*Special thanks to Jack Quint and Cole McGinnis for helping put the material together for this article.
Every serious trainee who wants to take control of their training needs to have a fundamental understanding of the principles regulating hypertrophy.
Bodybuilding has become an activity of precise science and research-based action. What used to be a sport that could be dominated by train-by-feel meatheads has quickly become a domain pushed forward by an army of PhDs. And these aren’t your stereotypical lab rats — they practice what they preach, utilizing their conceptual knowledge to achieve physiques that immediately lend credibility to the research.
Of course, the hard work has always been nonnegotiable. However, equally indispensable now is programming built atop a foundation of formulated and verified principles.
This doesn’t mean every lifter must graduate summa cum laude in kinesiology in order to achieve gains. The knowledge has diffused out of the lab and into the hands of the general public. What we have now are training principles that allow any lifter to auto-regulate their own training and make the smartest, most optimized choices possible.
With any given program, understanding how to manipulate things like intensity, volume, frequency and rest can be extremely useful (as I’ve detailed in previous articles), but the “how” is very different from the “why”…
Why are you doing the exercises you’re doing?
Why are certain rep ranges better for one goal but not another?
Why do we try to increase load or reps achieved when performing a given movement?
Why do we need to change things up every so often?
Why does your body respond differently to the same program compared to another person?
If you want to be a zombie who blindly follows orders, you can hire a coach and follow the program without question. No problems there. But if want to truly get wtf is going on at a deeper level, then this article is for you.
To give you a quick overview of the principles we’ll be discussing, here are some basic definitions:
Specificity- Each aspect of the training program should have a high carryover to the demands of the sport
Overload- The relative intensity of training should gradually increase over time in order to stimulate improvements in fitness capabilities
Variation- Strategic alterations in training variables can be used to maintain an effective stimulus over time as adaptations takes place
Individualization- Individuals respond differently to a given training stimulus, so training variables should be tailored to their specific goals, genetics and environment
Fatigue Management- Progressive training induces the build-up of fatigue which requires planned strategies to manage
Although we’ll discuss each principle in the context of optimizing muscle growth, they also apply to other types of resistance training and exert their influence across the spectrum of general athletic performance. This is going to be HEAVY on theory, but don’t worry — we’ll also show you how to easily apply the concepts to your training for best results.
So without further ado, let us begin…
Specificity
The principle of Specificity proposes the question: “What are you training for?”
When designing a program, high-level goals and demands/requirements of the sport/activity should be your North Star and training should be adjusted accordingly. Obviously, this is easier said than done.
If your goals are aesthetic, all of the primary training variables (i.e. volume, load, frequency) should be determined based on which body parts you want to improve and adding muscle to those body parts in the most efficient way possible. Unfortunately, many people hinder their progress because aspects of their training are not well-suited for their long-term goals. Trimming the fat from the program, emphasizing what’s going to deliver the most bang-for-buck, and keeping the direction of training aligned with goals is a science. Given that we’re focusing on hypertrophy, let’s look at some common mistakes of specificity that are made…
Technique:
Exercise technique is an area that many lifters, even advanced ones, should keep a watchful eye on. For hypertrophy, reps should be slow and controlled on the eccentric and powerful on the concentric. Jerking movements and use of momentum should be minimized or altogether eliminated. It’s easy to swing or bounce the weights to crank out an extra rep or two, but this can easily result in injury and/or much less useful (in hypertrophy terms) stimuli being generated than expected.
The actualized stress should be aligned with the hoped-for stress, as dictated by the goals of the program — if they deviate, specificity has been violated.
Rep Ranges:
Most old-school bodybuilders are pretty close-minded as to what an effective rep range is. They live in walled-gardens of 6-12 reps, believing anything below is for powerlifters and anything above is for marathoners (or worse, CrossFitters). However, a growing body of literature shows that hypertrophy is very easily attainable in a much broader range — even within 3-30 reps — so long as the sets are taken to a similar intensity.
