then the squat is certainly the next in line as the heir to the throne. As with the deadlift, it requires a strong posterior chain, as well as strong and mobile hip, knee, and ankle flexors.

One problem with the newbie squatter is the tendency to lean forward at the bottom phase of the squat. This is sometimes down to the ”knee buckle.”

This can occur when your posterior muscles are not quite strong enough for the load, creating a chain reaction that usually results in more of a ”good morning” looking squat than an actual squat; placing an unnecessary load on the lower back. Poor dorsiflexion (ankle mobility) can also be a factor when looking for posture and depth on your squat.

One good place to start on improving this is to work on the external hip rotators; this will help you with the knees-out type of squat. The knees-in squat does have its place, however, as we are all anatomically and physiologically built differently—especially in regard to hip structure. Finding out where your body’s preference lies will take time to experiment with and assess. In my experience, knees-out squats have better improved the ”valgus knee” problem.

Shoulder mobility can also be a factor in the back squat, which can give the elbows the appearance of ”winging”—essentially the elbows pointing backwards, resulting in a forward lean with the upper body. Guess where the body ends up at the bottom stage of the squat? Exactly, forward on the toes, with the hips lifting first on the upward stage of the squat, giving the impression, once again, of a ”good morning.” Here are some beginner/pre-squat exercises:

• Goblet squat (dumbbell or kettlebell)
• Suspension squat (TRX)
• Banded lateral walk
• Shoulder dislocations

The Bench Press

When any new lifter enters the fray, inevitably you will be drawn, instantly, to the bench press. With many beginner lifters being motivated by looking better in a t-shirt, then it is understandable why so many would want to start here.

However, is it just a case of unrack the bar, lower the bar down to your chest, then grunt it back up? Well, it may seem that way. Again, it is a case of your upper anterior muscles and connective tissue being able to cope with the demand of a heavy load. Poor form on this lift, over time, can create a shoulder impingement; making other lifts such as overhead press and so forth, more difficult.

Don’t let your ego win on this lift and practice with an empty bar. You are trying to avoid having your arms at a 90-degree angle on the lowering phase; this can place an unnecessary load on the shoulders. Aim to start vertical after unracking the bar, then follow a slight diagonal path; with elbows tucking in at around 75 degrees, and bar travelling to the center of the chest. Here are some beginner/pre-bench exercises:

• Press-up
• Dumbbell bench press
• Banded flye
• Barbell bench press (with an empty bar for movement pattern)

Start with the Basics

So, are they essential? As always I have gone off tangent and almost turned this post into an ”introduction to the big lifts” kind of article, which wasn’t my intention.

No, would be the short answer to the question of the three big lifts being essential, especially if you are going to the gym just to lose a little weight and change your physique. To say that there is only one move for a body part is a very ”tunnel vision” way of thinking.

So, take your time and enjoy the whole process of learning different movement patterns. When you have mastered the basics, and have created a fluid movement pattern, then move on to the more difficult of lifts. When first starting at the gym, your intention should be to train long-term, safely, and effectively as possible.

The post Are the Big Lifts Essential? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Someone younger is bound to look at someone older and think, they don’t have a clue. Someone older is bound to look at someone younger and think, you don’t the half of it. The fact is that we all need support, young and old, but as you get older priorities change, your family takes up your time, your body doesn’t seem to respond the way it used to and you find a lot of things harder. But, this perception of yourself, the perception that the young have of you, is not real. Your attitude matters and your health matters most of all.

If you’re the fattest, oldest, the least fit person in the gym, you’re an inspiration, and you have just as much right to be there as anyone else, more in fact, as it’s easier to get fit when you’re already fit. We’ve all seen the clips of the crazy 69-year-old grandparent types doing bodybuilding shows, pull-ups, and handstands and they only started 5 years ago.

The only difference between you and them is, they had a thought, they used their experience to be smart and made gains faster than any little twerp that was already strong. I can make any person with no previous injuries, or stress, strong easily. Taking someone that’s been through a lot and is starting from the ground up, well, that’s so much more worthwhile.

Find Your Flexibility

The first place to start is to find out how much flexibility you currently have. If you have not moved much for a number of years – or just never moved – you don’t need to start squatting and deadlifting for your first competition quite just yet. You might have to go to the back of the queue and start behind everyone else you see around you at the gym, and that’s slow, but it won’t be forever.

Take a look at these ultimate mobility sequences. You may not be able to do them at all. I couldn’t when I first tried them at the age of 24. But the more you work at it, the more magical things should start to happen.

Lunges – A Safe Starting Point for Building Strength

There is every likelihood that if you are just trying to move you may have balance or core issues so, squatting may not be for you, yet. The magic of the simple lunge is that it sorts things out for you as you go along.

You can start with the usual lunge forwards, step backward, alternating each side of your body. However, it’s nice to work up to clockwork lunges, demonstrated below, because they strengthen your hips, coming at them from all kinds of wonderful angles.

Core Stability

Working on planks and leg lifts have so many benefits for keeping you strong and coordinated. Yes, you may feel like you are horribly weak and are embarrassing yourself but, keep training because you are doing something that requires no machines or gimmicks and carries over to real strength and stability.

The Pull

As for the upper body, in general, pulling is stupidly important. Most people end up with rounded shoulders from sitting at desks and just a general decline in their posture as they age. Opening up your chest and strengthening the rhomboids, those muscles that stretch from our scapula to the base of the neck on your back, is essential to correct posture and help you avoid neck pain. Having a TRX or a set of gymnastics rings is a great idea for training, you can’t do enough of these type of exercises. Try ring rows, like I show here.

