How should you train to build muscle? 8 fundamentals you should know

Kelvin Ng
May 23, 2023
8 min read

OVERVIEW

“Higher training volume is best to build muscle”

“You should train heavy to build muscle”

“Training with lighter weights can help you to build muscle”

You might have seen arguments like this on social media between gym bros, or even google searched these topics yourself to find out the best ways to build muscle.

However, chances are you still do not have the answer yet. Because the answer will always be - “It depends”. That might confuse you even more as you still have no idea why, how and when you should train in certain ways.

In this article, I will bring you back to basics. We will unpack the basics of how muscles grow (the theory) and how you should train to build muscle (the actual practice).

THEORY

1. HOW DO MUSCLES GROW? (HYPERTROPHY)

The process of muscle hypertrophy occurs when muscles are exposed to workloads higher than they are used to, which causes muscle injury (mild injury). During this time, you may experience a sense of soreness or pain. This prompts the satellite cells around your muscles to be activated, and starts to repair the muscle damage by joining the muscle fibre together to become stronger or bigger than before.

This is where resistance training comes into play, where its main purpose is to overload the muscles with weights. And gym resistance training is an excellent choice to building muscle before there are almost infinite amount of loads you can add into your exercise!

To sum it up, the main factors that causes muscle growth are:

Workload that exceeds the muscles current capacity
Muscle damage
Repair and recovery

2. THE 3 PRINCIPLES

There are 3 main principles when it comes to training to build muscle - Progressive overload, muscle damage, and metabolic stress.

Progressive overload - The process of gradually increasing the intensity of the training over time which includes: load, frequency, repetitions, time under tension etc.

Muscle damage - The process of tearing(partially) of the muscle fibres after exposing to increased workload of the exercise. Through muscle damage, only then the satellite cells can start the work of repairing the muscles. Hence muscle soreness, or DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) are often required for muscle hypertrophy.

Metabolic stress - A “pump” sensation achieved as the result of consistent effort of loading the muscles with repetitions, where the metabolites accumulate into the muscles causing it to look temporarily bigger.

PRACTICAL

As we now have a basic understanding on the theoretical perspective of how to train to build muscle, now let's put all these into actual practices. Keep in mind, a good muscle building program will usually consist of all 3 main principles we have discussed above. And I am going to show you how we can implement them into your muscle building program.

1. TRAINING PROGRAM

Weekly training split: 1-2 body parts on each training day

If we look at the training programs of any bodybuilders, we tend to see a similar pattern. Their training program usually consists of a weekly 3-6 days training split, with each training day focusing on 4-10 exercises on each body parts. For example:

Monday - Chest and Bicep

Tuesday - Back

Thursday - Shoulders and triceps

Friday - Legs

**On Tuesday’s back training - Bent over row 4x8, Lat pulldown 3x12, Seated cable row 3x15

This way of programming puts a fair amount of volume to overload specific muscles on the training day. If we look at the Tuesday back training workout above, 3 exercises in total of 113 repetitions all primarily targeting the back muscles. With that, we have adequate volume (repetitions) to elicit metabolic stress, which also leads to higher chances of muscle damage.

Linear progression - Adding intensity of each workout

Our muscles are the most adaptive tissue of our body, if we are training the same exercise at the same intensity over and over again, the body will soon adapt to the workload and will not undergo the process of repair and growth.

This is why it is important to gradually increase the intensity of the specific exercises aka. Progressive overload. A linear progression method can be a useful tool for beginner and intermediate trainees to apply progressive overload, for example:

4 week linear progression for barbell squat:

Week 1 - 60kg 3x10

Week 2 - 60kg 3x12

Week 3 - 60kg 4x12

Week 4 - 62.5kg 3x8

2. REST DURATION IN BETWEEN SETS

Resting longer vs shorter in between sets is not a black or white argument, neither of them is definitely right nor wrong. It all depends on the purposes.

Longer rest period - Longer rest duration(>2 min) allows your body to recover more in strength which leads to better performance (more weight or reps lifted) of the next set, which helps create greater stress to the muscles. It is also beneficial for progressive overloading from a strength perspective.

Shorter rest period - Once you pass the beginner stage, you may find progressive overloading not as easy as before. This can be a good time where your main training focus is to be on eliciting metabolic stress, which can easily be done by shortening your rest duration(<1min) between sets and exercises.

3. ECCENTRIC (TIME UNDER TENSION)

The king for muscle damage. On each resistance exercises, there are 3 types of contractions:

Concentric contraction (isotonic) - occurs when a muscles shorten

Eccentric contraction (isotonic) - occurs when a muscles lengthen

Isometric contraction - occurs when the length of the muscle does not change.

Take bicep curl as an example, concentric contraction occurs when curling the weight up by flexing the elbow. Isometric contraction happens when you pause at the top and keep applying tension to the muscles. Eccentric contraction happens when you lower down the weight by extending the elbow. The more time you spend on the eccentric portion, the more muscle damage you create from the exercise.

Hence, to apply this into your training. Simply adjust the tempo of your eccentric portion of the lift to be longer, slower. Usually if it takes 0.5 seconds to lower the weight down. Now you would take at least 2-3 seconds on the eccentric portion.

4. SET RANGE

Most research shows that anywhere between 8-20 sets per muscle group per week is the sweet spot for muscle growth. However, there are many factors that affect the outcome such as: load, repetitions, time under tension, intensity etc. For example, performing 10 sets of leg exercises with every set going close to absolute failure, compared to 10 sets of light easy sets, both will produce totally different results.