However, a physique athlete must also be cognizant of the fact that they are NOT an Olympic weightlifter or powerlifter or strongman. Blending styles of strength training can be useful in certain situations but it often does little to optimize hypertrophy or aesthetics pursuits. For example, a weightlifter would incorporate Snatch and Clean variations in very low rep ranges with the goal being to move it as explosively as possible. While this sort of training style is excellent for developing power, it does little for inducing hypertrophy. Meanwhile, a strongman may incorporate long-distance yoke or farmer’s carries improving their conditioning and ability to bear weight — yet the ROM being applied to the individual muscles is insufficient to promote optimal growth compared to just performing isolation exercises in much lower risk/stress environments. Obviously, these athletes have impressive muscle mass and are capable of incredible feats, yet the idea of a strongman stepping on stage in a man-thong is pure nightmare fuel. And the reason is that these athletes optimize their training specificity for very different goals.
Exercise Selection:
Keep in mind that the exercises used in training are also crucial for efficient hypertrophic outcomes. It’s easy to buy into the idea that the Barbell Squat is the king of all lifts, and involves so many muscles that you barely need to include anything else for lower body training. And while this argument might have some validity when it comes to the quads and glutes, the hamstrings would get left out-to-dry. Thus, it’s prudent to dedicate at least one specific exercise per muscle to maximize growth potential. Unfortunately, this means movements like Leg Extensions, Hip Thrusts, and Seated Hamstring Curls may be necessary (at times) for complete leg development — whether Barbell Squats need to be a part of that picture is the topic of a separate essay.
On the flip side, an excess of exercises — even the right exercises — can also be a big problem. (Gaussian distributions are everywhere in training, which is why those who promote extremism are so often wrong.) For example, one exercise for quads per week is good but probably not sufficient for a trained athlete to grow. Two is better, and three might be better still. But at some point, there is a cliff in which efficiency drops off precipitously. More than five unique and specific movements for a muscle is certainly excessive within a program, even if other variables like volume and intensity are controlled for. Specificity relies on precision, so don’t carpet bomb your program with every exercise you can think of. Pick and choose selectively, because you just might need something in your back pocket later on (*ominous foreshadowing*)…
Specificity is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most important principle not only for hypertrophy but for all of strength training. It dictates everything within your program and establishes a clear direction for everything else to follow. Once you have the arrow pointed towards your desired goal, the next step is to apply the force that will move you closer to it.
Overload
An indispensable aspect of progression comes via infusing the Overload principle into every nook and cranny of your training.
In order to stimulate muscle and strength gains, your training must gradually become more difficult over time. This seems intuitive — but in practice, many things can push-and-pull the focus of the program away from overloading. Often, a trainee will be completely oblivious to this as well, even as it’s happening. What’s crucial to understand is that training really hard ≠ overloading; and this fact makes the seemingly intuitive much less practically intuitive.
While this principle is commonly associated with increases in training load (i.e. weight on the bar), there exist other routes to achieving overload…
Adding Reps:
Ultimately, increases in volume load (through the product of sets x reps x load) across many sessions should serve as the bread-and-butter of your overloading stimuli for muscle growth. Most trainees immediately go for the lowest hanging fruit: adding weight to a given exercise week over week. This is a perfectly viable approach to progressive overload, but in some cases, it may not be realistic.
What about lifts in which the incremental jumps in weight are less feasible? For example, think about something like a DB Lateral Raise. Since dumbbells tend to spaced by a minimum of 2.5lbs (in many gyms, the jump is actually 5lbs), adding five total pounds every week is a huge percentage increase for most people. And even if this can be achieved temporarily, sustaining it with perfect technique while matching reps, for months on end, is unrealistic. More realistically, reps can simply be added as a means of progressive overload. In instances like this, the trainee can continue to push reps up with the same weight until they’re about +5 from where they started. Then they can bump the weight up, drop the reps back down to the bottom of their target rep range, and once again begin working their way through the progression.