The Daily Mobility Drill

Finally, at the end of the day, no matter where you are, you can always work on your mobility. Assessing your joints day by day and challenging them ever so slightly will have SUCH a big payoff in years to come! Plus if any of the younger ones are still tuned in, I am finding keeping my joints happier is far more beneficial than any strength program for actually building strength.

Not being in pain all the time means I can actually move more and practice better! You don’t have to get overly complicated with it, and you don’t have to go full yoga, just see how your body moves and what feels.

And if all else fails, dance. If you don’t want to learn to dance, walk up a mountain, race someone in the street. Don’t just sit there.

If you want my help, you can find me at Chum Sut Mixed Martial Arts in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, and if you can’t make the trip, try me online at The Simplistic Mobility Method.

The post Move It! You’re Old, You’re Not Dead appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I have worked with many different athletes over the years. For each one that presents with persistent back pain or injury it usually comes down to missing one element of core training. Everyone knows the exercises. I’m not here to teach you a new type of amazing fix-all core exercise; it’s the implementation of holistic core training that is the key. Ask someone when the last time was that they checked on their obliques. You’re usually met by a blank stare.

What Is Core Training?

Ask ten different people and you’ll get 10 different answers. You’ll get responses like: planks, sit-ups, the deadlift, back extensions, knee raises—and they’re not wrong, but where is the standard? What is it that you are actually trying to achieve with these movements? What’s the point in doing these core exercises? How often should you do them?

To me, everyone needs to have the ability to brace, rotate, and resist an external force and have balance within those strengths no matter what their discipline, sport, or way of life. If you are great at rotating in one direction but show a massive difference in the other, you’re going to develop issues down the road.

Real core strength comes down to balancing these three things:

• Isometric strength
• Rotational strength
• Anti-rotational strength

Creating strength and balance in all of these areas should be part of your training every week—without fail.

Isometric Strength

Just holding a position for a set duration couldn’t be difficult, could it? As a trainer, it is common to see people who can hold a “perfect” plank position with ease, but then give them a barbell and all of a sudden their spine looks like a giant question mark. Clearly, the plank isn’t giving them any actual core benefit.

Someone’s ability to relate a plank to actual weight-bearing exercises is where the benefits lie; otherwise, you’re just relying on joint stacking and making yourself uncomfortable for 2 minutes. Techniques such as the Hard-Style Plank (probably the best invention there ever was) that was made popular by RKC are what will give you the ability to learn how to create maximal tension in a static position in a safe way.

To perform a hard-style plank, have your elbows directly underneath your shoulders and your fists clenched. Your pelvis should be in a neutral position with no hyperextension of the lumbar spine, glutes engaged, legs straight, and feet pressed into the floor hard.

Take a breath in, hold good intra-abdominal pressure; imagining trying to crush the air in your belly with your abs; and contract every muscle in your entire body, even your fists, hard for 10 seconds. Then take 10 seconds rest by maintaining the plank position without the tension then repeat. One minute of that will be way more beneficial and relatable to lifting instead of just being in the position for 5-10 minutes without proper tension.

This same principle applies to the side plank. The side plank is a great tool for the obliques and by adding a simple leg lift into it you can really start to connect the hips and core together. Most people with hip pain or back pain will struggle to do this on one side more than the other.

It’s crazy how many people I have met that can deadlift very heavy and do all kinds of intense training but fail at this fundamental movement. When they get injured guess what gets the blame? Their training. People start to criticize movements they once loved just because they lack proper core strength.

In my opinion, this purely comes down to the amount of information available. People got along fine for years when jumping jacks and planks were standard warm-ups. Now we’re so damn intelligent that we’re trying to mobilize and “fix” everything, but we are forgetting to get strong. If you can’t hold a side plank for thirty seconds, you don’t need to be on a foam roller, you need to side plank.

The first few minutes of all of your sessions can contain hard-style planks, and that’s your isometric core strength taken care of.

Rotational Strength

I count any kind of movement that you do with your spine as rotational, so the sit-up falls under this category, but at the end of the day, sit-ups aren’t that important and can actually be quite aggravating to people with back issues and those who are bigger people in general. It is more important to train torso movements because they are more practical when it comes down to side to side rotation, like when throwing a punch or chopping wood, all that kind of groovy stuff.

Rotational strength is something that is missed by those who only strength train or want to get bigger. One of the best ways to add in some rotational work is to stand side-on to a wall and throw a medicine ball against it, repeating for both sides.

As we are only talking about the core itself and not the transfer of weight and adding the hips, the video example shows the core being isolated by using a kneeling position and lunge variations. This is a phenomenal way to teach the body how far it can rotate and the elasticity that it can access. Your core should feel like it’s been loaded and “let go” like a bow and arrow, rather than you just swinging and rotating.

One of the best ways to avoid getting back tightness is to just move your spine, see how far you can bend side to side, touch your toes, lean back, see how far you can rotate and reach behind yourself. Do all of those movements feel similar on both sides?

When I was recovering from my back injury one of the biggest things I noticed was how uncomfortable lateral flexion was on one side compared to the other, and even after years of training it was something I never once thought to check, but it was actually a contributing factor to my pelvis twisting. I think a lot of people put too much importance on the work and advice of others, forgetting that they can experiment with their own movement. No one knows how you feel better than you.

Anti-Rotational Strength

This is a fun one. Anti-rotational strength is the ability to resist being pulled out of position. Similar to rotation strength, this refers to all directions of movement. Anti-rotational strength is important for everyone, but it is paramount for anyone partaking in a sport in which there’s an external load or force.

