SS 177 – How To Train for Size / How to Train for Strength

SS 177 – How To Train for Size / How to Train for Strength

 

Episode 177 Show Notes

This is part II of Grant and Heavey’s discussion from last week’s episode (#176 -which we advise you listen to it first to better understand today’s conversation). Today, they dive in depth about different training variables and how you can manipulate them for strength or size. Whether you’re looking into building size or strength, this is a must-listen!

 

[02:50] The More You Eat Out, The Higher Risk of Getting BPA

Grant mentions this article about a study conducted by Dr. Sheena Shatnarayana at Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington. It found that if you’ve eaten out at a restaurant or any place where food does not come from the grocery store, you have a 35% higher measurement of Phthalates, a type of plastic that can apparently mess up our hormones.

Affecting not only younger and older people but also pregnant women, phthalates have been linked to cases of behavioral problems, obesity, birth defects, cardiovascular issues, and even some cancers. They studied where people are still getting this stuff from and what they’ve found is it’s in all of these restaurants and cafeteria. While a lot of these plastic materials are now made without BPA, there’s a lot of BPA-containing plastic packaging where food is kept, shipped, stored, prepped, which exposes food to BPA.

 

[07:10] Training for Size or Strength?

In last week’s episode, listener Joe raised a question about if it’s possible to increase muscle strength without gaining weight.

Heavey explains that increasing muscle size is a very important part of getting stronger but it’s not the only way. In fact, there are more ways that focus on the neurological adaptations of using your muscle mass more efficiently.

The conventional wisdom for building strength is 3-5 reps and 6-12 reps for building size, while 15+ reps for muscle endurance. Although these numbers are quite true, this is a “vast simplification” as Heavey puts it, considering there are many more training variables than just reps to dive into, for which today, they tackle five or six of the most common training variables people can manipulate with research backing them.

 

[10:08] Nutrition for Size or Strength

 

To build size, you need to eat more than you’re burning in a day. One of the great ways to control your size versus strength building is to throttle back your nutrition. To continue to promote strength, you want to make sure you’re eating adequately, trying to do this at your maintenance level so you’re at a point where you’re not really gaining or losing weight. If you want to gain size, you want to eat past that maintenance level so that your body has the fuel to continue to build muscle. This includes pushing the protein like the typical 1 gram per pound.

Grant adds that one of the difficulties of this objective is to try to do this in a sustainable manner. Many martial art professionals go through training and cut down their weight. There is a lot of manipulation of body weight so their training needs to account for that. Oftentimes, they may push up their weight a bit past their weight class limit. Then, they cut at the last minute and rehydrate so they’re replenished and bigger when they fight. This is taking it to the extreme and unhealthy but almost necessary to be competitive for their sport.

 

[13:45] Get Strong, Stay Small: Relative Load

Relative load is the percentage of a 1 rep max. If you want to be lifting at higher percentages, ideally stay at 85% or greater. This has been found to be most beneficial for increasing your strength.

Strength is a skill and you’re training your body to better recruit your muscles in a more coordinated way. The more time you can spend in this higher load range, the better you’re able to develop this skill.

In terms of building size, you can do this at any percentage except for 20% and lower. You’d very likely want to have variation in your training where you’re training at that full spectrum of percentages that will help further enhance your muscle gains and hypertrophy.

When you’re working out at such a higher percentage, it’s hard to get many reps in. Hence, the conventional wisdom of 3-5 reps for strength is not a terrible advice after all.

 

[16:06] Strength and Hypertrophy Based on Movements

Part of getting stronger is putting on muscle and Heavey points out that as we go through these variables, you’d notice some of them can’t be separated. You’d see that the guidelines that research shows for optimizing strength and hypertrophy are the same. This likely means that the strength gains you’re getting are mostly due to hypertrophy.

Additionally, you may also want to consider the movements you’re performing. There are some that don’t translate well into your sport and some that might work better. Compound movements are the holy grail because they’re so efficient since you’re using the most number of muscle units.

