Couple things to get you started. While nutrition is an important consideration here, I need to make sure that it's completely clear here. Resistance exercise is by far the greater stimuli of muscle growth relative to nutrition.
Really from this perspective, we need to make sure we have sufficient calories, which is to be said as hyper caloric. So we need a little bit more calories and we're burning. Does this stay alive?
And mostly we need to focus on protein here. 1. 6 grams per kilogram of body weight is a great place to start.
Now I personally prefer a little bit higher, 2. 2 grams per kilogram, which is about one gram per pound. But actually I believe the science is pretty clear here.
Suggesting that going from 1. 6 to 2. 2 is not really going to increase the amount of muscle you're you're growing.
And if it is, it's not going to be by much. And so, if you prefer to be at 1. 6, that's fine.
Higher is absolutely okay as well and it may aid in some people in some circumstances. But going below 1. 6 seems to reduce the amount of muscle you can grow.
So we want to be at least that number. From a training perspective, you want to start by focusing on your big muscle groups. Now if you have a particular muscle or group of muscles that you want to increase for any number of reasons, say you've identified assymetry, have a personal preference, you enjoy that more, you just want to have a muscle group grow larger for some aesthetic reasons, that's absolutely fine.
Focus on those. But you really shouldn't omit everything else either. It's critically important to maintain posture and joint integrity by ensuring we have adequate muscle surrounding each joint.
Which basically means we need to address each muscle at some point throughout the week. We can certainly emphasize some more than others. That's no problem whatsoever.
But we don't want to leave big chunks of muscles completely unchallenged. That's going to present problems more likely if not now, down the road. So we also want to challenge these muscles across multiple stimuli, meaning exercises.
So whether you prefer your body weight, machines, dumbbells, kettlebells, or any number of other strategies, those are absolutely fine. All are incredibly effective. And at the highest level, it actually doesn't really matter that much which of those strategies you try, because at the end of the day it's just about stimulating the muscle.
However you go about that is absolutely fine. So you have lots of options there. Perhaps in a future episode we'll get into the the details and spend the entire discussion on that going over pros and cons of those different strategies and tactics.
But for now at at again the most zoomed out level, you've got a tremendous amount of options regarding which exercise you select and which modes and methodologies you do to engage that resistance exercise. The range of motion is critical. You want to use the largest range of motion you can while still being safe and protective of both the exercising joint as well as the joint above it and below it.
So an example here, let's just say you're interested in growing your quadriceps. You want to have a lot of activity over both the knee and hip joint, but you want to make sure that you're doing though that in a case in which you're not compromising your low back and say your feet. And so making sure we're protecting the joints above and below the muscle group is important as well.
So we really want to challenge our muscles as much as we can in a variety of ways there. In terms of how much to do the repetitions per set doesn't really matter, such that you can have success in a number of them anywhere between, say as low as five repetitions per set, all the way up to 30 or more repetitions per set can be equally effective for muscle growth. The total amount of sets per week is probably the bigger determinant.
From there, you probably want to be in the neighborhood of about 15 to 20 working sets per muscle per week. If you were to break that down, let's say you were focusing again on your hamstrings muscles, if you did three sets on day one, three sets on day two and three sets on day three, that would give you a total of nine working sets per week. That's probably a little bit too low.
But if you did two hamstring exercises each day, three sets each, that'd be six sets day one, six sets day two, six sets day three, and now you're up to close the 18 working sets per per week rather. That's a pretty good spot to be in. Lots of things we could talk about there in terms of advanced athletes and elite, but structurally and roughly that's going to put you in the ballpark.
That's going to be enough stimulus for most people to grow most of the time. Last consideration here is frequency, as I sort of alluded to here, somewhere between two to three days per week per muscle group is a great way to go about it. More is fine as well if you can handle the recovery.
Less than two days a week is also theoretically possible. There's excellent research showing one day a week per muscle group is sufficient in muscle to grow muscle. It does become practically challenging though, because now you've got to fit all those working sets into a single day.
And that is challenging both in the length of the workout as well as how sore and how much damage you create. So what I recommend here is what I call the 72 hour rule, which is every seven two hours or so work each of your muscles to a nice pump or contraction. Remember, we want to stimulate muscle growth here, but we don't want to annihilate the muscle either.
Excessive fatigue and damage and soreness does not aid in muscle growth and can actually harm our ability to come back and train again in the next session, or even the one following that, which would then reduce our overall total volume. So enough intensity, enough difficulty to stimulate growth, but not so much that we completely annihilate it. We got to be able to repeat that every 72 hours or so.
So, again the way I say it, take it to a nice pump, a nice contraction, whatever that means to you. And that's going to get a lot of people in a close enough ballpark to growing muscle.