When working on anti-rotational strength, there are very few things that can compare to partner drills and martial arts training. Resistance bands go a long way, though, in supplementing anti-rotational strength and the best part is that they are cheap and you can use them easily outside of gyms. Just like you need your rotators to rotate, you also need them to stop and hold a position when you ask them to. Any kind of weakness in your game here will see you pulled out of position and squashed like a bug, especially during moves such as a heavy squat clean.

Probably the most noticeable issue with people who have weak anti-rotational strength is that their quadratus lumborum (QL) will stiffen up causing consistent lower back tightness that most people try to stretch out. Instead, working their obliques would be far more beneficial. It is a common mistake to stretch out long-term tightness when instead you should be asking: why has this area tightened up? Nine times out of 10, stability and strength are what’s actually required to take the pain away.

The Pallof press has got to be a favorite anti-rotational exercise for a lot of people. It should have a place in every gym of every discipline in the world. It is one of the simplest ways to get anti-rotational strength training done with only a small time investment: 1 minute each side for three to five sets will really keep your core fired up. You will find that if you play a side-dominant sport such as golf or hockey, or even do MMA, this will be incredibly easy on one side compared to the other.

Set yourself up with a band attached to something besides you, grab it with both hands, outstretch your arms and take sideways steps away so the band is pulling you back. Make sure that you are predominately feeling it in your core. This is not a shoulder exercise, so try to keep your arms relatively relaxed throughout.

Brace as if you were holding a plank and start to move your hands forwards and backward while maintaining a strong core position. You should move as if the band wasn’t there while resisting the pull back the entire time. If you haven’t already been doing Pallof presses then prepare to have your training changed forever.

You Must Incorporate These Methods

Having these three elements as part of your training, warm-ups, or cooldowns every week will keep your core solid and make your overall training even more effective. Try adding planks to your warm-ups, Pallof presses between your sets of squats or presses, and wall balls as a session finisher.

These movements are the basics before you start getting fancy with anything else and they should never be forgotten. Treat these exercises with respect, being mindful as you do them, and always remember you can get stronger, better mind-muscle connection, longer duration, whatever! Never assume that you have mastered them. No one has ever regretted having a stronger core.

The post The 3 Core Amigos: Brace, Rotate, Resist appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Consider the egg—a raw one may have a hard exterior but we all know what happens when the outer shell is compromised. Unless we reinforce the inside first, by cooking it, an egg might look hard and solid when, in fact, it’s fragile and falls over when we try to stand it up. A hard-boiled egg, on the other hand, can be spun on its head.

Activation of the core muscles should be a high priority each time we workout because core strength gives us the necessary foundation for strength training and functional movement. Also, a weak foundation is prime territory for injuries so these muscles are vital for our protection and safety.

If our heavier external muscles are strong and toned, that strength must go down to the bone.

Discover Your Core

Many people locate the core as the area behind our navels. While that’s a logical assumption, the core region really runs from our hips; all the way up the spine and because our thigh bones are attached to the pelvis; all the way down to our knees as well. This is evidenced when we kneel, our glutes fire-up and after a spell, there’s a noticeable lift in the buttocks.

Try kneeling down with your hips directly over your knees and feel how your buttocks are gradually activating and tightening up. In this position, our glutes are doing the stabilizing, more so than the muscles behind the navel.

House of Cards and Injury Prevention

Imagine the skeleton as a house of cards with the bones and vital organs balancing on random decks. Now, if you can imagine the role our muscles play in holding that structure together, you can see how vital it is to include core strength training in each session.

Injury Prevention

I’ve seen many experienced gym users struggle with the most basic body-weight exercises only because they’ve been training too hard and with too much added resistance. If we add too much external resistance too soon we’re not building a solid base but instead, we build strength in all the wrong areas, leaving ourselves wide open to injuries.
Slips and ouches may be part of life but so many are avoidable, especially when they’re caused by poor training techniques or dysfunctional movements.

Activate Your Core Chain

Our core muscles are mostly comprised of type 2 fibers which respond better to isometric (or static) stimulation. Core muscles, along with protecting the spine, hips, and organs, do a lot to prevent us from tipping over.

A simple way to activate your core is to hold yourself up when you exercise—no irony intended. So much of the fixed equipment in gyms encourages sitting but the problem is, once we sit down and start pumping iron, we disengage most of our core stabilizers. Instead, try to keep them engaged by adopting a strong, stable stance (preferably on your own two feet) before repping-out with free-weights. To recruit your core muscles, the trick is to keep the rest of your body static as you pump your weights. For advancement, try an unstable surface like a Bosu, a wobble board or a deep static squat.

The study of biomechanics shows us that most human movement is generated from the hips. As this is also the foundation for the spine and legs, the surrounding muscles have a critical job to do. Not only do they provide a nucleus of strength for the entire body, but they help protect and stabilize the spine. Adding heavy muscle mass to a delicate structure isn’t a wise move towards strength gains.

It is better to get buff from the inside out by getting down to the core. For a demonstration of how to use free-weights while keeping the core engaged, check out this move, The Kettlebell Halo.

The post Develop Strength Down to the Core appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

When I was in a band I saw a lot of pills. Not the kind that is going to make you stronger, but some of the people I encountered were very happy to pop at least a handful of them before lunchtime. I had thought this was the time that I would be most exposed to drugs in my life, but all of that paled in comparison to the rattling sound at the gym as another 18 multi-colored supplements were ingested by the blokes in the changing rooms trying to get jacked. So much promise, so much money, so few results.

The supplement game is big business. If you want to stand head and shoulders above the competition, then your product has to do things that the other supplements can’t. This results in a marketing overdrive of exaggeration, twisted science, and outright lies. The number of supplements claiming to be the one thing you need to get bigger, stronger, and more shredded is mind-boggling, but when you look into the claims made by the companies, and the evidence of the products themselves, you find a few sure bets, a couple of maybes, and a whole lot of absolute negatives.

