Hypertrophy training is what majority people are focusing the most at the gym since the primary focus of the training is to increase the muscle size. Compared to strength training, you can feel the effect of the exercises. People may use the term like burn or pump to express the effect of exercises and it is a satisfying feeling though soreness you may feel can be severe than when you are performing strength training.
In this article I will share some basic understanding of how to plan your hypertrophy training.
Comparing Hypertrophy Training to Strength Training
Hypertrophy training can be strength training since you will be adding a load to a muscle, however, focus of the training is different. Strength training focus on moving heavy object. Hypertrophy training focus on stimulating the muscles. Therefore, number of repetitions and sets can be different from strength training and hypertrophy training even with same exercise and same load.
Type of Exercises
Type of exercise for hypertrophy training can be anything. It is good to start with learning compound exercises such as squat, push up, cable row and so on, but can be done with biceps curls, triceps extension, leg curls and so on. Hypertrophy training can be done using plyometrics such as box jump, ball slams as well.
It is good idea to vary exercises so you can stimulate muscles in a different way and body can function better because of the variations. For example, for chest exercises, you can use bench press, cable fly, dips, pushups and so on. Experience lifters use 2-4 exercises using same muscle group to stimulate same muscles even further.
Reps, Sets and Load
Because the focus of hypertrophy is more on stimulating muscles repetitions can be 8-15 reps or sometimes even more. Sets can vary from 3-5 sets. Load or weight you may use can be heavy, however, important thing is to feel the engagement of the muscles that you are working on.
For example, if you are doing cable lat pulldown for 15 reps but all you feel is in forearm, either the form is not adequate, or weight is too heavy or both. Most of the time, trainees want to accomplish both and go too heavy for large amount of volume and cannot figure out why their muscles are not growing.
Make sure that the weights are heavy enough to be able to perform all the planned repetitions and sets with engaging the muscles that you are wanting to work on. If you cannot feel it, then lower the weight.
Frequency
Frequency of strength training can be determined by how fast you can be recovered from your previous training. However, with hypertrophy training you can work on body parts that are not sore. For example, if you had chest day today, most likely your chest will be sore tomorrow. However, legs are not sore so you can have your leg workout tomorrow. Because hypertrophy training has this merit, trainees tend to plan their frequency based on body parts such as:
Monday – Chest
Tuesday – Leg
Wednesday - Rest
Thursday – Back
Friday - Rest
Saturday – Arms
Sunday – Rest
You can be creative with your training schedule and arrange your frequency according to your goal and your ability to recover from session to session.
Recovery
Recovery is preached by all but practiced by few. This is why majority of population can not experience success from training and diet.
If you ever done gardening or have pets, you can relate this to why recover is important. Growing and nurturing something takes time and continuous effort. Because if you don’t water the plants or not feeding your pets you know what will happen. Same thing is true for building the muscles and the strength. Recovery is part of the training. Proper nutrition, sleep (min 7hrs) and hydration are important for nurturing the muscles and strength. Training itself is catabolic, or breaking down, which means if you are not eating healthy, not sleeping, or not hydrating enough the body will not restore the damaged muscles.
Little tip on the nutrition. As mentioned earlier, hypertrophy training typically uses higher volume of exercise for each body parts. This depletes muscle glycogen, which is energy storage form for the muscles. Muscle glycogen needs to be replenished for it to be ready for the next training session. Therefore, adequate amount of carbohydrate intake is necessary for the faster recovery. If you are concern about fat accumulation because of carbohydrate intake, allow yourself to have carbohydrate only after the workout and keep the carbohydrate under control on other meals.
Kota Shimada
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