Improving Specificity of Technique:
Ensuring the actual programming and the stated program goals are always in alignment is paramount. Consistently assessing and iterating on your technique to improve this alignment is actually a form of overload as well. (See how specificity+overload are intimately intertwined?)
The optimal stimulus is delivered to the muscle through optimal technique. This includes variables like ROM, controlled tempo, stance/grip, and even being able to avoid breakdown of this collection of variables as failure approaches. So anytime technique can be progressed over time, the overload principle can be adhered to independent of loading and volume.
Rate of Progression:
Progression can only happen so fast even under ideal circumstances. When applying the overload principle, it’s important to consider the rate of practical improvement compared to the accompanying rate of fatigue generation. Frivolously adding an excessive amount of load, sets, and/or reps to a given exercise week over week — along with maintaining a high level of relative intensity — is a recipe for stagnation. Counterintuitively, doing too much too fast actually lowers your ceiling for the rate in which progress can be made. When the program’s progression model calls for superhuman rates of improvement, overload cannot keep pace, which is why we recommend gradual titrations that allow for some cushion. In the short-term, intentionally placing restrictions on your program may feel like you’re leaving gains on the table — if you’re capable of doing more volume or more weight, intuition says you probably should cover that gap. But in due time, this strategy of delayed-gratification — of purposefully keeping some gas in the tank — will always come out ahead.
Progressive overloading (in any capacity) will also be progressively fatiguing. This is always the least sexy topic when it comes to training/programming/periodization, but it’s a necessary evil to understand. As we force adaptations to occur by pushing our limits further and further, our bodies begin to fight back. Throwing in the occasional rest day isn’t enough. Eating more, sleeping better, and taking more supplemental aids won’t solve the issue either. As the predictable negative impacts of specific/overloading training start to present themselves, proper fatigue management (our next principle of training) becomes required for sustainable progress.
Fatigue Management
The previous (and upcoming) principles described in this article center around ways to improve the quantity and quality of output. For fatigue management, we want to focus more on maintaining the systems that allow those improvements in output to come to fruition. Effective use of this principle incorporates both planned and auto-regulated strategies into the programming in order to manage the unavoidable repercussions of overloading training.
Even though hard training is the impetus for muscle growth, we know that it also causes fatigue as a byproduct. And this isn’t just the muscle soreness or acute weakness you experience after a hard set — there are several other types of fatigue associated with hypertrophy training that must be accounted for…
CNS Fatigue:
Central nervous system (CNS) fatigue (sometimes called “systemic fatigue”) impacts the whole body. This occurs when the chronic effects of hard training (or any activity that constantly pushes the body beyond it’s present capabilities) begin to negatively influence the feedback loops used by the brain to maintain an internal equilibrium. The result can be as innocuous as a suppressed appetite or as detrimental as down-regulated hormone production. Some types of peripheral (or local) fatigue can also be lumped in this category, such as when excessive delayed-onset-muscle-soreness (DOMS) feeds back to inhibit motor-unit activation and force output.
Some level of CNS fatigue is normal and indicative that the training you’re doing is sufficiently overloading to promote adaptations; however, this must be carefully managed to avoid overreaching (or overtraining) down the road.
Metabolic Fatigue:
Metabolic fatigue refers to what you’d expect: an accumulation of metabolites associated with hard training, as well as the depletion of crucial intracellular molecules like ATP, phosphocreatine, and glycogen. On the surface, this is not inherently a bad thing; we want some degree of molecular turnover as new nutrients come in to flush out the metabolic byproducts of the old. However, these reserves of energy are depleted at different rates by different activities. And their rates of replenishment can differ vastly as well. So what we need is a program that takes these dependencies into account at various levels in order to prevent any metabolic issue from becoming the rate limiting step of the entire progression.
Psychological Fatigue:
Psychological fatigue (aka burnout) can result from consistent hard training without the requisite checks and balances. Successful athletes often have a mindset hardened by grit and perseverance, which is an asset the majority of the time. Yet, this way of thinking can cloud objective judgement when it comes to addressing the realities of burnout.