My aim is to help you navigate the marketing spiel so you only put your hand in your pocket for something that actually has a benefit. This is the only guide you’ll ever need for which supplements to take to get stronger and more jacked.

Creatine Is a Sure Bet

Creatine is probably the most researched supplement in existence, and for good reason; it works. If you’re training to get bigger and stronger and had to pick just one supplement off the shelf to help you get it done, this would be what I’d recommend.

Creatine is a naturally occurring molecule found in your muscles. You can get some in your diet from eating meat or seafood, but unless you’re chowing down on half a cow every day, you’re going to want to supplement.

By the way, don’t believe the supplement marketing hype, there’s no truth that “newer” forms of creatine work better than anything else. Stick to good old-fashioned creatine monohydrate if you actually want results.

Creatine helps you lift more weight and increase muscle mass. As supplements go, it’s ticking the boxes we want to be ticked:

• Creatine increases your maximal strength and the number of total reps you can do.
• Creatine increases the amount of weight you can lift and therefore promotes greater muscle gain.
• People who take creatine experience an 8% greater increase in muscle strength and a 14% increase in weightlifting performance.
• Creatine increases the signals for muscle growth to occur and helps increase satellite muscle cell numbers.
• Creatine promotes quicker recovery from lifting.

The quickest way to saturate your muscles with creatine is to “load” it for five days by taking 20g split into four 5g doses. After this five day period, your muscles will be saturated, allowing for a maintenance dose of 3 to 5g to be taken daily after that.

To get the most out of creatine, taking it in the post-workout period with a meal including carbs and protein is the best bet.

Creatine also has a few more benefits outside of what you might expect. If you struggle to always get a good nights sleep, taking creatine can significantly reduce the normal drop in performance usually caused by not getting nearly enough shut-eye. If you’re not content with only making your muscles bigger, creatine actually promotes brain gains, too. A study found creatine to improve both working memory and intelligence.

Caffeine Is Also a Sure Bet

If you’re anything like me or 85% of the population, you can’t function in the morning without a cup of coffee. However, as well as preventing you from turning up at work looking like an extra from the Walking Dead, caffeine actually has a substantial effect on how much work you can do in the gym.

A quick review of the benefits of caffeine:

• Caffeine makes hard exercise feel easier and helps minimize fatigue so you can lift more and rest less during training.
• Caffeine increases the number of reps to failure you can do in a session.
• Caffeine increases the amount of weight you can lift for one rep.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of when to take caffeine and how much, I want to cover a few gentle words of warning:

• Do not take caffeine too close to bed if you actually want to sleep. Caffeine has a half-life of around 8 hours. That means that if you take 300mg of caffeine before an 8 pm workout, you’ll still have 150mg of caffeine dancing about in your body at midnight. Considering how important sleep is for your training and recovery, staying up all night playing Sporcle on your phone will be detrimental.
• Caffeine is addictive. The more you use it, the better a tolerance you get for it. You may want to take a few days off here and there to re-sensitize yourself to its effects.
• You might be sensitive to caffeine. If you don’t drink coffee or energy drinks, do not go and smash down two scoops of a caffeinated pre-workout supplement before your training session unless hiding under the bench press shaking like a 6-week old puppy for four hours sounds like fun to you.

Several different doses of caffeine can work to your advantage while training, depending on your tolerance and how much of an effect you want to see:

• Doses as low as 3mg per kg of body weight can be effective for increasing performance.
• Only 5mg per kg of body weight is shown to be a dose that works well without too many side effects.
• Keep in mind that 6mg caffeine per kg of body weight is the best dose to improve strength. However, assuming you weigh 85kg, that’s 510 mg of caffeine about equal to 6 cups of coffee or 3.5 large energy drinks, and taking that much in one go could potentially turn you into a gibbering wreck.
• I recommend taking 3mg per kg of body weight of caffeine 60 minutes before a training session in the form of caffeine pills, coffee, or energy drinks as a starting point. Based on your response, you can adjust up or down from there.

If you already love coffee, you probably don’t care about the bonus benefits of caffeine. You already know it’s awesome. Here are a few though benefits about caffeine, just in case you didn’t quite love it enough yet:

• Improves mental choice reaction time, concentration and memory
• Improves focus
• Reduces appetite
• Increases metabolism
• Increases breakdown of fat

Moving on to Maybes

Moving on from the sure bets, we approach the realm of the maybes. With much less research backing or general use, I wouldn’t be too quick to spend my hard earned cash on something that I wasn’t totally sure about, but if you find yourself browsing the supplement aisle, you might at least pause to have a look. If anything, see these as the icing on an already very tasty cake.

Beta-alanine Is a Maybe

Beta-alanine is mostly taken by endurance athletes to increase muscle endurance and improve fatigue. Despite having a lot of evidence for helping people perform exercise lasting at least 60 seconds, beta-alanine may have some benefit for lifters training to get bigger:

Beta-alanine may help performance for very high rep (15-20) strength training. Very recently, a study by José Luis Maté-Muñoz compared two groups of people in a five-week weight training study, where one group were randomly given beta-alanine and the other a sugar pill placebo. The group of people taking beta-alanine improved their one rep max and lifted more kilograms overall compared to the placebo group.

You can take beta-alanine in the following dosages:

• Take a loading dose of 80mg per kg of body weight for the first 4 to 10 weeks.
• Take a maintenance dose of 40mg per kg of body weight after that.

Citrulline Malate Is Also a Maybe

Citrulline is used to reduce fatigue for both cardio and lifting. It should help you reduce fatigue, and therefore perform more reps and sets in a session than you would normally.