Alternately, when talking about sports, it may make more sense to break it down to more isolated movements and train towards the muscle groups that are most involved in the movements appropriate for that sport due to some hypertrophy.

For instance, if for some reason, you don’t need to develop your chest as much as you need to develop your biceps for pulling, you may want to consider this. Rather than doing bench press, maybe biceps curls and rows make more sense in this scenario. This is just something to consider when you’re in a weight-class sports scenario.

 

[18:55] Sets and Volume

Volume is sets times reps and sometimes it’s sets times reps times load. For strength, more sets are better. This could be due to an increase in muscle size because in hypertrophy, more sets are better. This is one of the areas you want to be careful since if you’re pushing the sets, your strength gains may be coming at the cost of increased muscle. You’re going to walk a fine line here since people respond differently to training. Try just doing more sets and monitor that over time and if you’re not putting on size then consider adding more sets over time. But see how your body responds.

 

[20:00] Training to Failure

Training to failure involves doing a lift until you can’t anymore due to muscular fatigue. This variable is difficult to control for in research but it’s beneficial for increasing strength. However, this may also seem to favor hypertrophy as well. So if you may want to again experiment with this personally. Heavey recommends against this when starting off if you want to be efficient while not having to add size. Train closer and closer to failure and see what happens.

 

[21:05] Training Days Per Week

The more training days per week, the stronger you get, the bigger you get. Again, Heavey stresses it’s really difficult to separate strength and muscle size increase. You need to focus on those other things mentioned here where you’re working at 85% or more and you’re not doing a ton of sets. So day to day, you’re getting some reps in at higher percentages to help you optimize your muscle efficiency and be stronger.

 

[21:52] Rest Periods

 

For building strength, you want to take a rest of about 3-5 minutes per set to optimize your strength gains. That rest period gives you a good amount of time for your body’s energy systems to recharge. Then you can go back and lift at those higher percentages on the next set.

For hypertrophy, you do a wide variety of rest periods ranging from as short as 30 seconds to as high as 3-5 minutes. This means variation is your friend.

 

[22:53] Muscle Action

Muscle action involves doing the concentric, eccentric, or isometric-focused lifting. Concentric is the raising part of the lift. Eccentric is the lowering part of the lift. Isometric is the hold or static part of the lift.

This doesn’t have any positive or negative effect on strength. However, if you’re doing sports-specific muscle training, this may be of benefit. If you’re in a sport where you’re pushing a lot, there’s more concentric action with the legs or pushing your arms, you may want to do concentric-focused training because that strength will translate into that sport.

Outside of that, there’s no reason to focus on it or avoid it either since it doesn’t seem to really negative affect your strength. Moreover, eccentric focused training seems to have some benefit for hypertrophy. This means that focusing on lowering can enhance size so you may want to avoid this if you’re trying to be efficient in your strength and not add size.

 

[25:15] Variable Loads

When you’re standing up if you’re squatting with chains, you’ve got the full weight of the chains on the bar but as you squat down, the ground offsets that load. So a bar with a chain on is lighter at the bottom of the squat than it is when you’re on the top of the squat.

Variable loads are like the muscle action variable where they don’t seem to hurt or help when it comes to building strength. If you’re one of those people that get fired up by using bands and chains, then do it. It’s not going to give you a significant enhancement on your strength over somebody not using them.

Some research shows that working with bands and chains can be beneficial for developing power and developing a stronger lockout at the top of the lift. With hypertrophy, there is no consensus in the research as to whether it can help or hurt.

 

[28:10] Stretching, Massage, and Rolling

Grant raises a sensible question about whether stretching or massage can help improve your strength training. Heavey suspects it could benefit both hypertrophy and strength. But with that said, those self-care things are valuable because they enable you to come back to training more quickly. As a result, you get to train harder and get stronger or bigger depending on how you manipulate the variables in your training session.

 

Links:

Here’s a new reason why eating out might be bad for you