This story is from the manual, GQ’’s flagship newsletter delivers helpful advice on style, health and more four days a week. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Despite what many workout equipment manufacturers, TV fitness personalities, and die-hard gym dudes might believe, building muscle is actually a naturally straightforward thing. Packing on size has nothing to do with four sets of 10, tempo reps—or even specific exercises. In fact, gaining muscle does not depend on what you do, but how you do it.
The first thing to understand is that increasing size and gaining strength are two different things. Yes, lifting for muscle growth – or hypertrophy, to use the scientific term – will lead to some strength gains along the way, and vice versa, but the way you do the work will primarily get you closer to one goal or the other. To put it another way, you can use the same exercises to strengthen or get stronger muscles, depending on your approach.
Consider the difference between bodybuilders and powerlifters – two groups that rely heavily on the bench press in their training. “A powerlifter is trying to lift as much weight as possible, while bodybuilders are trying to increase the size of their muscles.” Matthew Welch, MS, CSCS, ATC, USAW-1, an exercise physiologist, says hss. “Don’t get me wrong, bodybuilders are going to be strong, but they’re not necessarily going to have as much strength as powerlifters, and that’s because the qualities they’re training for are so different.”
“The big message here is that there is no magic exercise for hypertrophy,” says Luke Carlson, founder and CEO of . discover strength. Instead, we have some research-backed principles you can use to optimize your existing workouts for muscle growth.
Are you ready to implement your strategy for massive muscle gains once and for all? Here’s everything you need to know.
Hard reps equal hard muscle
“The biggest scientific discovery in strength training in the last 15 years is that we definitely don’t need a lot of it if you want to add muscle,” says Carlson. “But we have to do it harder than we thought.”
Research Shows us that muscle growth is driven by mechanical stress. Unlike time under tension – the time a muscle spends under load, which doesn’t actually do anything to hypertrophy – mechanical tension begins when your reps naturally begin to slow down as you approach muscular failure. Trainers call these “effective delegating.”
“Effective reps are defined as the last five or more repetitions in a set that bring the muscle to failure, and these reps are believed to provide the most stimulus for hypertrophy due to the mechanical tension being experienced by the activated fibers,” says Welch.
“The closer you get to failure, the more motor units and muscle fibers you recruit, and the greater your chance of increasing muscle size,” says Carlson. “The most important element is whether you are approaching muscle failure – more important than how many sets you do or how many days a week you workout.”
This means that the weight you lift is essentially irrelevantThat’s until you push yourself to muscular failure—useful knowledge the next time you find yourself in a hotel gym with nothing more than a pair of 20-pound dumbbells. (However, as we’ll explain below, high-rep sets with lighter weights may not be the most effective way to pack on size.)