A study showed that supplementing with citrulline malate increased the ability to perform higher reps to failure of lower body exercises. In a later study, two groups of people did three sets of chin-ups, pull-ups, and push-ups to failure. One group were randomly given citrulline malate, while the other group of people were given a placebo. A week later, the groups were reversed. The researchers found that the group that supplemented with citrulline malate were able to perform more reps to failure.

If you want to try citrulline malate, take 6 to 8g around an hour before your training sessions.

Supplements to Avoid

In an article recommending supplements, it might seem a little bit strange to have a section containing supplements to avoid. However, there are a bazillion worthless supplements out there and there are two that come up time and time again in conversations in the gym and in chats on the internet. In trying to keep you from falling into the same useless supplement money pit as I did, I’ll address two chronic offenders here.

Avoid BCAAs

Branched-chain amino acids are usually touted as improving muscle building, reducing fatigue, and generally giving you superpowers. The truth is a bit different. Rather than helping you build muscle, BCAAs actually make the process worse.

Studies have shown that they don’t do anything to reduce muscle soreness, and they don’t do anything to reduce fatigue.

Avoid HMB

HMB is used to promote muscle gains while stopping muscle breakdown. Recently, the headlines around this supplement have been extraordinary and people rushed to dose up on the stuff. However, as with a lot of supplements, the claims made were too far-fetched.

In a recent study, HMB was said to have contributed to literally ridiculous gains in muscle mass, more so than that produced by anabolic steroids. Frankly, I would not believe the results of this study, and the rest of the literature on HMB is severely lacking. This is one supplement where you should definitely not believe what you read.

Supplement Bonus Round

We’re not quite done. There exist a couple of bonus supplements. These supplements are beneficial to your health, and despite being a sure bet for health reasons, there is at least some evidence pointing toward them regarding increased muscle building (making them a win-win in my book for muscle building and overall health).

Fish Oil – As well as having a multitude of health benefits making supplementing with fish oil or eating fatty fish a no-brainer, fish oil also has emerging evidence pointing to a potential for helping build muscle.

• Fish oil increases the rate of protein synthesis
• Fish oil enhances the effect of weight training

Vitamin D – Vitamin D is critical for survival and improves bone health, immune health, increases cognition, and reduces the risks of cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and heart disease. If that’s not enough reason to get more of it, recently it has been found that vitamin D improves recovery from training and may enhance muscle growth.

Keep It Simple

Taking supplements for strength and muscle gain doesn’t have to be confusing, time-consuming, or expensive if you know what to take when to take it, and why. Stick with a few sure bets, dabble with a couple of maybes if you like, but keep your money firmly in your wallet when it comes to everything else. Streamline your supplements and then pay more attention to smashing it in the gym and eating right.

The post Supplements to Make You Stronger appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Training for size isn’t as simple as hitting the gym and blasting a muscle group. You need to provide an appropriate signal to the body to force it to adapt. The signal should be of an appropriate magnitude and delivered at an optimal frequency.

If you fail to provide your body with this signal it won’t grow. Muscle is a luxury item as far as your body is concerned. Luxuries tend to cost a lot. In the case of building muscle, it costs a lot in terms of nutrients and effort. Applying this effort intelligently can drastically expedite the process.

You have multiple variables at your disposal to optimize training for hypertrophy. Organizing and adjusting these variables logically is a key skill to develop if you want to be successful at building muscle. Variables such as, training volume, intensity, frequency, exercise selection, exercise variety, sets, reps, rest, and tempo are all important and require consideration.

The three key variables to understand are:

• Intensity
• Volume
• Frequency

If you can sequentially manipulate these three variables you can progress at the fastest possible rate. This article, I will describe exactly how to do that, but first…

A Quick Review On Program Design Priorities

Before outlining how to organize the three key training variables into a periodized plan it is important to establish a concrete understanding of the aforementioned principles of specificity and progressive overload. Your training must adhere to these principles to be successful. In other words, you must be training in a way that is specific to your goals and in a progressive manner.

Specificity is a very simple concept and the fundamental training principle to base your training program on. Specificity means that training is focused on developing the training adaptation you desire. Many people forget this. They train hard, but they do not train specifically, or more often, they take their eye off the ball and allow chunks of their training to become less and less specific.

I’m sure you know someone who started out wanting to get lean, but then got distracted by improving their total in the squat, bench, and deadlift. Without realizing it their training morphed into that of a powerlifter, rather than someone looking to look good at the beach.

Alternatively, you may have come across someone who was desperate to build muscle, yet got sidetracked in keeping their conditioning on point. Next thing you know they are spending more time chasing 10km personal bests than lifting weights in the gym.

While these above examples of a loss of focus do not violate the principle of progressive overload (they are still training harder and harder) they do violate the principle of specificity. That is why it gets priority status. Training in an overloading fashion is important, but first you must be sure you are overloading the thing that you hope to improve. After all, training for an Ironman will 100% overload me, but it isn’t going to help me build bigger muscles.

Guidelines for Training Hypertrophy

As this article is centered on training for size, here are some specific guidelines to follow to train specifically for hypertrophy. Ensuring your training sticks closely to these will give you the best chance of success.

• Train using loads >60% 1RM
• Do most of your training (66-75%) in the 6-12 rep range
• Most of these should be for sets of 8-10 close to or at failure
• Do 40-70 reps/muscle group/session
• For a total of 80-210 reps/muscle group/week
• Train each muscle group 2-3x/week
• Use 1-3 exercises per body part (1 for smaller muscle groups)
• Begin with 2-3 sets per exercise
• Progress to 3-6 sets per exercise
• Training to failure is not required, but done occasionally might help
• Avoid rest periods that are too short and compromise overall training volume
• Gradually increase training volume over time
• Lift with a moderate tempo (about a 2 second eccentric and 1 second concentric)

You are now armed with hypertrophy specific training guidelines. The next step is to apply the principle of progressive overload.

