Neuroscientist: 7 Tips to Build Muscle FAST (For Beginners)

Here is a brief summary of the key points from the transcript: - The nervous system controls muscle growth and strength, not just the muscles themselves. The nerve-to-muscle connection is key for hypertrophy (muscle growth). - For muscle growth and strength, lifting weights in the 30-80% of 1 rep max range, taken close to failure, is optimal. Heavy weights are not required. - For untrained individuals, 5+ sets per muscle per week is needed just to maintain muscle mass. 10-15 sets per week can stimulate growth. - Most sets should be not to complete failure. About 10% of sets can be high intensity to failure. - Rest 2-6 minutes between sets. Time of day doesn't matter much. - Performing contractions between sets can help boost hypertrophy. Rep speed doesn't matter much. - Training at a consistent time daily can help enhance cognitive performance on non-training days.

If your goal is to build larger muscles, there's a way to use your nervous system to increase the size of those muscles. Heavy weights can help build muscle, but they are not required. For individuals that are untrained, moving weights in the 30% to 80% of that is going to be the most beneficial range in terms of muscle hypertrophy and strengthen. When we think about muscle, we don't just want to think about muscle, the meat that is muscle, but what controls that muscle, and no surprise, what controls muscle is the nervous system. If your goal is to build larger muscles, there's a way to use your nervous system to trigger hypertrophy, to increase the size of those muscles. And it is indeed controlled by the nervous system. So you can forget the idea that the muscles have memory or that muscles grow in response to something that's just happening within the muscle. It's the nerve to muscle connection that actually creates hypertrophy. Weights in a very large range of sort of percentage of your maximum, anywhere from 30% to 80%. So weights that are not very light, but are moderately light, too heavy, can cause changes in the connections between nerve and muscle that lead to muscle strength and muscle hypertrophy. Put differently, heavy weights can help build muscle and strength, but they are not required. What one has to do is adhere to a certain number of parameters, just a couple of key variables that I'll spell out for you. And if you do that, you can greatly increase muscle hypertrophy, muscle size and or muscle strength, if that's what you want to do. And you don't necessarily have to use heavy weights in order to do that. If you want to get stronger, it's really about moving progressively greater loads or increasing the amount of weight that you move. Whereas if you're specifically interested in generating hypertrophy, it's all about trying to generate those really hard, almost painful, localized contractions of muscle. Now, of course, how much weight you use in order to generate those contractions will also impact hypertrophy. There's a lot of information saying that you need to move weights that are, you know, 80% to 90% of your one rep maximum, or 70%, or cycle that for three weeks on and then go to more moderate weights. There are a lot of paths, as some people say. There are a lot of weights to add up numbers to get 100. You know, there's a near infinite number of ways to add up different numbers to get to 100. And what's very clear now from all the literature that's transpired, and especially from the literature in this last three years is that once you know, roughly your one repetition maximum, the maximum amount of weight that you can perform an exercise with for one repetition in good form, full range of motion, that it's very clear that moving weights or using bands or using body weight, for instance, in the 30% to 80% of one rep maximum, that is going to be the most beneficial range in terms of muscle hypertrophy and strength. So muscle growth and strength. So 30% to 80% of one repetition maxims, it doesn't really seem to matter for sake of hypertrophy, except at the far ends when you're really trying to bias for strength. Now, it is clear, however, that one needs to perform those sets to failure where you can't perform another repetition. Competition in good form again or near to failure. For individuals that are untrained, meaning they have been doing resistance exercise for anywhere from zero, probably out to about two years, although for some people it might be zero to one year. But those are the so called beginners. They're sort of untrained. For those people, the key parameter seems to be to perform enough sets of a given exercise per muscle perennial week. Okay. The same is also true for people that have been training for one or two years or more. What differs is how many sets to perform depending on whether or not you're trained or untrained. So let's say you're somebody who's been doing some resistance exercise kind of on and off over the years, and you decide you want to get serious about that for sake of sport or offsetting age related declines in strength. The range of sets to do in order to improve strength to activate these cascades in the muscle ranges anywhere from two, believe it or not, to 2020 per week. Again, these are sets per week, and they don't necessarily all have to be performed in the same weight training session. I will talk about numbers of sessions. So it appears that five sets per week in this 30% to 80% of the one repetition maximum range, getting close to failure or occasionally actually going to full muscular failure, which isn't really full muscular failure, but the inability to generate a contraction