#002 What it takes to build muscle

This will be the most crucial newsletter of all I will publish because it will lay the foundation for all other newsletters that will follow. Today we will talk about the basics it takes to build muscle:
Training, Recovery, Nutrition

Training

The most obvious part of what we need to do to build muscle is -to no surprise- working out.

Starting at the highest level possible, training serves a simple purpose: Providing a growth stimulus for the muscle.

As a reaction to the growth stimulus, an adaptive response is triggered in your body. This adaptive response is the trigger that causes your muscle to grow to adapt to the stress you put your muscle under with the growth stimulus (workout). That’s what we call hypertrophy.

Put simply, you should look at your workout from the angle of providing a growth stimulus to your muscle that you can leverage through the right nutrition and recovery.

Now, let’s go a bit deeper. What does it actually take to provide a growth stimulus? For most of you, surprisingly little. The two most important training variables we have to structure our workout around are volume (how many sets we do) and intensity (how hard we train).

The Boats & Logs philosophy follows a low-volume, high-intensity approach as it has great benefits for hypertrophy while being time efficient. With this workout approach, we minimize the amount of sets we need to do while maximizing our recovery and giving it our all during the workout.

To make this approach work, we obviously need to train at a high intensity, which means taking all of our sets to failure (the stage where you can’t complete another rep without breaking form). We do this with a technique called progressive overload. If you are not familiar with the concept of progressive overload, it is about increasing the weight or reps for each exercise every (other) workout. This way, we make sure that we are actually training at a high intensity and are not leaving any reps in the tank.

However, this goes a bit against the newest findings in science, which argue that stopping around 2 reps close to failure is slightly better for hypertrophy than training to failure. But if you are a beginner or intermediate, I’d still encourage you to train to failure, as the upside of stopping a bit before failure is not that big, and the risk that you are stopping too early because you don’t know when you are 2 reps shy of failure is quite high.

As we have established that we should train with high intensity, we can now move on to the second factor: Volume.

Volume and intensity are in a direct relationship with each other. Until a certain degree, we can decrease our volume when we increase the intensity and increase our volume if we decrease the intensity. Most people you see in the gym do not have the optimal mix of intensity and volume. The average lifter may train at high intensity, but he also runs a high-volume approach, where he does more volume than he needs to trigger an adaptive response. We call these sets and reps “junk volume”.

You should try to avoid junk volume because not only does it not generate additional muscle growth, but it also puts additional and unnecessary stress on your body that will lower your performance during the next exercises and increases the time you need to recover from the workout.

So, how much volume should you do? Remember, our goal is to do as little volume as possible and as much as necessary to trigger an adaptive response.

Our volume comprises all sets and reps we do per week. Without diving too deep into sets and reps (they are worth an article themselves), you should aim to have at least 10 sets per week for each body part when training at a high intensity. But keep in mind that many exercises work multiple muscle groups. Incline bench press, for example, works the chest, shoulder, and triceps, so it adds sets to multiple muscle groups. Don’t worry too much about the reps, just pick something in the range of 6 - 15 reps. While lower reps are generally better for strength and higher reps are better for hypertrophy, you won’t see much difference if you train around the lower or higher end of this range.

After reading this first part about training, you may still wonder what exercises and program to use, and we will cover that over the next weeks. For now, I’d encourage you to pick a full body, upper/lower, or push/pull/legs split that follows a low volume/high-intensity approach and stick to it for at least 3 months. Realistically, it’s a good idea to pick a split that is fun to you, and that fits your life so you can be consistent with it.

Don’t start changing splits and exercises every few weeks because you believe it will result in greater muscle gains. If you already have a decent program, there is limited benefit in trying to optimize the exercise selections. You will see more results from optimizing recovery and nutrition.

Recovery

Directly linked with training is recovery. Many people tend to underestimate the importance of having an adequate recovery despite the process being quite simple: You train to provide a growth stimulus, you eat to fuel the muscle growth, and you recover to give your muscles time to grow.