What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today we're talking all about how to grow bigger muscles, and it's right here.
It's actually really simple.
You've got three paths to do it, but the big thing is; you can't get attached to one at
the exclusion of the others.
I'm going to show you today how all three have to be explored, and rotated if you want
to see your best gains ever.
If you want to reach your true, full potential you have to make sure you're doing them.
I'm going to cover that, and the reasons why that is.
Let's identify what we have as our options, first.
We've got progressive overload, metabolic stress, and eccentric damage.
These are the three main ways you can grow muscle.
Ironically, if you were looking at the three of them, only one of them would I say is going
to cause a lot of muscle soreness.
So right off the bat, you realize that muscle soreness is not a prerequisite for growth.
But it actually might be.
You see, at some point – I did a whole video on this – you're going to have to dip into
the eccentric muscle damage technique as a way to continue to illicit new gains because
these are going to dry up, if these are the only two things you use.
I'll get back to that in a second, but these two don’t necessarily do that.
So what are we talking about?
With progressive overload we're talking about adding weight to the bar.
Getting stronger in different exercises.
Have your strength gains proceed your size gains.
The only thing you can do is increase your workload.
We can increase the volume of what we do inside of our workout.
We can increase the density of a workout by decreasing the time that we do the same volume
that we did the last time.
So we can increase workload and volume, or we can increase our training frequency, taking
advantage of the fact that we know muscle protein synthesis peaks, and then gets back
to baseline within 48 hours.
So if you train a muscle more frequently you can hit it more often.
You can spark that stimulus for growth more often.
Or you could do both.
You could even increase exercise variety from time to time because the new exercise stimulation
on a muscle that you've never really felt before can be a good form of progressive overload.
It's a lot more limited than these two, but it can be something you can rely on.
Metabolically, it's kind of exciting because you use lighter weight here, but what you're
really relying on here is not just the tension of the muscles' feel, but the chemical reaction
that goes on inside of a contracting muscle.
As your muscles contract you produce metabolites.
These metabolites start to accumulate, and what we normally do is, we stop when it starts
to burn.
But if we learn how to train with a purpose here, train to seek out this stress, and train
through it; we start to take advantage of the fact that chemical reactions start to
take place inside our muscles, which provide a stimulus for growth on their own.
So it is a way that we can train with lighter weights.
There's another thing too, dispelling the myth that heavy weights are the only way to
do it.
We've just seen we can do it with heavy weights, lighter weights, or again, heavy weight, but
with more muscle soreness.
So what happens is, if we go down this road and we get attached to one, single method
that's when problems occur.
Let's start at this end.
Let's say I wanted to do my progressive overload using weight.
We know – if we're not newbies – that this eventually becomes a problem because,
yes, neurological gains are a thing of beauty when you're new to lifting because you become
more efficient at the lift.
If it's a multi-muscle group exercise, a compound movement, you might even become more coordinated
at recruiting the different muscle groups to contribute to that lift.
So all these things start to allow you to increase your strength, the strength gains
help to proceed the side gains – as I've said – and you can increase muscle contractile
tissue, and that's feeding into your ability to even lift more weight, and this whole thing
is a beautiful cycle until it ends.
When it ends you have to look elsewhere.
What a lot of people will do now is they'll look over here.
They'll say "Well, I've just got to change my training volume around.
If I could change my training volume then I'll be good.
If I could increase my workload, then I'm good to go."
Well, here's the problem with that.
As you increase your volume, or if you increase your training frequency what happens is, we
often times find ourselves derailed by that method because we s tart to get tendonitis.
Overuse injuries.
We're approaching this without realizing 'what is the actual recovery that I have in a muscle,
by muscle basis?'
Because some of our muscles don’t respond the same way.
Some muscles, we feel like we can go right back out there and train.
Other muscles take us longer.
So we're going to have a 48 hour window to do so, and we think that's the magic number,
we're not really doing ourselves a service by doing that.
So we're undercutting our ability to do it the right way, and more importantly, we're
costing ourselves by creating overuse injuries that create problems here, because this can
take you out of the gym entirely.