It’s easy to notice the acute feeling of mental exhaustion during (or right after) a hard workout, but the chronic burdens can be much less obvious. Do you find it harder now than in the past to get yourself hyped/focused for a big set? Are you losing excitement to go to the gym? Do previously important goals no longer seem worth pursuing?
Note that these are subjective indicators and thus incredibly hard to measure with much accuracy, but escalating psychological fatigue can take a heavy toll on your training regardless of your ability to precisely track that escalation. And this is why it’s so important to preemptively build your training in a way that reduces the risk of burnout becoming problematic in the first place.
Lifestyle:
Our ability to keep fatigue in check can also be massively impacted by our lifestyles. Getting a sufficient quantity of quality sleep (strong emphasis on quality) is always going to be the biggest lever for suppressing fatigue, despite the narratives we spin in our heads that we can “function just fine on 5 hours” — newsflash: no you can’t. Parallel to sleep comes intaking a sufficient quantity of quality food (strong emphasis on quantity) to provide our bodies with the nutrients it needs for energy production and repair.
More insidiously, non-fitness-related stressors from professional and personal life are always creeping into the picture. An athlete may be following perfectly managed programming yet not realize that their life outside of the gym is causing additional fatigue and inhibiting progress. Recognizing how these seemingly unrelated elements can impact your fatigue levels is incredibly important to being able to maximize training and recovery at any given time.
Checking the Ego:
At first, this might seem out-of-place, but using the safest, most specific technique on each exercise is a high-impact and simple way to avoid generating non-stimulative fatigue. Getting the most out of training with proper technique and well-considered exercise selection will allow you to get the greatest ratio of hypertrophy stimulus to fatigue, and this becomes crucial as margins for error compress.
Training within your capabilities should also be something that is explicitly programmed. Comparison can be deadly — An athlete may see someone else lifting twice the weight they are and get their feelings hurt. Suddenly, they feel the compulsion to crank up the load, double the volume, and triple the intensity in order to catch up…I’m sure you can see how this ends. The best strategy, therefore, is to focus on yourself and trust the program.
Deload:
Inevitably, any sufficiently excited trainee will be reluctant to take deloads. They will feel as though deloading is unnecessary and a waste of precious time that could be better utilized to make more gains. Hell, most will feel like a deload is an active step backwards — losing those hard-fought gains that have already been made.
The reality is that we’re all awful at gauging our own fatigue levels and tend to be overly optimistic, which means that full recovery will often take longer than expected and require more drastic measures. Given an exceptionally difficult mesocycle or macrocycle (i.e. anything sufficiently hard to force the body to adapt), a period of lower volume and intensity will often be needed to fully recover. Although deloads of this kind are more effective when integrated into an auto-regulated strategy, programming should still aim to sync the culmination of a progression model with a plan for the inevitable plateau in capabilities. In practice, this looks like ~4-8 weeks of escalating volume-load and intensity capped with a week of scaled back training to wipe the slate clean of fatigue, before pivoting into a new training block. Adhering to this conservative “2 steps forward, 1 step back” approach (overly simplistic caricature of deloads but bear with me) allows training to be arbitrarily aggressive in the short-term, while avoiding many of the pitfalls associated with unrestrained specificity and overloading.
Fatigue is simple to understand. Ultimately, it boils down to this heuristic: For every unit of stress placed on our body, we need an equal and opposite unit of recovery.
Don’t neglect it. Be honest with yourself. Learn how much you can tolerate before you burn out. Always stay a step ahead of stagnation rather than waiting until it sets in to act.
The rate at which fatigue is accumulated — as well as the rate in which it’s dissipated — is variable from person to person. How much training — and of which type — a person can tolerate without fatigue spiraling out of control is largely based on individual factors. This is true of sensitivity to volume and speed of recovery, but also of many other far-reaching and disparate aspects of training. Looking more closely at the ways in which we’re all unique snowflakes and how training should be adjusted to account for this snowflakyness leads us into our next principle: individualization.
