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Categories of Weight Training: Part 3

Before taking a short break to talk about my own recent experience with Overtraining and Overeaching, I had talked about some of the physiology behind hypertrophy training in Categories of Weight Training: Part 2.  In that article I discussed the issue of hypetrophy vs. hyperplasia as well as the idea that there are different types of hypertrophy (i.e. sarcoplasmic vs. myofibrillar), I also looked a bit at some of the underlying physiology of what stimulates muscle growth.

Today I want to use that as background to talk about hypertrophy training in more practical terms.  Today I want to make some more general comments and then talk about intensity/rep range as a loading parameter.   I’ll talk about other issues in a later part of the article I’d note that some of what I want to talk about has been discussed in other articles on the main site and, when appropriate, I’ll link out to those articles rather than repeat myself here.

Compared to other types of training, it seems as if you see the greatest variety in what can stimulate or generate hypertrophy in terms of the different types of training that has been done.  Basically, the phrase ‘hypertrophy training’ covers a lot of ground and people have gotten bigger using approaches ranging from multiple sets of low repetitions to high-repetition ‘pump’ training.  If you can conceive of it, someone has probably tried it or made it work.

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Beating a Dead Horse

Now, at the risk of thumping an all too often beaten drum, part of the issue has to do with the use of anabolic steroids in bodybuilding (and other strength oriented sports).  Steroids been around for at least 40 years (if not longer) and, as studies have found, can generate muscle growth (that is actual contractile tissue growth) even in the absence of training.

In one study in young men (ages 18-35), doses of testosterone ranging from 25-600 mg/week (a relatively low dose compared to current use) led to a dose related increase in muscle mass.  In that study, the 600 mg/week group gained a whopping 18 pounds of lean body mass over 20 weeks without training.

In another study, subjects were either given steroids alone, training alone or steroids plus training.  The steroids only group gained about as much size as the training only group with the steroids plus training group gaining essentailly what the drugs alone plus training group had gained.

And, because of this, a lot of the strangest routines often appear to work because, in effect, drugs have made the training much less relevant.  It’s not unheard of (though certainly not universal) to see drug-using bodybuilders fooling around with the lightest of weights and simply exploding in size.  Most naturals find out, usually the hard way, that many types of training are simply ineffective for growth, at least for the majority of trainees.

I add that disclaimer since you can always find a small percentage of naturals that seem to respond well to what many would consider ‘ineffective’ training.  The problem is that the folks focusing on that small handful tend to ignore that the grand majority make zero progress with that kind of training.  At the end of the day, focusing on what works for the minority is less relevant to me than worrying about what will work for the majority.

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Hypertrophy Training Loading Parameters: General Comments

Irrespective of the steroid issue, hypertrophy training still tends to have the greatest variety of training methods and methodologies that all seem to ‘work’ to some degree.  And given the multiple stimulating pathways that I discussed in Categories of Weight Training: Part 2 this makes sense.

Even if we only look at the three major pathways I described: tension overload, damage and metabolic fatigue; the existence of those distinct pathways alone could potentially explain how training ranging from high-repetition pump training (typically involving light loads and short rest periods which generates a heavy metabolic stress) to heavy strength oriented training (heavy loads and longer rest periods which focuses on the tension/damage end of things) can all ‘work’ to one degree or another.

It might be that the pathways are independent (impacting on different aspects related to growth such as energetic vs. contractile aspects of growth) or perhaps there is some type of synergy to be had by focusing on all of them due to overlapping or interacting molecular signalling pathways (either at the same time or in some sort of sequence).

As I’ll come back to, many of the routines that ‘work’ end up having some focus on each of the different pathways to at least some degree.  How they do it is often variable, some systems do it all in the same workout, some stretch it out across a week, some sequence it across a larger mesocycle of 6-10 weeks.   For one related discussion I’d point you to A Quick Look at Some Popular Hypertrophy Programs.

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Loading Parameters Part 1: Loading and Repetition Range

In the sports-science realm, for this reason, hypertrophy training is often defined as being somewhere from 60-85% of maximum which gives a repetition range from about 5-20 repetitions.  Basically it falls between what I described as the depletion/metabolic weight training in Categories of Weight Training: Part 1 and what I’m going to talk about when I get to maximal strength training.

But as you can see that provides an extremely broad range of loading parameters from high rep pump work (perhaps 3-4 sets of 15-20 with a short rest) down to the classic 5X5 Program with everything in-between. And while the range of 8-12 repetitions has been classically given as ‘the hypertrophy range’ there is actually little to no scientific support for this that I’ve ever seen.  It’s cited repeatedly as being ‘proven’ but if there is original research to support this, I can’t find it.

Going off on a very random tangent, my gut has always told me that this is where the old 8-12 rep range came from.   Back in the day, a classic routine was to do 3 sets of 10.  In fact, many still use this.  I figure that lifters would get distracted and miscount their repetitions.  Sometimes they’d do a couple less and sometimes a couple more.  Voila, 8-12 was born as the growth range.

More to the point, it’s clear that a variety of repetition ranges can lead to growth in the long-term.  Here’s another tangential story about one of my more eye opening experiences.  Oh so long ago I took the USWF Club Coach Certification course; Wes Barnett was the lifter on the spot.  I was fresh out of college and thought I knew my stuff; I knew what caused growth, right?

In any case, I got into a discussion with one of the instructors and we got to talking about hypertrophy.  How, I asked, did Olympic Lifters gain size when they needed it?  He told me that, at most, Barnett might do a bunch of sets of 5 when he needed to put in size.  What?  How could that be when everybody knew that 8-12 was the hypertrophy range.  I think it may have been that day that I realized I had a lot to learn.

But it made the early point to me that the idea that there is a single ideal repetition range for growth was incorrect.  Clearly there was more going on.  And between the possibility of different ‘types’ of growth (again, discussed in Categories of Weight Training: Part 1) along with overlapping and possible interacting molecular pathways, it makes sense that a variety of different approaches could be potentially workable.

A lot of it coming down to how the training is done, what volume of training is done (e.g. 8 sets of 5 might is the same volume as 4 sets of 10 even if the first takes a lot longer to finish), etc.  You get the idea I hope.  And with that, I’m going to stop for today, it’s getting long and the next block of discussion (dealing with volume, frequency and exercise selection) will make a good entry for Friday.  See you then.

Read Categories of Weight Training: Part 4

Related Articles

• Categories of Weight Training Part 4
• Categories of Weight Training: Part 6
• Categories of Weight Training: Part 5
• Categories of Weight Training: Part 2
• Categories of Weight Training: Part 1

Copyright © 2008 Lyle McDonald. All rights reserved.