Hello
Is the goal of a hypertrophy focused training plan to do enough work to see progressive overload or the maximum I can recover from for a muscle?
For example, if I’m consistently able to add reps/weight for the same RPE to my leg press, is that enough evidence to say the muscles involved are growing, and doing a hack squat alongside that wouldn’t be beneficial despite more total leg volume?
I find it hard to believe that a muscle has grown significantly if you’re doing the same weight for the same reps year on year, but I feel that telling someone to “get stronger to get bigger” is like saying “earn more money to be rich” - it doesn’t explain the method to get there, which in the case of muscle growth I would imagine is accumulating a lot of work over a long period of time instead of chasing numbers.
Cheers
The goal of any programmed training is to elicit the maximum response from the available resources (logisitical and physiological).
With respect to hypertrophy-focused training, we would expect an increase in strength in the exercises being trained, though not quite as much as a strength-focused program. Still, a program that is well-suited for an individual is likely to produce increases in both muscle size and strength because there’s a lot of overlap in the two processes.
On the other hand, getting stronger doesn’t necessarily mean someone is gaining more muscle mass and vice versa. They’re correlated because the two outcomes are hard to separate when using most training methods.
Both strength and hypertrophy outcomes are tethered to total training load, where higher training loads tend to drive more results provided the person can tolerate it. The specifics of the training load such as intensity, proximity to failure, exercise seleciton, rep schemes, etc. are different, but more work tends to produce more results either way.
-Jordan
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Thanks Jordan!
Since I’m mostly doing machines and dumbbell movements, would you recommend going to failure all the time? I don’t squat bench or deadlift, I only do barbell and dumbbell RDLs where I think it could be a problem
I do not think going all the way too failure all or most of the time is a good idea. Within 2-4 RIR is fine, with some isolation work closer to 1-2 or even 0.
I do think doing some free weight squat and hinge pattern would be generally beneficial, if you’re up for it.
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