Ep. #141: Is Getting Stronger Really the Best Way to Gain Muscle?

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Instead, the new school says, you can focus on other training variables like volume, time under tension, metabolic fatigue, and so forth, and achieve the same results. Results. The big question is, of course, who is right? Or are both of these philosophies a bit misguided and is the truth somewhere in the middle?

And that’s what we’re going to be diving into in this podcast. I’m going to give you a clear, concise, and conclusive answer based on decades of anecdotal evidence as well as [00:02:00] our current scientific understanding of muscle hypertrophy. Now, before we get into this episode, I’m sorry, but I have to shill for something to pay the bills.

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As you’re going to see, there is absolutely a direct relationship between muscle strength and muscle size, but there is also more to the story and it helps explain why some people are much stronger than they look and vice versa and why some people can gain quite a bit of muscle without ever really paying attention to their one rep maxes or ever really getting that strong.

Let’s start this discussion by setting the table with a bit of muscle building 101 and then see how it relates to strength. So despite [00:04:00] what the bodybuilding magazines might tell you, the primary driver of muscle growth isn’t muscle confusion or muscle soreness or metabolic conditioning, time under tension or anything other than strength.

Progressive tension overload. And this refers to increasing tension levels in the muscle fibers over time. And the most effective way to do that is to progressively increase the amount of weight that you’re lifting over time. So in other words, if you’re not gradually adding weight to the bar over time, you are missing out on most of what progressive overload has to offer in the way of muscle growth.

Now, progressive overload isn’t the only driver of muscle growth, of course, there’s also muscle damage, which refers to just that. That’s the physical damage caused to muscle fibers by high levels of tension. And this damage has to be repaired, of course. And if you eat right and you give your body sufficient rest, then the damaged muscle fibers can be made bigger and stronger to better deal with future training bouts, which can be viewed as future increased levels [00:05:00] of muscle tension.

A third driver of muscle growth, a third factor here is metabolic stress, which refers to working muscle fibers to their metabolic limits through the repetition of actions to muscular failure. Now, you can think of these three things as muscle growth pathways, and they can be emphasized or de emphasized or lessened.

By how you train. So for example, heavy weightlifting emphasizes progressive tension overload and muscle damage. When you work with lighter weights and higher rep ranges, however, you’re emphasizing metabolic stress and especially when you shorten the rest times in between the sets. So if progressive overload is the most powerful stimulus for muscle growth, and if adding weight to the bar is the best way to achieve progressive overload, then what would be the best way to build Muscle.

The obvious conclusion of course is gaining strength. And that’s why your number one goal as a natural weightlifter [00:06:00] should always be increasing your whole body strength. Now that isn’t to say that lighter weights and other training modalities have no place in your workout routine, but if your goal is to gain muscle as quickly as possible, then ultimately you are going to need to gain strength as quickly as possible.

It’s really that simple. We could just end the discussion here, but chances are you have some doubts because you’ve heard about or maybe seen evidence to the contrary, indicating that strength and size just aren’t as connected as I’m claiming that they are. So let’s talk about that. Let’s tackle a few of the most common rebuttals to what I have just said.

And the first one is what about people that get big, but not strong. Now, raise your hand. If you’ve seen this before, Some guy or gal starts hitting the weights and quickly adds a considerable amount of size without ever even giving a second thought to progressive overload. They just run from one isolation exercise to another, one machine to the next, chasing pump pump, and just grow.

How does that work, especially in the [00:07:00] context of what I’ve the first thing you need to know about this is when you first subject your body to any form of resistance training, it is hyper responsive to the stimulus. This is the newbie gain phase, the honeymoon phase. And during this period, even the most poorly designed workout programs can produce noticeable changes in your physique.

And that’s why research shows that when you are new to resistance training, getting stronger does produce muscle growth, but you don’t have to gain much strength. to gain size. I myself experienced this when I first got into weightlifting because for the first several years, really, I didn’t pay attention to gaining strength.

All I really did was put a lot of lighter weight volume into mainly my upper body. And yeah, I did gain a fair amount of size, nothing tremendous. I think I gained about maybe 15 pounds of muscle in my first two years, but that’s still 15 pounds of muscle from very poorly programmed workout routines. In short, you can more or less ignore progressive overload for your first [00:08:00] six months or so of resistance training and just go about it willy nilly and have something to show for it.

After that though, the game changes. It changes radically. Once your newbie gains have been exhausted, studies show that muscle growth is going to skid to a halt if you don’t get serious about getting stronger. And that’s exactly what happened to me. Again, I made decent progress in my first year, I’d say probably the first six months of my second year, I made a little bit of progress and really from that 1.

