By: Chris Gates
Designing a program for yourself is tricky.
There’s so much research out there, so much advice swapped back and forth, and so many returns on each Google search about “how to get stronger” and “how to build more muscle.” Nevermind the fact that what works for one individual may not work well for another.
Trying to figure out how to build your own routine in a way that makes sense is damn near impossible. Or at least it feels that way.
Well, you’ve come to the right place. This is the second article in a series tailored towards helping you train smarter and achieve your lifting goals. The first article in this series breaks down the differences between training for size and training for strength. Definitely give that a read if you haven’t already. It has a lot of introductory information that this article will build on.
Today, you and I are going to dive into how to set up your training routine for muscle growth. I’m not going to write an entire program for you and map out specific exercises, rep ranges, and progressions. Rather, let’s focus on the concept of building muscle and outline what you should be doing in the gym to experience progress.
So to start, let’s dive into some of what the research says about training to build muscle. From there, I’ll offer some examples and coaching cues that can help you put this information into action.
Research Evidence
Before diving too deep, let’s first rehash some of the basics from the introductory article in this series. Here are the key points for building muscle:
- You should probably be doing 10-20 hard sets per muscle group each week (or at least for the muscles you’re trying to grow).
- These sets should be within the 5-30 rep range.
- You need to be training legitimately hard — getting close to, and sometimes reaching, muscular failure.
- Training volume should increase over time in some way, via sets, reps, and/or load.
- Form and technique should be prioritized over increases in load.
If you haven’t read the first article in this series, give it a read to learn more about those concepts. It’s important information to get you started.
So how do you structure things from there? What exercises are going to be best and what order should you do them in? And how many exercises should you be doing each training session?
In the end, the answers to those questions are going to be very personal and specific to you, but some of the research on this topic can help you to get started.
To build on the training volume recommendations listed above, increasing volume can be simplified to mean making an increase in sets, reps, and/or load from what you’re doing right now. If you’re only doing five sets per muscle group each week, you don’t need to immediately add five more sets to find yourself in that 10-20 set range. And if you’re doing 10 sets, it doesn’t mean more is better and you should instantly double it up and do 20.
The 10-20 sets range is something you can work your way into over time, and generally it’s a range that works best for most people to build muscle long term. If you’re a complete beginner to lifting weights, just getting started is going to result in increases in muscle mass. If you’ve been lifting for a while and you’re outside of the 10-20 sets per week range, make gradual increases over time to see how much volume you can handle and how much is most effective for you.
Gradually increasing volume from your current baseline is going to be what drives muscle growth. It will allow your body time to adapt and grow, and you’ll be able to effectively progress over time.
Think about it this way… Your body doesn’t know what sets are. It’s just knows the stimulus you provide it with, and it reacts and adapts to that stimulus. So gradually increasing the lifting stimulus over time is really all that matters.
Let’s also build on the 5-30 rep range. You may prefer training with heavier weight on the lower end of that rep range, or you may enjoy doing more reps with lighter weight. Both of those, and anything in between, have been proven effective at building muscle. Generally it seems that if you prefer lower rep ranges (5-8 reps per set or so), doing more sets is going to be necessary to maximize the amount of muscle you can build.
Whatever your preferences may be, making those sets legitimately hard is going to matter and make a big difference. Taking those sets within 1-4 reps of failure, and sometimes even reaching failure, will be important to generate enough stimulus to grow.
In terms of exercise selection, a recent meta analysis provided some valuable information on what matters, and maybe what doesn’t matter, when it comes to programming for muscle gain.
To summarize the findings, authors found that the order of exercises within a workout didn’t really make a significant impact on muscle gain. Lots of commonly used exercises were part of the analysis — single-joint and multi-joint movements, free weights, machines, etc. Regardless of the training protocol, increases in muscle mass were similar.
Let’s use squatting vs. doing leg extensions to grow the quads as an example to explain what this means. Squatting is a multi-joint exercise — throughout the movement your hips, knees, and ankles are participating in the lift. Leg extensions, on the other hand, only involve the knee flexing and extending — so it’s a single-joint exercise.
Often multi-joint movements, or “compound lifts,” are considered to be the gold standard for muscle growth and strength development (programming for strength development will be discussed in a different article) and many lifters and trainers insist on doing these movements at the very beginning of a training session in order to maximize performance and, in turn, theoretically maximize the stimulus and gains that come from the movement.