Progressive Overload

For training to be overloading it must disrupt homeostasis enough to cause the body to adapt. Homeostasis is defined as, “the tendency towards a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, especially as maintained by physiological processes.”

To build muscle you must present an overload to the body that disrupts the equilibrium. Your training must be hard. If you apply the hypertrophy specific guidelines listed above with sufficient effort then you will overload the body. This will cause it to adapt and build bigger, stronger muscles.

So, we know training must be hard to be effective—the bad news is that it has to get harder.

Once an overload has been presented to the body it adapts. Presenting an equivalent stimulus next time is no longer an overload. The body has already adapted to this magnitude of stimulus and it is no longer perceived as an overload. Thus, every subsequent stimulus should be greater than the one which preceded it. This is the progressive part of progressive overload.

In simple terms, your training, on average, must continuously provide an overload to the body. Therefore, you must continually lift more weight, or do more sets and reps at a given weight, to keep providing a sufficiently overloading stimulus to the body to cause long-term adaptations in muscle size.

The Progressive Overload Conundrum

It may be a fundamental principle of training, but progressive overload presents a problem. That problem is that on the face of things our only option to keep progressing is to do ever longer and more arduous training sessions. Time is finite and most of us have work, family, and social commitments that prevent us from spending every waking hour at the gym. Even if we didn’t have these commitments, you cannot indefinitely train harder, for longer, more often without getting injured or overtrained.

So, how can you adhere to the principle of progressive overload without hurting yourself?

That’s where those three key variables I mentioned earlier come in…

• Intensity: In this instance, is defined by the percentage of 1 rep max used when performing an exercise.
• Volume: A measure of your total workload per exercise, session, and week.

A simple way to track volume is by using the following equation:

Sets X Reps X Load

Research indicates a dose response relationship between training volume and hypertrophy. While there is both an intensity and volume component to hypertrophy training, research indicates that, assuming you use loads above 60% of your 1RM, volume is the key determinant of success.

While generally people consider the term training frequency to mean how many days a week you train, Brad Schoenfeld has stated that the number of times a given muscle group is trained per week is a potentially more important consideration. For the purposes of this article frequency relates to how often a specific muscle group is trained per week.

Literature appears to indicate that splitting the same training volume into more frequent training sessions is superior for hypertrophy. There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that training a muscle group twice a week is better than once per week. Current research indicates that anything between 2-4 times per week is optimal, but cannot provide a clear answer to whether 2, 3, or 4 times is best.

The interplay between intensity, volume, and frequency is critical to the success of a program. Intensity and volume are inversely related. When one is high the other cannot be (without consequences–injury or overtraining). At any one time, you can only push two of these three variables hard. Over successive phases of training you can manipulate these to constantly provide a novel muscle building stimulus.

Consider this training format example

Phase 1: Upper/Lower split, hitting each muscle twice per week, with higher intensity and moderate volume. (e.g., 3×8 @ 75%1RM)

Phase 2: Increase training frequency and overall training volume by transitioning to training 5x/week using an Upper/Lower/Push/Pull/Legs split. Decrease intensity by moving to slightly higher rep sets with a lighter load. (e.g., 3×10 @ 70%1RM)

Phase 3: Bump frequency and volume up again by switching to training 6 days a week on Push/Pull split (push = quads, chest, anterior delts, and triceps. pull = hamstrings, spinal erectors, back, rear delts, and biceps). Intensity drops and incorporate metabolic stress style techniques (drop sets, etc.). (e.g., 3×12-15 @ 65%1RM)

Phase 4: Strength phase using lower frequency and volume, but higher intensity. For example, training 3 days per week using a whole-body approach. (e.g., 3×4-6 @ 80-85%1RM)

Phase 5: Repeat the process if you want further mass gain or begin cut if you want to drop body fat.

During phase 1-3 the average intensity (% of 1RM) goes down while volume and frequency are pushed higher and higher. This allows you to progressively overload your body via increased training volume. Since volume has a dose response relationship with hypertrophy this is optimal for muscle building and will allow you to reach your muscular potential as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The post The 3 Key Training Variables to Manipulate for Size appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Science gives us some useful insights into this topic. It indicates that splitting the same training volume into more frequent training sessions is better for hypertrophy.

Training frequency is one of the most important variables to consider for hypertrophy. In this instance training frequency relates to how often a given muscle is trained rather than how often you train in the gym.

Science gives us some useful insights into this topic. It indicates that splitting the same training volume into more frequent training sessions is better for hypertrophy.

This is likely due to a more optimal distribution of training stimuli across the week. In fact, several physiological markers show superior results with training programs that match overall volume through high-frequency approaches which use less volume per session.

The evidence clearly illustrates that training muscles twice per week is superior to training a muscle once per week. Other research indicates that training frequencies higher than twice per week are optimal for hypertrophy.

Most traditional bodybuilding programs have you training a muscle directly only once per week (e.g., the bro split) or twice per week (e.g., upper/lower or push/pull/legs). In my opinion, these splits limit your muscle building ability.

Why?

Because they evenly distribute training frequency and cap a muscle’s frequency at a maximum of twice per week. It is my contention that for maximal growth some muscles require a higher frequency than this. Most traditional splits, therefore, fail to maximize your growth in these muscles for this very reason.

Optimize for Each Muscle

The fundamental flaw in the symmetrical training splits out there is that they lack a consideration for the differences between muscle groups. Different muscles respond best to different intensity, volume, and frequency prescriptions.