5 to two year mark to the, I would say year six or year seven mark, not much changed. Yes, I did gain a bit more muscle, but we’re talking four to five years of work for an additional maybe 10 pounds of muscle. That’s bad. And I was in the gym five, six days a week, one and a half, two hours. Per session. And I really didn’t take any extended time off.

I was diligent about it. And the mistake I made and that many people make is I didn’t make progressive overload the focus of my training after that newbie gains period. That’s what I should have done if I wanted to keep my muscles growing. And as the best way to do that is to work [00:09:00] on adding weight to the bar over time, and especially on compound exercises like the squat, which I really wasn’t doing much of the deadlift, which I was doing none of and the bench press, which I was doing some of, but I was all on the Smith machine, which isn’t as effective as the freeway bench press.

When I finally did make that change. When I went from really never touching a barbell or struggling to lift a weight over maybe 70 percent of my one rep max to working with anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of one rep max, the shift was a bit jarring. My workouts got really hard, really fast. And that actually is one of the reasons why I recommend that people focus on building whole body strength.

Right from the get go this way. They’re going to enjoy the newbie gains. They’re going to gain just as much muscle as they would if they trained with lighter weights, but they’re also going to be preparing themselves both mentally and physically for what is to come when muscle is much harder to train.

to come by. They’re going to have their technique dialed in on their [00:10:00] primary movements, and they’re going to be comfortable handling heavy loads safely. I look at it like this, unless your goals for your physique are very modest, you’re going to have to eventually focus on getting really strong. So why not get a headstart and just focus on that from day one?

Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. If you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at muscle for life, fitness Twitter at muscle for life and Facebook at muscle for life fitness. All right. So let’s now address another [00:11:00] question that I’m asked.

And that is, what about people that are way stronger than they look? Because we’ve all seen this before and it can definitely boggle the mind. There are plenty of men and women out there who can lift. Tremendous amounts of weight. They can lift in quite a bit more weight than people even twice their size and make it look easy.

If you want to see some examples of this, just go on YouTube and look at some power lifters, go go look up John hack with two A’s H A C K. And you’ll see he weighs 85 kilograms and he’s benching 205 kilograms. That’s crazy. He weighs about 190 pounds and is benching 451 pounds. To put that in perspective, most guys that are well north of 200 pounds body weight dream of being able to put up weight like that on the bench and he does it with ease.

Feats like that, they raise the question of then how much are strength and size really associated? And I understand because what are we looking at here? Steroids, just higher levels of muscle activation. Absolutely flawless [00:12:00] technique. Yes, those can be factors, but the most important one is something that most people don’t consider, and that is anatomy.

While we all have the same muscles in our bodies and they’re all located in the same general regions, there are very important differences in how they’re attached To our skeletons. These discrepancies are usually small, only a centimeter or two, but they actually can translate into huge differences in natural strength.

We don’t need to get too technical for the purposes of this podcast, but really what it boils down to is mechanical advantage because muscles function as. they attach to your bones greatly impacts how much force they’re able to produce and thus how much weight they’re able to move. The effects here can be staggering as well because studies have found that thanks to anatomical variance strength can vary by as much as twenty five percent among people with identical amounts of lean mass.

Just think about that one person can be up to 25 [00:13:00] percent stronger than another with the exact same body composition, simply because his anatomy is better suited to weightlifting. Similarly, some people’s muscles and bones are arranged in a way that just allows them to lift far more than you’d expect based on their total lean mass.

For example, if someone has short biceps, they have a major advantage on the bench press because the bar simply doesn’t have to move as far. And if someone has long arms and short legs. What do you think they’re going to be good at? Deadlifting, right? With that type of body, the bar simply doesn’t have to travel as far to get to the lockout position, which allows for greater loads to be moved.

In other words, some people are just born to push, pull, and squat tremendous amounts of weight, and some people aren’t. In my case, for example, I have very long arms, which makes any sort of pressing very hard. I also have long legs though, so I have a little bit of an advantage on deadlifting, but I feel like it’s negated by my long legs and my long femurs in particular.

And those long legs and long femurs make squatting a bitch [00:14:00] as well. Now despite all that, with Proper diet and proper training. I have been able to get pretty strong and gain a fair amount of muscle. It has just been more of an uphill battle for me than it would be for someone whose body is better suited to weightlifting.