As anybody that's felt pain in their elbow every time they curl, or shoulder pain every
time they try to press, or knee pain every time they try to bend their knees.
This can become a problem.
So if you rely exclusively on this, and think your volume approach is going to be the answer;
it's not.
Even back here, if I were to point out, if you think that I'm going to just keep adding
weight to the bar, what happens here is less of an overuse injury.
This can become more of an acute injury because you tried to add too much weight and you can't
do it, and you wind up getting hurt.
Even worse, in an attempt to look like you're moving more weight all you do is continue
to bastardize your form to the point where it's not even recognizable anymore of what
you were doing.
Then what started off looking like a bench-press, or a squat now looks like a quarter rep of
both.
That's not helping you either.
So now, if you're in this game here, and n ow you've got to go down and look for something
else, we can go down this road.
This is the one that I said is pretty exciting because I don’t think enough of us train
this way.
I don’t think enough of us rely on the lighter weights.
We think that the lighter weights aren't capable of building muscle – which we've already
told you is not the case – and when we do use them, we don’t train hard enough with
them.
That's the problem.
You can take light weights and train really damn hard because if you can create this metabolic
distress in the muscles, and push through it – what I like to say is "When it starts
to burn is when the exercise starts."
Then, how far can you push through that?
When you do, you create a new opportunity for growth.
But it is uncomfortable.
You do benefit from having a knowledge of strength curves here because it helps you
realize where in a certain exercise you can do more damage here, but the fact is; this
opens up new doors, and it's something you should do.
But here's the problem here.
If you exclusively use this method, and you're using lighter weights to do so; where is the
tension overload?
You're using the chemical overload here, but where is the tension overload?
The tension overload is coming back here.
So you can't just keep doing this.
You need to do more than that.
So then, we always come back down to the end, here.
That is, you've got to start throwing in some eccentric muscle damage, too.
We definitely have tension overload.
We actually have mechanical distress to the muscle as you're elongating that muscle under
tension, and stretch.
You can cause some damage to the muscle that actually comes back, repairs itself, and sparks
a stimulus for growth.
So the eccentric training, that's pretty heavy, and that's pretty uncomfortable, and the people
that say "I'm going to just do that because I know it's hard, but it's good."
That's a problem because what's going to happen to your frequency and your volume if you're
always doing eccentric training?
You're going to be too damn sore to ever do any of this.
So you see where this is all going?
Where this is all going is, all of these are necessary.
Again, the people that say "Oh, you don’t need to be sore in order to make muscle gains",
my argument was 'yes, you do', because eventually, even if these two methods aren't leading to
much soreness, because they're going to dry up, and they're going to force you to go down
the line, looking for another method; you're eventually going to have to come down here,
and that will cause soreness, in most cases.
If you're doing it right.
So ultimately, I say 'yes, you're going to have to in the big picture'.
But no, you don’t have to on any, single method to be making gains while using that
method.
So the point of this video guys, is that there are definitely ways you can build muscle,
and attaching yourself to just one of them is doing yourself a disservice in the long
run.
You can attach yourself to all three and learn how to weave them in, and out with each other
so you're benefiting from all of them, without facing any of the detrimental side effects
from any one of them.
As a matter of fact, we've been putting a lot of time and effort here, at ATHLEANX,
to do just that.
I have a brand new program coming out called "ATHLEANX Breakout" that is meant for guys
that have hit a plateau in any of these areas, or they can't gain size anymore, they can't
gain strength.
They thought that they reached their true potential.
I don’t think that's the case.
I think if you learn how to do these, and do all three together, at the same time, weaving
them in and out at the right time, then I think it's very, very possible to start seeing
new gains.
That new program is released tomorrow on Black Friday – depending on when you're watching
this video.
If you're watching it after Black Friday, it's already available over at ATHLEANX.com.
If you're looking to try and break out of a plateau I highly recommend you go over there
and check that out.
In the meantime, I hope you've found the video helpful, guys.
There's a lot to training and building muscle, but the fact is, you can simplify it a lot,
but more importantly, be open-minded to all three of these things because that's ultimately
going to hold the key for your success.
All right, guys.
I'll be back here again soon.
See you.