of the muscle or move the weight in good form, about five sets per week is what's required just to maintain your muscle. So think about that. If you're somebody who's kind of averse to resistance training, you are going to lose muscle size and strength. Your metabolism will drop, your posture will get worse. Everything in the, in the context of nerve to muscle connectivity will get worse over time unless you are generating five sets or more of this, 30% to 80% of your one repetition maximum per week. So what this means is, for the typical person who hasn't done a lot of weight training, you need to do at least five sets per muscle group. Now, that's just to maintain. And then there's this huge range that goes all the way up to 15, and in some case 20 sets per week. Now, how many sets you perform is going to depend on the intensity of the work that you perform. This is where it gets a little bit controversial, but I think nowadays most people agree, and Doctor Galpin confirmed that 10%, not to be confused with the 10% we discussed earlier, but 10% of the sets of a given workout, or 10% of workouts overall, should be of the high intensity sort, where one is actually working to muscular failure. But the point being that most of your training, most of your sets, should be not to failure. And the reason for that is it allows you to do more volume of work without fatiguing the nervous system and depleting the nerve to muscle connection in ways that are detrimental. So we can make this simple. Perform anywhere from five to 15 sets of resistance exercise per week, and that's per muscle. And that's in this 30% to 80% of what your one repetition maximum. That seems to be the most scientifically supported way of offsetting any decline in muscle strength if you're working in the kind of five set range, and in increasing muscle strength when you start to get up into the ten and 15 set range. Now, the caveat to that is everyone varies and muscles vary in terms of their recoverability, depending on how well you can control the contraction of muscles deliberately. And you can actually figure that out by sort of marching. You might take five minutes and just kind of march across your body and mentally try and control the contractions of muscles in a very deliberate way, to the point where you can generate a hard contraction, and you may have to move a limb in order to do this. By the way, I'm not talking about just mentally contracting your bicep without moving your wrist, I'm talking about doing that without any weight in hand or any band or any resistance. If you can generate a high intensity contraction using these upper motor neuron to motor, lower motor neuron pathways to muscle, you might think, well, I should perform many more sets, right? But actually the opposite is true. If you can generate high intensity muscular contractions using your brain, using your neurons, it will take fewer sets in order to stimulate the muscle to maintain itself and to stimulate the muscle in order to grow or get stronger. There are some other things that can enhance the whole process of building nerve to muscle connections, making them more efficient and generating, if you like, more strength and hypertrophy. One of them, I loathe to say, I was told, is in between set contractions. The other name for this is the people in the gym does typically seem to be guys in the gym flexing their muscles in between sets. And indeed, the research supports the fact that contractions of about 30 seconds in between the actual work sets, they're not going to favorite better performance on the work sets. If anything, they're going to compromise them. But those hard contractions in between sets, for a variety of reasons related to local muscle metabolism, as well as what we talked about before, which are stress, tension and damage. They seem to improve stress, tension and damage, and the nerve to muscle contraction in ways that facilitate hypertrophy. If you're wondering how quickly to perform repetitions for sake of hypertrophy or strength gains anywhere from a half a second per repetition all the way up to 8 seconds per repetition, it doesn't seem to matter now how long to recover between sets for hypertrophy and for strength gains. It does seem that resting anywhere from two minutes or even three or four or even five or six minutes can be beneficial. And of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about time of day for training. Turns out that whether or not you do, whether or not you train in the morning or in the afternoon, doesn't really seem to matter for sake of things like hypertrophy and strengthen, et cetera, everyone seems to have a time of day that they prefer to train. I've said before, and there are reasons based on body temperature, rhythms, and cortisol release that training 30 minutes, 3 hours, or 11 hours after your normal waking time can be very beneficial and can provide a sort of predictability or regularity to when your body will be ready to train and best apt to train well. There is some evidence that training in the afternoon is better for performance, whereas training for or body composition changes and strength changes, etcetera, doesn't really matter when you train. So you also want to make it compatible with sleep, compatible with work that really gets down into the weeds of optimization. But I think it's interesting to note that if you're going to train at a regular time, you can take the days when you don't train and use that to enhance your cognitive focus for things that have nothing to do with exercise. So this might be writing or reading or music or math, etcetera.