That’s a pretty sound approach (more on that in a second), but if your sole goal is building muscle, the types of exercises you do, and the order in which you do them, might not matter all that much. The most important factor is probably choosing to do exercises that are most effective for you — the exercises that lead to the most effective muscle engagement and allow you to make progress over time.
As Michael Zourdos put it, “training for size is a bit more forgiving than training for strength.” There are many advanced techniques and unique exercises you can employ to build muscle, but it really might not be necessary.
Simply put, if you’re doing exercises that get you an adequate stimulus on the muscle groups you’re targeting, and you’re able to get in a sufficient amount of volume each week, you’re going to grow, assuming you’re eating enough protein and calories and managing your recovery.
Coaching Cues
Despite these findings of essentially being able to do whatever you want for muscle gain, I don’t think you should just abandon the idea of outlining a program for yourself. You should still have a program, you should still know what you’re going to do each day in the gym, and you should still have goals to accomplish each day.
Without some type of structure or program, tracking progress and making progress are going to be more difficult.
And despite the finding of not needing to prioritize multi-joint, compound exercises, I still think that’s probably the right way to go. More so, I take that finding to help us understand that it’s not 100% necessary to do movements like the squat, bench press, or deadlift to build muscle.
So if you want to build a bigger chest but you hate doing the barbell bench press, or if you struggle to engage your pecs with that movement, understand that you don’t have to perform any specific exercise to grow that muscle group. If you get better muscle stimulation with a dumbbell press, that’s probably the exercise that’s going to get you more quality as it relates to building muscle.
But back to the topic of exercise order for a second.
If you plan to do multi-joint, compound movements as part of your training program, I do still recommend you prioritize them and do them first during your workouts. If you’re going to do the bench press or squat in your workout, it makes more sense to do that first and follow it up with associated accessory work (even though your goal is to build muscle and not specific to building strength).
Why? Well, for starters you’re going to be freshest at the start of your workout and be able to move the most weight. Generally multi-joint movements allow you to move more weight than single-joint movements because more of your body’s musculature is involved in the lift. So why not take advantage of that and try to move the most weight possible?
These movements also typically rely on a higher level of form and technique to perform properly. If you do something like leg extensions before you squat, your quads will be fatigued and you’ll potentially see your form break down earlier in the squat sets than if you swapped the order of these two exercises. Form breakdown at the very least can negatively impact the gains you’re able to make, as it reduces overall training volume for the workout, but it also has the potential to lead to injury.
And injury often means you stop training altogether, which clearly isn’t going to promote muscle growth.
I’d recommend starting each workout with a multi-joint, compound movement (if it’s part of your training program) and follow it up with less demanding accessory work.
Let’s roll with the example of squats and outline a hypothetical training session…
| Exercise: | Notes: |
|---|---|
| Warm-Up Sets | Start with the bar and progressively work your way up to the working weight for that training session. |
| Barbell Back Squat (compound) | 3 sets of 8 reps |
| Barbell Romanian Deadlift | 3 sets of 8 reps |
| Standing Calf Raise | 6 sets of 12-15 reps |
| Leg Extension | 3 sets of 12-20 reps |
| Leg Curl | 3 sets of 12-20 reps |
Like I said, this is purely hypothetical. The exercises and rep ranges are less important than the structure here, so let’s break this down.
You’ll see that warm-up sets get you primed and ready to move some weight during your three sets of squats for the day. This is the movement that will require the most energy and allow you to move the most weight, so it makes sense for you to do it first. In the 8-rep range, you’re going to get an adequate stimulus for muscle growth.
After squats, you move on to two movements that don’t involve the quads — barbell Romanian deadlifts (hamstrings) and standing calf raises (calves) — in order to give the quads time to recover before hitting them again.
Then it’s back to quads, performing leg extensions, and then you finish the session off with leg curls for the hamstrings.
All work is done within the 5-30 rep range, and there’s a variety of rep ranges that provide for a pretty good overall stimulus for each muscle group. All told, this framework has you doing 6 sets per muscle group, which lines up nicely to hit a second lower body session later in the week to get into the 10-20 hard sets range.
This type of thought process and approach is something you can apply to each muscle group within each workout, every week. And hopefully, if you’ve made it this far, the concept of organizing training makes a little more sense for the goal of building muscle.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to check out part 3 of this series on how to structure your training to build strength! (Coming soon – subscribe to the CGF newsletter and you’ll get it the minute it’s published!)
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CGF