If you want to grow muscle, you need to get strong
On the importance of strength periodisation for muscle hypertrophy and why strength is the key to optimal muscle growth
If you want to build muscle, you need to be strong! To get strong, you need to switch between phases of hypertrophy with phases of strength training!
It is the secret as to why sprinters and power lifters gain mass extremely quickly when performing hypertrophy training. If you are a body builder, what seems as a waste of time is actually the greatest investment you can do. And here I will explain why…
People who go to the gym to build muscle usually adopt the mindset that pumped and tired muscles are great, and a sign that the training has been successful. Obviously, training releases endorphins, and if you come to the point where muscles are tired, you’ve probably gotten your fair share of them. Besides the feel-good chemicals it generates, and the Stockholm syndrome that develops, a common anxiety sets in and starts to grow: the fear of muscle atrophy if one is to take a break from heavy hypertrophy training.
For these two reasons, it is excruciatingly difficult to get hypertrophy-type gym goers to try a period of pure strength-based training. Throughout my years of coaching, this has been one of the toughest nuts to crack, but at the same time perhaps the most important one if my athletes are to develop optimally.
Strength training, in this example, refers to lifting that involves maximal intent/effort, since it is only then that the brain sends the maximal amount of signals, causing neural adaptation. This can be achieved, as most already know, by lifting weights close to the 1RM. However, it also occurs during ballistic lifts involving lower weights that one tries to lift as quickly as possible. These two types of training induce slightly different neural mechanisms, and cause slightly different training effects, but for the sake of simplicity, they can be considered the same thing: brain training as opposed to muscle training.
To explain why strength periodisation is such a powerful method, I will briefly outline some basic muscle physiology (in the parentheses I will give hypothetical values for illustrative purposes):
Each muscle consists of many muscle cells (100 cells)
Muscle cells are activated by so called motor neurons, causing them to contract
Several motor neurons connect to each muscle (this muscle is activated by 10 neurons)
Each motor neuron connects to several muscle cells (each neuron connects to 10 cells)
A motor neuron and the muscle cells it connects to is called a “motor unit” (there are 10 motor units in this muscle, each consisting of 1 neuron and 10 muscle cells = 100 cells in total)
Even though the idea that we use 10% of our brains is a myth, it is true for our muscles; during a contraction we only activate part of our muscles. Depending on the force that we are applying, we are activating more or less of the muscle (for simplicity I’m considering a muscle that only has one type of muscle fiber, and not two main types as is actually the case). The higher the weight we are lifting, or the faster we are trying to lift it, the higher the muscle activation is.
Imagine you are trying to lift a medium weight with a moderate speed. In that situation, you might activate 4 motor units, and contract 40 muscle cells in total (4 * 10 cells). This will generate enough tension in the muscle to perform that action. Perhaps this allows you to lift 50kg. By lifting the weight several times, you will metabolically stress the muscle a certain amount (say 500 stress-units), which will cause the muscle to grow a certain amount.
The difference between submaximal weight lifting without using maximal intent is that the signals sent from the brain are not that high. When lifting with maximal intent, the increased signaling causes the motor neurons to sprout, and send out connections to more muscle cells. You also teach the brain to increase the number of activated motor neurons by lowering the threshold at which they become activated.
In other words, the body attempts to increase strength neurologically, as opposed to muscularly through hypertrophy, by increasing the size and number of motor units (see illustration below for example). So, if you go through a phase of maximal strength and power training, you will cause your motor units to grow from 10 muscle cells each to 12 (each motor neuron connects to two more muscle cells), and to activate 5 instead of 4 motor units. The result of this is that, instead of activating 40 muscle cells (or 40% of the muscle) during a lift, you will activate 60 muscle cells (5 * 12, or 60% of the muscle). By performing that same exercise after a period of strength training, you will also have increased the metabolic stress on the muscle, from 500 stress-units to perhaps 750, which causes an increased stimulus for the muscle to grow. On a side note, strength-/power-training is a more potent stimulator of myosatellite cells (stem cells) than hypertrophy training, which causes lifelong increases in the number of nuclei and ribosomes, leading to higher protein synthesis in the muscle.
This illustrates the concept of increasing the number of motor units and the number of muscle cells they contain following strength training.
This outlines how one can gain strength without increasing muscle mass (that is, increase relative strength), which is important for almost all sports. And, to come back to the original point, it also shows the importance of periodising strength and hypertrophy even when the sole aim is to increase muscle mass. If you are experiencing a muscle-building plateau, this is a sure way to break through!