Vilkas Fitness

3 Giant No-Nos In "Hypertrophy Training"

You may look at this list of things and raise an eyebrow because you may have done, or currently are doing, at least one of these things in your training.

If you made your own training program with these things included, hire a proper trainer to program it for you. If your trainer programmed it for you, also hire a proper trainer to program it for you, because discomfort maxxing is not how you grow muscle.

Okay! After that truth bomb, I think I owe you, my precious followers, an explanation as to why I'm making the training choices that I make here. So, let me explain!

If you're training to build muscle, every exercise should take the targeted muscle of that exercise closest to failure without something else inhibiting it.

For instance, if you've done a set of barbell squats and stopped the set panting so hard that you drag your tongue across the floor but the concentric velocity change from the first rep to the last is indistinguishable, or you stopped the set because your lower back had taken a way more of a beating than your quads (assuming your goal of that is to grow quads), or you stopped the set because your upper back is so beat that you started throwing your glutes back unintentionally, it's fair to say that the set didn't deliver its intended purpose of stimulating your quads for growth.

Simply put, you shouldn't do a working set of any exercise and stop it feeling "I could've gone for a few more reps if it wasn't for my *insert any reason other than the target muscle/muscles failing to go for another rep*" (Before you all come to the comment section about this statement, no! I'm not saying that every set of every exercise should be pushed to mechanical failure. I'm simply saying that nothing else of the set should limit the set if it were to be pushed to failure other than the target muscle itself.) This is exactly why I neither start, nor finish the set out of breath. I know I have solid technique to achieve the task of delivering the most stimulus to the target muscle, but, if I either start a set out of breath, or used a load light enough to ge me out of breath mid-set, I most likely will still fail to stimulate the target muscle of the exercise for growth.

To explain the 3rd point, the whole supposed point of adding an intensity technique to add more relative intensity, and therefore, supposedly more stimulus to an already sufficiently intense and stimulating set to make it better. No intensity technique makes sense on a set that's not hard enough to be stimulative to begin with, and an intensity technique is unnecessary at best and detrimental at worst when the set is hard enough to be stimulative. So, I'd much, much rather do another set after sufficient rest than trying to pile it on with the current set. In fact, I'd much rather stop the straight set once I reached mechanical failure and moved on to the next exercise than adding an intensity technique into the set. (Yes! I'm being a strsight set purist here because I understand how muscle growth works!)

So, this is why I never do these 3 things in my training.

If Your Program Looks Anything Like This, Run Away!!!!

I'm gonna be straight up! If your program looks anything like this, RUN AWAY!!! .

1. Exercise Redundancy

*6 exercises for the chest, which only performs 2 functions.

*5 exercises for the back, which only performs 3 functions (4, if you considered spinal er****on, which gets trained to a reasonable degree on compounds for the legs).

*7 exercises for the elbow flexors, which could've been covered by 2 (if I'm being generous!).

*3 exercises for the elbow extension, which realistically could've been covered with just one after all that pressing (because compound presses don't stimulate the long head of the tricep, which is a necessity if your goal is hypertrophy).

*7 exercises for the shoulders when they could've been covered with 2 after all that pressing.

2. Muscular Overlap.

*Presses for both days, which is a very very bad idea given that your elbows are gonna be cooked beyond comprehension if you trained for hypertrophy at this high of a volume on one session and it'll take at least 2 days to recover from that.

*There is Shrugs on day 02 and there are 3 variations of rows on day 01, which I'd assume to have some way of scapular retraction.

*You got rows on day 01 and rear delt work on day 02.

*You got elbow flexion on both days along with compound back work on day 01.

(There are a few more, but honestly, I grew tired of typing all of it.)

3. Volume Beyond Recoverable capacity.

*This is pretty self explanatory. 18 sets for chest, 15 for back, 30 sets for arms etc. is simply not gonna be recoverable for a natural lifter, if they teain with any semblance of intensity.

4. Lack Of Basic Understanding Of Human Biomechanics.

*4 exercises for the legs and not one works any level of hip extension, or abduction. So, your glutes, the very that could protect your lombar spine from being seriously injured when combined with proper spinal erector strength, is completely missing from this program.

Now, I so wish that this was a one off situation, but, it's not. The programs are usually not THIS BAD, but be that as it may, you could find at least one of these errors on most of these programs, which is enough to deliver catastrophic results for the long run.

So, if you take anything from this post, let it be this. Be careful who you hire as your personal trainer because that guy hold the entire responsibility of the quality of your life. (HINT: 077 945 6757 for coaching Inquiries!)