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Exercise

🏋️ Muscular hypertrophy is achieved by progressively increasing the weight over time.

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Jump to my current exercise routine

Much of the philosophy behind this post is attriubted to Mehdi of StrongLifts

In Ancient Greece, there was a legendary figure named Milo of Croton, renowned for his incredible strength. His training method, though seemingly simple, is a profound example of progressive overload—the cornerstone of building strength and muscle. Each day, Milo began his training by carrying a newborn calf on his back. As the days turned into weeks and months, the calf grew larger and heavier, eventually maturing into a full-grown bull.

This method was not just about physical endurance; it was a deliberate strategy to increase the challenge placed on his muscles progressively. By gradually increasing the weight he carried, Milo’s body had no choice but to adapt. His muscles grew stronger and larger to meet the increasing demands. This incremental increase in weight mirrors the principle of progressive overload, where you steadily increase the resistance or intensity of your workouts to continue challenging your muscles and stimulate growth.

Milo’s approach was revolutionary for its time and remains a fundamental principle in strength training today. If you were to lift the same weight day after day, your muscles would eventually adapt and stop growing. However, by continually challenging them with heavier loads, as Milo did with his growing calf, you ensure that your muscles are constantly pushed beyond their current limits. This consistent and gradual increase in load is crucial for ongoing muscle development and strength gains. Without applying progressive overload, you would plateau, and the promise of growth and strength would remain unfulfilled.

Fundamental Compound Exercises

To keep things simple, you want to mostly do compound lifts and progressively add weight to the bar over time.

The average Squat to Bench ratio for men was 1.52. The Deadlift to Bench ratio was 1.75. A good lifetime goal is to aim for 1000lb across squat, bench, and deadlift (SBL).

The average SBL for the male lifter:

As a way to standardize strength across different body weights, the Wilks score is a formula used in powerlifting to assess a lifter’s strength relative to their body weight. Unlike raw totals in powerlifting, the Wilks score adjusts for body weight to provide a fair comparison of strength between lifters of different sizes. The Wilks score is a formula to measure your relative strength as a lifter (squat + bench press + deadlift).

Here is a Wilks score calculator

How many sets and reps?

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.

The 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.

Here are four things that are generally pretty universal regardless:

  1. Your muscles need to go through an appropriate range of motion
  2. They need to be symmetrical
  3. They need to be stable
  4. You need to be aware of what they’re doing if you’re aware of the context

Paying attention to your movement quality is the fastest way for most people to actually move faster and move stronger.

  1. Improve technique first
  2. Then chase after improving maximal capacity of the actual muscle fiber and tissue.
  3. The third is in making sure you’re balancing movement planes and posture so if you want to get a better squat make sure that your glutes aren’t significantly stronger than your hamstrings or your adductors or your groin and the muscles that kind of pull your knees together aren’t significantly weaker. You will only ever be as strong and as fast as your weakest link in that movement chain so ensuring you don’t have anything grossly behind something else and that you’re training yourself so that the muscles move appropriately.

The point isn’t “just” to move a weight from point A to point B. The point is to maximally activate the muscle through a full range of motion.

Progressive Overload

To build muscle mass, progressively increase the weight, reps, or sets over time. Aim for 3-5 sets of 8-12 reps for hypertrophy. Monitor your progress, ensure proper form to avoid injury, and adjust your routine as needed.

Make sure to complete slow and controlled movements with proper form. Imagine and focus on the muscle contraction. Really squeeze.

Make sure you do enough volume and enough hard sets to stimulate more growth.

Your training quality is higher if you spread your volume through the week over more workouts. You won’t get pre-fatigue in your muscles this way. You can go harder, train heavier, and do more reps.

Powerlifting legend Ed Coan said it best years ago: “lift the light weight like it’s heavy.”

For exercise cadence, you do NOT want to do any exercise “explosively.” The hard gainer must strip everything down to its essentials.

Think of it this way:

The muscles work the weights. The muscles work the weights. The muscles work the weights. The muscles work the weights.

“Heavier is Better” is a Myth. Contrary to the 1RM strength theorists, it’s not the weight that works the muscles; it’s the muscles that work the weights.  Read that over ten times. This is an important part of your biofeedback and the internal cues of training, which I will talk more about. It is also a departure from a focus on “how much” is on the bar lifted for how many reps. This is an important switch in emphasis to internal aspects of performance, such as a perceived sense of exertion and affect, the actual angle of contraction of the muscle, muscle shortening, muscle activation potential, and so on. It’s an emphasis on how much stress a muscle is under; not how much weight is being lifted.  This is the beginning of training maturity not measured in numbers, but felt in experience. The focus becomes, as I said, not on how much a trainee “can” lift, but rather on how much a trainee should lift for the desired effects. How much you lift is not nearly as important as how hard (how intensely, how explosively) you lift. The “heavier is better” argument is a myth that prevents many of us from getting results in terms of physique enhancements. All while progressively overloading too of course.

Nutrition and Recovery

Remember, muscle growth also requires adequate nutrition (protein intake), hydration, and rest. Ensure you get sufficient sleep and recovery time between sets and workouts.

