The personal training community is a close knit bunch. Recently we meet some personal trainers from London called Evolve Fitness.
Based in Liverpool Street and Blackfriars they focus on group and individual personal training programmes. Their lead trainer and founder, Tim Walker, has also appeared on the odd TV show (most notably Get a Holiday Body: Lose a Stone in 4 Weeks, where he was a fitness mentor to the Antony Costa formerly of the boy band Blue).
They’ve written us four of their top tips for building muscle.
1. Train the largest muscles first, but not always
The general rule of thumb that the big exercises should be done first is a good one. But a couple of times a year, a three or four week period of training the smaller muscles first in isolation is extremely effective. So, on a push session you’d do triceps, then shoulders then lastly chest. You’ll need to reduce your weights, but we’re only talking about a few weeks here.
Then, on a pull workout you might train biceps first, then the upper back and then finish with chin-ups (if you can manage it, it’s a humbling experience!).
2. When training for muscle gain, seek inefficiency
When training solely for muscle gain, try the opposite and make the exercise harder. With our bench press example, you could perform the wide grip press to the upper chest on a five-second lowering tempo.
Same movement pattern, dramatically different exercise.
This is the opposite of training purely for strength. For example, if you’re looking to just get stronger on the bench press, you should place the feet firmly on the ground, retract the shoulders, arch the back and drive the traps into the bench. This gives you a solid, stable base to lift more weight.
3. Vary your exercises more
When seeking to build muscle, choose exercise variations you haven’t used for at least a few months. If you’ve been back squatting, switch to front squats. If you’ve been doing pull-ups (palms facing away from you) switch to chin-ups (palms facing you). You still want to train the key movements, change -upper body push to upper body pull, lower body knee dominant to lower body hip dominant.
You should vary your methods too; when a new client arrives and wants to build muscle one of my first questions is “what have you been doing up until now?”.
Then I do the opposite of whatever they’ve been doing. If they’ve been using a high volume approach I’ll drop the volume and increase the intensity. If they’ve done nothing but full body routines I’ll split things up. If they’ve trained bench press first thing on a Monday every week of their adult life, guess who’s going to be occupying the squat rack on a Monday evening from now on?
If you’re looking at going into a hypertrophy phase, give some of these tips a go!