Train Smart: A Practical Guide to Fitness and Muscle Growth

 

Why Physical Activity Matters

If you’re someone who hits the gym, you’re already ahead of most people in terms of fitness, simply because most people are not willing to devote some time for physical fitness; resulting in obesity and a lot of health issues. Desk jobs play a huge role in making people detach from physical activity, but that is simply the direction the world has moved in. Now we have to accept the fact that most people need to rely on deskjob, but that isn’t an excuse for avoiding physical activity.

Not necessarily everyone needs to hit the gym, but any sort of physical movement must be present, whether Walking, Running, Bodyweight exercise or weight lifting.

We have a detailed guide on How to Run Your First 10 Kilometers which you should check out aswell!

 

Optimizing Your Gym Training

If you’re already into the gym and have been training for a while, it’s time to learn about important science based concepts that will fix your form and technique in every exercise you perform, resulting in a superior hypertrophy training, and lead to maximum muscle growth.

 

1. Time Under Tension (TUT)

Time under tension basically means the total amount of time your muscles are actively working. Most people make the mistake of having very low time under tension, where they do the reps extremely fast and use a lot of momentum which takes tension away from the muscles.

It might align with the purpose of a person whose goal is to lift as heavy as possible, or to build endurance, but not efficient for someone who wants to maximize hypertrophy, in other words; muscle growth.

A general rule for time under tension which lead to best results:

  • Eccentric: 3s

  • Pause at the top/bottom: 1s

  • Concentric: 2s

To help visualize things, imagine you were doing bench press, here is how it would look after you unrack the bar (Take the bar off the rack and hold the bar in your benching position):

  • You would lower the bar for 3s.

  • Pause at the bottom for 1s.

  • Push up for 2s.

So if you were doing 10 reps, one set would take 10×6 = 60s to complete.

This way of training will ensure that every rep is perfect and effective. Tracking reps and weights will become convenient as well which is what we will learn about next.

 

2. Tracking Reps and Weight

Do you really need to track reps and weight? Isn’t it annoying?

Well, it might seem annoying, but it actually is the opposite. It will become motivating to look at the workout you did on the previous day, and think about beating that record today!

Tracking will open up a gateway for you to make progress and consistently grow. It will give you a purpose; which is to beat yesterday’s record.

You can track your workouts anywhere. Tracking it in the note app of your phone will be the most convenient as you will always carry your phone with you.

Here is an example of exactly how you can track:
If you were doing flat bench press, with a weight of 20kg, and were able to get 10 reps on the first set, 10 reps on the second set and 9 reps on the third set, here is how you would track them:

Flat Bench Press: 20kg - 10x10x9

Next day, your objective is to attempt 10 reps on all three sets. You will not always be able to do that the next workout. Muscles take time to grow.

After a while, when you do get 10 reps on all 3 sets, your new track would look like this:

Flat bench press: 20kg - 10x10x10

Example: Push-Pull-Legs Workout Log

Date – 3.1.25 – Pull
• Lat PullDown 30kg – 8x8x8x7
• Cable Row 30kg – 9x9x8x7
• Reverse Pec Dec 15kg – 8x8x8x8
• Dumbbell bicep curl 5kg each hand – 12x12x12x12

Date – 2.1.25 – Push
• Bench Press 30kg – 7x7x7x7
• Incline Press 20kg – 6x6x6x5
• Machine Flyes 20kg – 7x7x6x6
• Shoulder Press 15kg – 8x8x8x8
• Lateral Raise 5kg each hand – 10x10x8x5
• Tricep Pushdown Cable 25kg – 12x12x12x12

Date – 1.1.25 – Legs
• Hamstring Curl 25kg – 11x11x11x11
• Leg Press 80kg – 10x10x10x9
• Quad Extension 30kg – 11×4
• Calf Raises – 7.5kg – 15x15x15x15
• Hanging oblique crunch – 10×10

If you observe carefully, you will notice that the reps do not always increase symmetrically. For instance, if you look at ‘Lateral Raise’ under the ‘Push’ day, you’ll see that the reps are quite unsymmetrical, 10x10x8x5.

This basically shows that the reps will not always increase linearly like the incline press 6x6x6x5. The number of reps will increase; sometimes decrease but will eventually increase in the long term.

So, if you have a day where your number of rep decreases instead of increasing, do not worry, that is completely fine and normal.

 

3. How to Approach Failure

Muscle Failure is simply when your muscles cannot perform another repetition of that exercise. Most people do not train hard enough. By training hard we do not mean training longer.

Think of approaching muscle failure like this: You have sufficient mental energy to push yourself more, but your muscles just won’t lift the weight up anymore, as if they have become completely numb. This is when you know that you have approached muscle failure.

But this is not easy to do, or else everyone would’ve done it. Getting close to failure can be especially difficult when using lighter weights. You would have to do a lot of reps which would require a lot of mental energy and your cardiovascular system would get very active. That is why the 6–12 rep range is a sweet spot. It does not take too much of your mental energy before you reach failure.

You may be curious then why not go for even lower reps and higher weight? Yes, you can, some people do, usually after gaining a lot of experience, but using a weight that allows you to only perform a max of 5 reps increases the chances of injury significantly. Even if your muscles are strong enough to withstand the stress, your joints would not be warmed up enough for such big weights.

 

4. How to Train Beyond Failure

Training beyond failure will maximize your muscle fibre tears. This will result in bigger and stronger muscles once recovered. This is exactly what we want.

In order to work even after you have failed, you would have to add Partial Reps or Half Reps. This is where you add a few half reps because your muscles won’t allow you to perform full reps; to ensure utmost growth.

For instance, let’s say you are doing Standing dumbbell raises.
You completed 12 reps for 2 sets. It’s your third set and after doing 8 reps, you cannot raise your hand to your shoulder level. Now you perform further 4–6 reps where you raise your hand up to your lower chest level.

With this, you will eventually build the strength to perform 12 full reps, for all 3 sets. That’s when you either increase reps to 13 reps for 3 sets or increase the weight to 7.5kg per hand.

We can also take another approach where we instantly shift to a lighter weight and perform full reps for another set. Nothing is wrong with this and this can be very effective to tear the maximum muscle fibers.

But it comes with a big issue: Overtraining.
Since we are already training in a way that we fail on every exercise, doing excessive volume would simply mean, longer recovery time. If you’re training 1–3 times per week, it might be fine, but if you’re training more than 3 days a week, there is a chance that you might overtrain yourself.

The problem with overtraining is that you will not be fully recovered, by the time you hit the same muscles again. Workout while your muscles are not completely recovered will cease growth. This is exactly not what we want.

 

Takeaway

  • Muscle failure is when you have the mental energy to push yourself more but your muscles just cannot lift the weight up for another repetition.

  • To train beyond failure, add partial reps since you cannot perform the full rep.

  • Adding another set of lighter weight will help tear more muscle fibers.

  • Do it only if you’re confident that you’ll recover completely, by the time you train the same muscles again.