Comprehensive Exercise Organization

Long duration endurance training

Mobility & Flexibility

Stretches

Strength & Muscular Endurance Training Plan (3 to 5 Rule)

To ensure balanced development, you can follow an upper/lower body split routine that targets different muscle groups on different days. 3-5 exercises, 3-5 repetitions, 3-5 sets, rest for 3-5 minutes between each set, repeat 3-5 times per week. Higher rep range gives you hypertrophy.

Benefits of Upper/Lower Splits:

  1. Balanced Workload: Ensures all major muscle groups are trained evenly.
  2. Recovery Time: Allows sufficient recovery for muscle groups while training others.
  3. Frequency: Typically allows for training each muscle group twice per week, which is effective for strength and hypertrophy.
  4. Flexibility: Easy to adjust based on goals, recovery, and schedule.

You can train harder, heavier, and do more reps if you spread all the chest exercises over more workouts than try to do it all in one workout. You’ll be able to do more volume, and volume is the main driver of muscle growth.

The reason why so many people skip the leg day is because its where you do all the squat/deadlift volume in one session (which is a lot harder). The one muscle a day approach is called a “bro split” and it used to be quite popular. It’s quite outdated now though. One muscle a day is just not a good idea for most people. It forces you to train five days a week. Few people have time for this. And the leg day is always skipped, even though the legs are half your body.

Thus, the better alternative is upper/lower splits.

  1. You’re constantly going to get sore if you think soreness is what drives muscle growth. But we know progressive overload is the main thing that matters, not soreness. I don’t like being sore because that prevents me from training the same muscle hard again in the next workout.
  2. If you change the exercises all the time, then you have no time to learn how to do it with better form. You have no time to improve your skills. Yet strength = skills x muscle.
  3. You have no way to know if you’re making progress or not, since the weight is different on each exercise. So now you can’t track if the weight is going up or not to see if what you’re doing is actually working.
  4. Try not to skip a workout if you’re not feeling your absolute greatest health/diet-wise. Workouts under these perceived sub-optimal conditions will give you an opportunity to lower the weight and practice sustaining your form with proper technique for a full range of motion. This alone will still yield results and is an integrally important aspect of training muscle hypertrophy because in order to safely progressively overload, proper technique must be in place too.
  5. Every set should be done with the same level of focus and effort. You need to think about what you’re doing better or differently on the latter sets, and start doing this from your very first set too. If you would record every set, from the very first warmup set to your last workset, you should ideally find that they all look exactly the same. This requires you to fully focus on your workout and exercises when you’re in the gym.

The two main things that drive muscle growth are:

  1. Progressive overload: adding weight on the bar. That doesn’t have to happen every workout. But it has to happen over time.
  2. Volume: how many sets you do per week per muscle group. Doing more volume typically results in more muscle growth.

Upper Body

Back

Triceps

Forearm

Core

Shoulders

Legs

Chest

Miscellaneous/Full Body

Lower Body

Quads

Hamstrings & Glutes

Calves

My Exercise Routine

Below is my general current Upper/Lower Split Program Since 2024-11-13. I may deviate slightly with variations depending on how I’m feeling.

Monday

Upper 1

  1. Bench Press (Horizontal Push, Compound)
  2. Inverted Row (Horizontal Pull, Compound)
  3. Military Press (Vertical Push, Compound)
  4. Triceps Pushdown or Skullcrushers (Accessory for Triceps)
  5. Hanging Leg Raise (Core)

Tuesday

Lower 1

  1. Squat (Quad-Dominant, Compound)
  2. Nordic Hamstring Curl (Hamstring-Dominant, Isolation)
  3. Lunges (Quad and Glute Focus, Compound)
  4. Landmine RDL into Row (Hamstring/Glute Focus with Upper Back Engagement, Compound)
  5. Cable Kickback (Glute Isolation)

Wednesday

Upper 2

  1. Close-Grip Palm-Up Pulldown (Vertical Pull, Compound)
  2. Overhead Press (Landmine) (Vertical Push, Compound)
  3. Face Pull (Rear Delt/Upper Back Isolation)
  4. Halos or Plate Swings (Core/Stability and Shoulder Mobility)

Thursday

Lower 2

  1. Front Squat (Quad-Dominant, Compound)
  2. Landmine RDL (Hamstring-Dominant, Compound)
  3. Lunges (Quad and Glute Focus, Compound)
  4. Hanging Leg Raise (Core)
  5. Nordic Hamstring Curl (Hamstring Isolation)

Friday

Upper 3

  1. Bench Press (Feet Up) (Horizontal Push, Compound – increases stability requirement)
  2. Landmine T-Bar Row (Horizontal Pull, Compound)
  3. Overhead Press (Landmine) (Vertical Push, Compound)
  4. Face Pull (Rear Delt Isolation)
  5. Wrist Curl (Forearm Accessory)

Saturday

Lower 3

  1. Good Morning (Hamstring/Glute-Dominant, Compound)
  2. Zercher Squat (Quad and Core Focus, Compound)
  3. Landmine Thrusters (Full-Body Compound, Quad and Core Focus)
  4. Nordic Hamstring Curl (Hamstring Isolation)
  5. Weighted Decline Crunch (Core

Sunday - Rest

Notes: Whenever/wherever I can, I use Fat Gripz to really target forearms.