It also does not mean performing 7 sets or 21 sets is completely useless. Instead, listen to how your body responds to different volumes and find out which works best for you.

All that being said, start playing around with 8-20 sets per body part per week, and switch up the volume from time to time to find your best number.

5. Rep range

Generally speaking, 1-5 rep range produces more strength, 6-12 rep range produces more muscle hypertrophy, 13-20 reps produces more muscle endurance. Again, this is just a general guideline, that does not mean you should ONLY perform 6-12 rep range for the rest of your life. In fact, effectively utilising both lower and higher rep range can lead to more muscle growth as well.

When to use:

1-5 rep range - Best when you want to increase muscle strength. More strength = more weights lifted = progressively overloading the muscles = more potential the muscles grow bigger. Less metabolic stress with this rep range.

6-12 rep range - Best when you want to maximise muscle hypertrophy. Balanced strength gains and metabolic stress with this rep range.

12+ rep range - Best when you want to achieve higher metabolic stress, in other words the “pump”. Less strength gains with this rep range.

6. EXERCISE ORDER

Properly structuring your exercise order can significantly increase your immediate lifting performance, which leads to more muscle growth. Generally speaking, exercise order should follow these rules:

Compound complex exercises > isolation exercises
Larger muscle groups > smaller muscle groups
Heavier exercises > lighter exercises
Targeting weakness first > strength

For example, let's say you are training Chest and Tricep with 3 exercises: Barbell bench press, dumbbell chest flyes, and tricep dumbbell extension. It is more logical to start off with bench press (compound movement, larger muscles, heavier load), followed by chest flyes (isolation, second heaviest load), and finishing with tricep extension (isolation, small muscle, lightest load) at last. If you perform tricep exercises at first, you are likely to fatigue the tricep muscles which will lead to a significant decrease in performance on the bench press, due to the nature of tricep being a secondary muscle (synergist) in the bench press.

7. INTENSITY (LOAD)

To overload the muscles, it means stepping out of your comfort zone to push yourself slightly harder to elicit a change. If you are lifting with an intensity that your body can easily handle, there isn’t much room for the body to undergo change to become bigger and stronger.

Hence, the key to build muscle is to train with adequate intensity.

For my 1on1 online coaching beginner clients, I like to use RIR (Reps in reserve) to start with. RIR refers to how many more repetitions you can perform on an exercise before technical failure. For example, you are bench pressing 60kg for 10 reps, you feel like you have 5 reps before technical failure, 5 will be your RIR.

For beginners (<6 months of lifting), 2-5 RIR on each set will be a good starting point. The main focus at this point is to lift with proper technique. You do not want to push to absolute failure with faulty technique, otherwise you are likely to injure yourself before reaching your goal.

For intermediate to advanced trainees (6 months+ of lifting), 1-2 RIR on each set is a very good intensity to elicit muscle growth. And you may even go for 0-1 RIR on last set of each exercises to challenge your muscles even more.

Keep in mind not to use 0-1 RIR on the first set of the first exercise of the day, as it may decrease the strength and performance throughout the workout!!

8. RECOVERY

Once we figured out efficient ways to break ourselves (I mean our muscles), it is time to focus on repair and recovery. Most research has been suggesting each muscle group requires 48-72 hours of rest after each resistance training session for optimal recovery.

This is where the weekly training split by muscle groups shine its light. For example, if you are training chest and triceps today. You can still train other muscle groups tomorrow (back, legs, shoulders, biceps) while allowing your chest and triceps to recover.

SUMMARY (KEY POINTS)

Here are the key points of training principles for muscle growth covered in this article:

3 principles of muscle growth: Overload, muscle damage, repair and recovery
3 training principles: Progressive overload, muscle damage, metabolic stress
1-2 body parts per training day
Progressively adding intensity to the workouts on a weekly/monthly basis
Longer rest duration in between sets for strength and progressive overload, shorter rest for metabolic stress and endurance.
Longer duration on eccentric contraction to maximise muscle damage
8-12 sets for each muscle group per week
1-5 reps for strength and progressive overload, 6-12 reps for hypertrophy (balanced strength and metabolic stress), 12+ reps for metabolic stress
Exercise order: compound movement, larger muscle groups > single joint, smaller muscle groups
No matter the reps: 2-5 RIR for beginners for each set, 1-2 RIR for intermediate and advanced trainees for each set, 0-1 RIR on the last set of each exercise.
48-72 hours of rest for each muscle group after each resistance training session.

CONCLUSION

Thank you once again for reading my very second article I've written for this website. Hopefully it helped you clarify a bit more on how you can structure your training program to maximise muscle growth.

With all the points mentioned above, another most important factor that contributes to muscle growth is trying to be slightly better consistently, to phrase it in my favourite way - Be at least 1% better consistently overtime. Get better by learning more, practising more, push yourself in each workout a bit more. Think of ways to better yourself in any way you can. That is the true key for a change.

All that being said, structuring your own training program isn’t easy. If you are somebody who would like an extra help in designing your muscle building program, feel free to email me at kelvin@coachkelvinng.com or check out our 1on1 Online Coaching. Not only you get a complete tailor-made muscle building program based on your need, preference, schedule, lifestyle, goal etc.

You will also have a complete guide on how to lift, eat, and recover properly to maximise muscle growth, all science based!! From then on you will never have to figure out the do’s and don'ts on your own, I will take over all your guesswork and leave you with execution only. Check it out now - 1on1 online coaching

Hope it helps!!

Be 1% better,

Kelvin