So if you’re worried about your anatomy, take heart because all this should really only concern you if you’re trying to become a competitive strength athlete. On the other hand, if you’re in the gym to build a strong, muscular, lean, and healthy body, You can achieve your goal with or without the genetic leg up.

Another question that I’m commonly asked when I have this discussion with people is, don’t you eventually stop gaining strength though? And what should you do when that happens? And yes, absolutely. It goes without saying that you’re not going to be able to just keep adding weight to the bar forever.

Eventually, You are going to hit your ceiling for whole body strength, and you’re going to have really little to no room left to grow your one rep maxes. Fortunately, though, you don’t need to worry about this. And there are two reasons. One, it takes at least 10 to [00:15:00] 15 years of high quality training to get there.

And most people actually never do even get there. And if you do, if you are one of the few people that ever breathe that rarefied air, you’re going to be pretty fucking huge. Trust me. You are not going to be disappointed with your size. And just to say on that first point, many people, they think they’ve reached their strength potential, but are far from it.

Instead, they’re just training incorrectly and they’re stuck. Something I often see among people in that crowd is they far exceed their body’s ability to fully recover from training. Many of these people they’re training five, six, or even seven days per week. They’re putting tremendous amount of strain on their muscles, joints, and nervous systems.

They often are eating too few calories and nutritious foods. If they rarely deload or rest, if ever and so forth, they think that the more time they spend in the gym and the harder they push themselves in their workouts, the more gains they’re gonna make. And unfortunately, that’s just not how it works.

And on that second point, because muscle growth and muscle strength become inextricably linked. [00:16:00] Once you’ve graduated to that intermediate stage of weightlifting, if you put in years of hard work to significantly increase your whole body strength, you are also going to significantly increase your whole body muscularity.

It’s inevitable. If you do that, if you work hard at that for years, And then you’re not happy with your size. You still feel like you’re not big enough. That’s when you’d have to consider getting on some of the hashtag dedication. That’s steroids. By the way, when you are perusing Instagram and you see the big swole dudes talking about all their hashtag dedication, yeah, that’s what you’re looking at.

All 10 grams of dedication per week. Anyways, the bottom line is this. If you’re like most people, you can get the body you really want by simply getting really strong. All right. So if getting really strong is the long term goal, what then should you do when it gets really hard to get stronger? Because when you’re new to weightlifting, you can add weight to the bar just about every week.

It’s glorious. And [00:17:00] fortunately it also. comes to an end and a lot sooner than you want it to. And then you find that you have to fight tooth and nail just to gain reps, let alone add weight to the bar. Now that is a critical period in your progression on the whole as a weightlifter, because the wrong thing to do at that point is to abandon your quest to get stronger and just Turn to nonsense, like muscle confusion and super slow training and other fads in hopes of easier muscle gains.

Instead, what you need to do is fine tune your training methodology to continue to produce reliable strength gains. Now, fully diving into that would be something for another podcast or two or three, but I’m going to share a few tips here. So first I mentioned earlier, but it bears repeating. You need to make sure that you are incorporating deloads or rest weeks into your routine.

And really what this boils down to, if you don’t know deloading, you can head over to muscle for life and search for deload. I have an article on it. If you want to read it in depth, but really what it is it’s reducing the amount of [00:18:00] weight and or reps that you’re working with for about a week or so.

And what this does is it just buys your body additional time to recuperate and prepare for another period or mesocycle of intense progressive overload. This recovery debt, so to speak, can be insidious because as a beginner, you can go for months In months without ever even feeling the need to deload, and you just keep on adding weight to the bar, keep on gaining strength, keep on gaining size, feeling great, energetic, powerful in your workouts, good sleep, blah, blah, blah.

But after many years of regular training, especially proper training, you start getting into heavier loads. It’s more taxing on the body. You get older and you’ll find that you may need to deload as often as every four to eight weeks and depending on your genetics and workout program and lifestyle in general.

Personally, I deload every six to eight weeks and funny enough, I was looking at my training plan because my sleep has been off. I’ve been waking up several times at night for the last couple of weeks, which is unusual for me. My workouts have been [00:19:00] okay, but I haven’t been feeling the energy that I normally have for my training.

And lo and behold, I skimped on my last two deloads. I haven’t really done a proper deload in probably about five months. Instead I just took, an extra day or two off and then went right back into my heavy training. Whereas a few years ago, a proper deload is, I would do three light workouts for the week.