Individualization
Have you ever tried a free program from bodybuilding dot com only to be absolutely shocked that you didn’t get the results you had hoped for? Take comfort in know that it’s most likely not your fault at all. And the explanation for why this is doesn’t require any type of deep or domain-specific knowledge — the program just wasn’t made specifically with you in mind. Yeah, maybe it was designed with some avatar of you as the target consumer, but this is still a long way from being able to integrate all of the idiosyncrasies that make you you.
This is the round-about premise of the individualization principle: each person will respond differently to a given program, and therefore training should be tailored to each person’s specific needs.
Here is an analogy that should really hammer-home the importance of this principle…
How do you think about buying a cheap suit off the rack? Sure, you might not care about showing up to your 2nd cousin’s wedding wearing an oversized jacket and slightly-too-short slacks if it means you can save a few bucks. But what about your own wedding? Undoubtedly, you will want to look your best, and you’ll go the whole 9 to get a suit custom-tailored to your dimensions.
The suit = your program — and in order to get best results, it needs to be well-tailored to your individual needs.
Sex Differences
At the most fundamental and immutable level of individuality is genetics. Individuality in genes can present across a very wide spectrum of emergent traits, but the most straight-forward (and applicable) is the difference between men and women.
The mechanisms of hypertrophy between the sexes will always the same — the actin and myosin don’t know who their boss is and aren’t biased in how they produce force. Specific overload still reigns supreme. However, sex does matter at a more macroscopic level largely due to one massive difference between men and women: hormones. Men have much higher baseline levels of testosterone, which is a pretty significant advantage when it comes to many of the hypertrophy+strength effects that we’re after when designing a program (and this is a huge understatement). More testosterone means that men will generally have high lean body mass, have lower body-fat percentages, and be capable of handling higher absolute loads in the gym. Additionally, androgen receptors tend to congregate more densely in specific regions of the body (i.e. upper traps) which means that men will typically be proportionally more upper body dominant (compared to women’s general lower body dominance).
Due to ovulation cycles, women experience vast hormonal swings over relatively short time frames; testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, and many other hormones may be significantly higher or lower depending on which phase a woman is in. While trying to program around specific phases of the ovulation cycle is mostly a fool’s errand (despite how desperately some try to will this into practicality), the effects of these hormonal undulations can still have strong implications for performance and recovery. As such, it must be accounted for at an individual level. Additionally, women need to be cognizant of irregularities in their menstrual cycle (e.g. complete cessation of a period) that can result from exceptionally intense/voluminous training.
Interestingly, men and women should largely be trained using the same fundamentals of programming even when taking hormonal differences into account. Yes, capabilities between the sexes will vary pretty drastically (i.e. women generally recovery more quickly and have much greater mobility whereas men tend to have greater absolute strength), but all roads that branch into individuality should still begin and end with principles of specificity, overload and fatigue management.
Morphological Differences:
Anatomy (and the relationships of constituent parts) is also a huge factor when accounting for individualization in programming. Across any n+1 sample size, trainees will have unique limb/trunk lengths as well as muscular origin/insertion points. Even subtle anatomical variations between two individuals can lead to vastly divergent optimal paths in training. For instance, an athlete with relatively short femurs will have a much easier time with barbell squats than someone built like a giraffe — Mr Stumpy will probably be stronger on the exercise, create less muscle damage, and be more tolerant of higher volumes/intensities. Likewise (but different), a trainee that has calves that reach damn-near to their ankle will have a massive leg-up on the unfortunate soul cursed with sprinter insertions — the former’s direct calf work will consist of nothing more than walking whereas the latter will have to make a deal with the devil just to confidently wear shorts. Bodybuilders and physique athletes must work within the bounds of their God-given proportions, for better or (as is often the case) worse.