Primary amongst this is how quickly they recover from training and, therefore, how soon they are ready to be trained again. Frequency of training shouldn’t be considered a blanket, body-wide issue, but a muscle-specific one.

To maximize your results, you need to optimize your training frequency for each and every muscle. The problem is that people like easily packaged symmetrical training splits which neatly fit within the seven-day week.

I completely understand this. From a logistical standpoint, it is far simpler. Convenience is nice. It rarely results in outstanding results though.

The question is, do you want simple and convenient or do you want exceptional results?

If you answered simple it doesn’t make you a bad person. You can still get good results. They just won’t be quite as good as they could be.

For those that answered exceptional, you will need to invest just a little brain power and creative thinking to build the perfect training frequency for you and every one of your muscles.

Decades of bodybuilding wisdom show that some muscle groups can be trained more frequently than others—think abs, rear delts, forearms, and calves. Conversely, some muscles just don’t seem to respond to high-frequency training. Hamstrings every day anyone? Nope, didn’t think so.

While science hasn’t identified muscle-specific frequency guidelines, it does provide a large number of clues we can use to start piecing the optimal frequency puzzle together.

A range of training a muscle 2-4 times per week has been identified as effective for hypertrophy.

Pinpointing where on this spectrum each of your muscles lies means you can bespeak your training at a whole new level. Not just to you, but to each and every one of your muscles.

That creates the possibility of you growing at the fastest possible rate for every muscle group. Not as is commonly the case having some muscles lagging behind while others take center stage.

Stimulus, Recovery, Adaptation

Stimulus, recovery, adaptation (SRA) describes the entire sequence of events that occur during, after, and before each training session. It is a sports science adaptation of Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS). Training is the stressor/stimulus. Following training the body has to recover back up to baseline. Then adaptation can occur.

Each muscle has a different SRA curve. This is a fancy way of saying some muscles recover and adapt quicker than others after training. On that basis, your training frequency for each body part should reflect a muscle’s specific SRA timeframe.

Your goal, as Fred Hatfield described it, is to “train each muscle when it is ready to be trained–never sooner and never later.” In sports science geek terminology that means you should train a muscle at the peak of its adaptation curve.

SRA curves for strength are different to power SRA curves, and skill SRA curves are different again. It should come as no surprise that hypertrophy SRA curves are also unique from other training qualities.

The length of the hypertrophy SRA curve varies due to numerous factors—your strength, training history, and level of muscle mass all play a role. Furthermore, the size of a muscle, its function, anatomy, fiber type ratio, structure and its propensity for muscle damage all contribute to its SRA curve.

While establishing a muscle’s hypertrophy SRA cycle is multi-factorial, it is possible to narrow it down to roughly 24-72 hours for practically every muscle in the body. Although this range is relatively narrow it is still wise to try and fine tune your training to each muscle’s exact SRA timeline.

Think of it this way, training a muscle every 72 hours when it can only tolerate training every 24 hours will massively limit your rate of progress. Likewise, hitting a muscle every day which requires 72 hours of recovery is a fast track to injury and overtraining.

To bring this point home ask yourself “how often could I train my abs and recover?” Then ask, “could I train my hamstrings hard this often?” I’m guessing the answer to the former is every day (or damn near) and the latter is, about every 4th day, or twice per week. Hopefully, this illustrates why following a symmetrical split is sub-optimal.

How to Determine a Muscle’s SRA

If you can identify a given muscle’s SRA then you can plan your training frequency around it for the best possible results.

To establish this, you first must consider the following overall factors:

• Your training age/history/experience
• Your strength levels
• Your size and level of muscularity

Over your training career, you will become bigger and stronger. With this comes the ability to handle heavier loads. To overload yourself consistently you will require higher training volumes as you progress. This all adds up to an increased ability to cause homeostatic disruption at every training session.

With a higher stimulus comes a longer recovery period. As such, more experienced lifters will very often have longer SRA curves and, therefore, require a lower training frequency per body part.

Once your global or systemic factors have been considered it is then important to drill down into more detail on muscle-specific factors. These include:

• The fiber type ratio of a muscle
• A muscle’s size
• A given muscle’s anatomy
• Lift and exercise specific differences

Fiber Type

Different muscle groups have different roles within the body. These diverse functional characteristics are the key contributing factor to why different have varying fiber type ratios. Some muscles are predominantly slow-twitch in fiber composition while others are fast twitch dominant.

Fast twitch fibers are much more powerful, have higher force production, but fatigue more quickly. They also take longer to recover. Slow twitch muscle fibers, however, tend to recover more quickly, both within a session and from session to session.

Consequently, training slow twitch muscle more often is a wise decision.

The classification of muscle fiber type ratios is not an exact science as there is a great deal of inter-individual variability. With that said the literature does provide the following guidelines:

• Chest – fast twitch (approximately 60% type II)
• Shoulders – slight type I dominance
• Traps – mixed
• Triceps – fast
• Lats – slightly more type II to type I
• Biceps – tendency towards fast twitch dominant (approximately 40% type I and 60% type II)
• Spinal Erectors – slow (63-73% type I)
• Hamstrings – mixed (44-54% type I)
• Quadriceps – mixed (44-64% type I)
• Glutes – mixed with a tendency towards slow twitch (52-60% type I)
• Calves – slow (gastrocnemius roughly 44-76% type I and soleus in the range of 70-96% type I)

If you have a higher predominance of slower-twitch muscle fibers then you can most likely tolerate and benefit from higher frequency training. On the other hand, if you have above average numbers of fast twitch fibers then you will probably benefit from using lower rep ranges and lower frequencies of training.