So if you take seven days, I’m really just doing three light workouts. And by light, percent of one rep max for, maybe nine sets of 10 to 12 reps. Very light. You just get a pump. You leave a little bit energized and that’s it. No soreness, very little muscle damage. That’s a proper deload.

So I’m now actually just going to take the next week off completely and just give my body a rest and reset. And see how my sleep responds. Cause for me, that’s always the first thing to go. And when my body is getting behind in recovery and the really, it’s just nervous system stress is [00:20:00] accumulating to a point where it’s a problem.

I notice it first in my sleep. Anyway, the second tip here is that you should know that progression does eventually become a non linear grind. And this is true even when you’re doing everything right. So what this means is you are going to get stuck. It’s very common to reach a point in your training where you can only add maybe two and a half pounds to the bar every other week on maybe just a few of your lifts and for others to just completely freeze for several months.

And the reason for this is As you progress closer and closer to your genetic potential for strength and muscularity, which there is a ceiling, there is an absolute ceiling for all of us in terms of how big and strong we can really get. And as you get closer to that, you have to work harder and harder just to keep the needle moving, working out as a bitch like that.

In the beginning, you don’t have to work that hard to gain quite a bit of size and strength. And then fast forward, three to five years. And you have to work hard as fuck just to [00:21:00] make small gains in strength and size. The solution then of course is to just keep working hard. If you just keep putting in high quality reps, high quality training sessions in the gym, and you also attend to your diet and recovery accordingly, you will eventually make breakthroughs and you’ll reach then new plateaus that you’ll have to then endure.

And then you’ll break through those in turn and so forth. That’s just how it goes. You progress step wise, not linearly. And it’s not even exactly clear why this happens, but it probably has to do with changes in your daily stress levels, sleep, and other variables that are involved in the adaptation to exercise.

So my third and final tip here is you want to periodically increase the number of heavy sets that you do in your workouts. And the reason for this is studies show that intermittently increasing high intensity volume is an effective way to increase progressive overload and thereby boost. your muscle growth.

Now, this is especially useful for the purposes of correcting muscle [00:22:00] imbalances and weak points in your physique. So for example, if your quads aren’t growing as much as you like, then you may need to blitz your legs to force them to grow. And the same goes for all other major muscle groups in your body.

So for example, in my case, These days I’m putting additional volume into my shoulders because natty shoulders are never enough. My calves, because natty genetically inferior calves are never enough. And my lats, because my lats have always been stubborn low responders. And where I’m not undulating my volume right now is with my chest because I am happy with where it’s at.

My upper legs, because I’m also happy with where they’re at. They are pretty proportionate with my upper body. I think my calves, yeah, not so much, but I’m working on it. I will not give up on my calves and my arms because they tend to be very high responders. My biceps in particular, and again, I’m happy with the size and the bigger my arms get, the smaller my shoulders look.

So I have to contend with that when I’m programming my [00:23:00] training. Okay. So the bottom line on all of this is when you’re a weightlifting newbie, you can gain muscle and strength with even the worst of workout programs. I would say you almost can’t go wrong. Those days are far too short though. And eventually you’re going to have to face the fact that what got you, your newbie gains is not necessarily going to get you any Further than that, you don’t have to get stuck in a rut though.

You can continue to progress and continue to add size, add strength and improve your physique. You just have to make sure that your diet is dialed in. You have to work a bit smarter and a bit harder in the gym. You have to stay patient. That’s a big one. And you have to focus on maximizing progressive overload through planned periods of overreaching and then deloading.

And if you do all that, then you can continue gaining muscle for many years to come. Hey there, it is Mike again, and I just wanted to say that I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. Now, if you’d like to read [00:24:00] about all this stuff as well, then head over to MuscleForLife. com, that’s MuscleForLife.

com, and LegionAthletics. com, L E G I O N Athletics. com, because I’ve published over a million words of free articles on the blogs on those websites, on all types of things related to bodybuilding. Building muscle, losing fat and getting healthy. New articles go up every week on both sites as well. So if you like what you read, then definitely hop on my mailing list and you will be notified when new stuff goes live.

My email subscribers also get exclusive deals on my products and services and other goodies, so there’s that too. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I will see you in the next one. Oh, and before you leave, let me quickly tell you about one other product of mine that I think you might like.

Specifically, my 100 percent natural fat loss supplement, Phoenix. It has sold over 100, 000 [00:25:00] bottles in the last several years, and it helps you lose fat faster in three ways. One, it increases your metabolic rate. Two, it amplifies the power of fat burning chemicals produced by your body. And three, it increases the feeling of fullness from food.

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