Another area in which morphology comes into play is the fiber-type composition of muscles. A trainee with an abundance of type-2 fibers (fast twitch) will be able to generate more force and velocity than someone whose muscles are predominantly type-1 (slow twitch), all else being equal. Unlike traditional anatomical features like limb length, fiber-type ratios can actually be affected by training but only to a limited extent; our genetics still set the boundaries. So should we alter our programming in accordance with our fiber types? Yes and no…Without comprehensive testing, it’s going to be impossible to know each of your muscles’ type-1:type-2 ratio. Even if you could know this, as we mentioned before, these values will be changing all the time as a natural side effect of training. What’s more practical is to gain an understanding of which direction your muscles are biased in — that is, are your glutes mostly fast twitch or mostly slow twitch? Do they respond better to high or low volumes? What about high or low rep ranges? Do they get sore easily? Do they fatigue quickly? By answering these questions using data/feedback from training, you can get a reasonable idea of your glutes’ fiber-type bias and then mold the programming accordingly.
Lifestyle and Experience:
We’ve thus far discussed some of the more rigid aspects of individualization, but not all are completely out of our control. Training-age and lifestyle are two such mutable variables that we can take slight comfort in.
Training-age refers to how long a trainee has been homing their craft or practicing their sport — in this case, bodybuilding. An athlete with a higher training-age tends to be more advanced/proficient and able to tolerate/generate higher intensities with lower risk of injury. They can also sustain higher volumes with less risk of overreaching and include complex movements in their program without technique breaking down. However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows…with greater training-age also comes stronger prerequisites to make additional gains. A newbie lifter (i.e. low training-age) can add pounds of muscle within their first year of serious training just by doing mostly the right stuff — they just need to be in the ballpark and progression will happen. A trainee who has been around-the-block (i.e. high training-age) has to be in the right seat of the right row of the right section within the right ballpark otherwise they can kiss any dreams of gains goodbye. And even then, the road to progress will be jagged and paved with an ever-increasing density of blood, sweat and tears (i.e. greater volumes and intensities).
Lifestyle is the most pliable aspect of individualization. To a degree, we have autonomy over how we live our lives and the circumstances in which our training must conform to. Diet and sleep seem intuitive — if they’re way off, we get easy-to-understand feedback from our body in the way of hunger cues and wakefulness, respectively. More unnoticed, however, is the slow trickle of poor habits which affect the quality of nutritional status and recovery over longer time frames. Scrolling TikTok while in bed or the temperature of the room being slightly too warm doesn’t seem like a big deal, but a decrease in sleep quality by 5% every night can quickly become significant when extrapolated. Similarly, you may prefer to practice intermittent fasting because of some benefit you read online once, but there is a sizable difference between training in a fed versus fasted state. Alcohol, even as little as one or two glasses, can have a profound impact on both acute sleep quality and nutritional/hydration status.
Compared to sleep and diet, stress is much more difficult to manage. With a little pragmatism, we can do a decent job with controlling for fitness-related stressors, but those that are side-effects of being human (i.e. stress from work, family, etc) can prove almost impossible to reign in. This type of stress cannot be eliminated entirely since it’s often unpredictable and you can’t simply decide to take on less responsibility at work or neglect your familial duties. (Well, I guess you can, but you probably shouldn’t.) What can be done is to offset these lifestyle stressors by controlling the controllables and ensuring those aspects of your lifestyle are optimized. Additionally, techniques like box-breathing, meditation, and nature walks can be other useful tools when it comes to managing stress.
Learning to let go of what you can’t control, and how to take control of what you can, is the name-of-the-game when it comes to the individualization principle. Your uniqueness dictates your performance, tolerance and longevity. Not all training advice is universal — what works well for one person may be suboptimal (or even lead to regression) for you. Chris Bumstead’s training can yield incredible results for a ton of people. Yet, this doesn’t mean we should expect his training to be efficacious for any random individual, nor will copying his methods result in the same physique. Instead, rerouting that money you were going to spend on a cookie-cutter program into a coach who can talk to you, understand your needs as an individual, and adapt training to your lifestyle factors is a smarter investment for anyone looking to make maximally-efficient progress.