Muscle Size

Bigger muscles take longer to recover. Just like you can cause more disruption the bigger and stronger you get; larger and stronger muscles cause more disruption than smaller ones. Training your quads causes significantly more disruption and requires far more recovery than training biceps.

The larger muscles of the body can produce more force. When training them you use heavier weights. Also, they obviously take up a larger surface area and comprise a greater amount of tissue.

This tissue must be repaired and re-modeled before it can effectively be trained again. Obviously, this takes longer for larger muscles.

Anatomy

Size is not the only consideration to a muscles training frequency. A muscle’s architecture must be considered. Muscle architecture varies from muscle to muscle and can influence force production, ability to stretch under load, take on muscle damage, and cause homeostatic disruption. This needs to be considered when planning training frequency.

A primary example of how this impacts training frequency is the chest. It rarely benefits from being trained more than twice per week because of the fast twitch fibers, it’s ability to stretch under load and high degrees of muscle damage created when training it.

Even though it is a relatively small muscle it’s ideal training frequency tends to be on the lower end of the scale. Meanwhile, a larger muscle like the latissimus dorsi tends to benefit from higher training frequencies because its fiber type and architecture allow for this.

Use Exercise Specific Information

Analysing training frequency by examining a muscle’s specific characteristics is an excellent foundation to base your training frequency decisions on.

A muscle’s fiber ratio, size, anatomy, and architecture tells most of the story, but not the whole story. The exercises you use in your training significantly impacts upon your training frequency.

The factors to consider when differentiating between exercises include, the quantity of muscle mass involved, the amount of force generated, movement complexity, nervous system activation, degree of stretch on working muscles, and the level of muscle damage created.

A practical tip is that compound barbell movements tend to be the hardest to recover from, then dumbbells, then cables or fixed machines. Isolation exercises also tend to be easier to recover from than multi-joint movements. So, at one end of the spectrum for chest is the barbell bench press and at the other is machine flyes.

When planning your training you must make a trade-off between choosing between the most effective exercises (generally multi-joint free weight exercises) and the super high frequencies possible with machine based isolation exercises. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that most of the time you’re best-served training less frequently with the most effective exercises.

I suggest you limit your training frequency to what you can tolerate while building the foundation of your training around the big lifts.

Another consideration is the amount of muscle damage caused by an exercise. Lifts that create high levels of stretch under load tend to cause very high levels of muscle damage.

Some prime examples are Romanian deadlifts, good mornings, dips, paused bench presses, cambered bar presses, and sissy squats. Because of the muscle damage caused doing these recovery times are slightly extended.

When it comes to programming this is important to consider. Taking the hamstrings as an example, they respond very well to twice weekly training. Now, say you structure your week to train hamstrings on a Monday and Thursday. It is probably best to do the RDLs and good mornings on a Thursday because these lifts take longer to recover from.

Meanwhile, making the bulk of your hamstring training on the Monday from leg curls is wise. After your Monday session, you have a quicker recovery time.

This is useful as you are training the hamstrings again 72 hours later. Then after the higher muscle damage caused on Thursday by RDLs and/or good mornings you get 96 hours recovery before hitting hamstrings the following Monday.

Range of motion (ROM) is also a consideration when it comes to exercise specific SRA curves. Movements with a greater ROM cause greater systemic fatigue as they have a higher workload.

Work in physics is defined as:

Force x Distance

Deficit deadlifts create more fatigue than pulling from blocks and bench presses require more work per rep than floor presses.

Nothing Is Set in Stone

It is worth noting that frequency shouldn’t be set in stone. Like other training variables, you will see the best results by manipulating it over time to optimize your training.

For example, using moderate frequencies (1-3x per week) as the default setting for your program, with periods of more frequent training (i.e. 3-6x) used sparingly to achieve functional overreaching, to target a lagging body part or to bust through plateaus is a very effective training strategy.

Some general guidelines:

With all the above factors taken into consideration, it is possible to give some general guidelines for muscle-specific training frequencies.

• 4 days per week – biceps, rear and lateral delts, and calves
• 3 days per week – back and triceps
• 2 days per week – quads, hamstrings, chest, and anterior delts

With this info, a training split like this would deliver an optimal training frequency for most. You could achieve the above by training 6 or 7 days per week.

If you don’t have time to train every day you could tag-on some additional work for the higher frequency muscles onto a standard upper/lower split as below and keep your total training days to four per week:

• Monday: upper + calves
• Tuesday: lower + biceps, rear, and lateral deltoids
• Wednesday: off
• Thursday: upper + calves
• Friday: off
• Saturday: legs + lats, arms, rear and lateral deltoids
• Sunday: off

With the tag-on sets, volume doesn’t need to be too high—2-3 sets per muscle group will get the job done and provide a sufficient stimulus while allowing you to hit the frequency guidelines above.

If you currently use a typical bro split, hitting each muscle once per week, don’t jump straight to training back three times a week and smashing biceps, shoulders, and calves four times.

Instead, gradually and incrementally increase your training frequency. Push biceps, rear and lateral delts up to twice per week.

If that goes okay add calves and back. Once you have adapted to that continue to add sessions for other muscle groups until everything is being trained twice per week. Once that is done you can begin to increase the frequency of biceps, rear and lateral delts and calves again. Assuming all goes well repeat the process.

Use Intelligent Training

In several months, you will have intelligently increased your training frequency. Progressively overloaded your body and be set to benefit from an optimal training frequency. Throughout this process meticulously track your response.

Identify patterns and see how different frequencies affect your progress. Can some muscles tolerate more frequency than others? In time, you will begin to identify your optimal training frequency for each body part. Once you arrive at these muscle-specific recovery rates you are then in a position to structure your program around them.

The post Optimal Frequency Training for Hypertrophy appeared first on Breaking Muscle.