Variation
In order to make the best possible gains, your training requires a certain amount of strategic variation. You can think of the variation principle as the need to (carefully and thoughtfully) alter certain training variables over time in order to keep novelty within the programming above a sufficient threshold. When properly implemented, this novelty can allow us to avoid stagnation and potentiate beneficial adaptations.
An important point to keep in mind is that the principles of specificity and overload are prerequisites for the principle of variation to be effective. In other words, your training must be structurally aimed in the right direction and progressively challenging for any of the superficial changes associated with the variation principle to have a tangibly positive effect.
Once the S&O bases have been covered, the next step in deciding whether or not you should change a given training variable is to look at different levels of programmatic time (i.e. single session vs microcycles vs mesocycles vs macrocycles). What we see is that most changes should be kept to a minimum over shorter time-frames, outside of those that are functions of strategic auto-regulation (which we will discount for now). But as we zoom out further and further, we will eventually get to a perspective where every aspect of the optimal program has completely turned over. In the short and intermediate term, specificity+overload necessitate consistency; in the long term, changes must be made to stay ahead of acclimatization. When the inevitable need for variation arises, there are several effective ways of going about it.
Exercise Variation:
This is one of the most debated questions in all of bodybuilding: how often should you change exercises? And the answer comes from understanding why changing exercises can be useful to begin with.
When you implement a new variation, you have to start from ground zero — the neural patterning must be etched, your muscles and joints must conform to the novel demands, you have to figure out what loads to use, and you have to learn how to strain through hard reps. All of this leads to increased muscular disruption (i.e. soreness) and longer recovery times. More importantly, the lack of comfortability, technical prowess and structural integrity means that risk of injury is much higher when introducing a new exercise. So sticking with movements for some duration of time seems like a good idea to circumvent these shortcomings, but there are also downsides to pushing that line of thinking too far. At a certain point, we get so proficient and adapted to a specific pattern that generating an overloading stimulus becomes unreasonable and impractical. The tissues we’re targeting have fortified themselves against the exercise after repeated bouts, which means more and more volume must be added while the load/rep progressions slow to a crawl. Eventually, the most efficient way to continue making progress is to vary the exercise and start the adaptation cycle over.
But not all exercises are created equal. A deadlift is vastly different from a biceps curl when it comes to how frequently you can strategically introduce novelty. For the former, a minimum of 4-6 weeks is probably needed for most trainees before they consider swapping variations. For the latter, you can probably undulate as often as every week without much downside. It comes down to weighing the inherent risk associated with the exercise with its magnitude of disruption. Through this lens, it’s easier to see why deadlifts (high risk/high disruption) need more accumulation time in a program compared to biceps curls (low risk/low disruption).
Another consideration is the severity of variation when swapping exercises. Returning to the above examples, going from a Barbell RDL to a DB RDL is not the same as Barbell RDL -> Deficit Barbell Stiff Leg Deadlift. The former only swaps modalities while the latter completely alters the ROM, pattern and target muscles. Intuitively, making less drastic changes dampens the novelty effect, which allows you to more seamlessly transition between movements without returning to ground zero. The effect of this can be huge when extrapolated to consider the total time/volume being dedicated towards productive work compared to that which is merely scaffolding for the future productive work. More efficient than a program that calls for Barbell RDL -> Deficit Barbell Stiff Leg Deadlift might be to throw in Barbell Stiff Leg Deadlifts as an intermediate step to smooth out the process.
Rep Range Variation:
Increasing or decreasing repetition ranges is another viable strategy to take advantage of variation. Altering the called-for programming from 5-10 reps to 10-15 reps (or vice versa) can place subtly different demands on the tissue to break out of a stagnation trap while keeping other variables the same to eliminate any learning curves that might otherwise be a barrier. Like we discussed earlier with the principle of specificity, the effective rep range for hypertrophy is quite vast, so taking advantage of variation to slide along that spectrum is probably a good idea. (Though, the same can be said here as with exercise selection: subtle changes are preferred to going from sets of 5 to sets of 20.)
Within this umbrella, I’ll also throw in variability in repetition cadence (i.e. tempo) as it’s a similar approach to altering the total time-under-tension for a given set. Slowing-down and/or speeding-up the concentric and/or eccentric — as well as pauses in the stretch and/or contraction — can stimulate the muscle in novel ways to avoid (or help break through) plateaus.
Intensity Variation:
The overload principle states that training must get harder over time. It’s trivially easy to track progressions in the form of weight on the bar or reps per set. But this also assumes that we’re training as hard as we can each time we’re in the gym, when in reality, this isn’t actually the best approach. Instead, utilizing a gradiated intensity progression across weeks (or even months) allows the difficulty of the program to move in lock-step with the adaptations that come with exercise and rep range variability. In other words, keep the training slightly “easier” as you’re getting used to novelty in the early weeks of a mesocycle and slowly drive the intensity closer to failure as you get more comfortable with the schemes and more adapted to the stimulus.
Pushing this concept slightly further, intensity techniques offer a unique approach to variation. Implementing things like myoreps, load drop-sets, and blood-flow restriction are all means of increasing the difficulty of training, but we can’t use them all the time (lest we violate the principle of fatigue management). So in accordance with our variability baseline of staged intensity progressions, we can also strategically toss in some of these techniques when we want to provide an extra kick to our training. (Though, it is prudent to understand how each technique is best used and their effects to properly integrate them into a well-built program.)
Before wrapping this up, it should be noted that changing a bunch of training variables at the same time is almost always a poor idea under normal circumstances. This will limit your ability to overload and increase injury risk. The goal should always be to keep training consistent for as long as possible (other than the changes that are mediated by the overload principle) and only resort to variation when psychological or physiological staleness kicks in.
Muscle growth isn’t driven by “confusing the muscle” despite what you see in the gym, social media or P90X commercials. As boring as it is, what actually works is becoming proficient through repetition and carefully titrated progress over a long period of time, only interjecting with variation when absolutely necessary.
Wrapping Up
Understanding these principles allows each of us to take back our autonomy from the mind-numbing, complexity soup that is unstructured programming. Knowledge floats all jacked and strong boats.
If you take nothing else away from this article, remember to start with the big boys — specificity and overload — and build outward from this foundation. Training must be specific such that it’s always in alignment with your short and long term goals, and it must be overloading in a way that forces your body to continuously adapt towards realizing those goals. Next comes ensuring that you’re always training within the bounds of your capabilities and using active strategies to promote recovery (fatigue management); tailoring the program to match your unique needs (individualization); and intelligently changing things periodically to circumvent plateaus (variation).
Only by internalizing and integrating each of these interconnected principles — specificity, overload, fatigue management, individualization, and variation —can we realize sustainable and efficient gains.
Useful Links
Intro Discussion- https://www.instagram.com/tv/CQBtrtjHwjY/
Specificity-
Specificity Discussion- https://www.instagram.com/tv/CQUAfGfn02g/
Overload-
Overload Discussion- https://www.instagram.com/tv/CQlsCKMHLQu/
Variation-
Variation Discussion- https://www.instagram.com/tv/CQ3j3ganTww/
Individualization-
Individualization Discussion- https://www.instagram.com/tv/CRJ0l3PnSce/
Fatigue Management-
Fatigue Management Discussion- https://www.instagram.com/tv/CRbx4CBHid1/
DISCLAIMER: Bryce Calvin is not a doctor or registered dietitian. The contents of this document should not be taken as medical advice. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any health problem - nor is it intended to replace the advice of a physician. Consult your physician on matters regarding your health. Materials in email transactions are not to be shared.