Jeremy Ethier breaks down three science-backed ways to build muscle faster: progressive overload using double progression, hitting 10-20 sets per muscle weekly, and training 1-3 reps short of failure instead of going all out.
Approximately 1.5 to 2 pounds of muscle per month.
Roughly 10–20 sets per muscle per week.
About 2.5%.
About 65%.
Approximately 80 to 85% more growth.
Most of us want to build muscle as fast as humanly possible. But unlike in the movies, building muscle is often a frustrating and painfully slow process, which can make it difficult to tell if you're actually making progress. And unfortunately, this process only continues to slow down as you gain more experience. For instance, here's a model developed by researcher Ellen Aragon that illustrates roughly what the maximum amount of muscle you can gain per month is. So, for example, a 140 pound beginner can expect to gain around 1.5 to 2 pounds of muscle per month in their first year of proper training. Fast forward to the intermediate stage and things slow down. Fast forward once again to the advanced stage and things slow down even further to the point where physical changes will become almost unnoticeable. And keep in mind that these rates are assuming that month to month, you're doing everything optimally and consistently in terms of your training and nutrition, which often just isn't the case for most people. So, as you can see, muscle growth is a slow process, but over time it does amount to big physical changes if you stay the course. And luckily, the literature suggests that there are a few things you can do to ensure that you're indeed making progress and building muscle as quickly as your body is capable of. And that's exactly what I'll cover in this video. The most important thing you can do in the gym to grow as quickly as possible is to apply the concept of progressive overload to ensure that you're getting stronger over time. For instance, a team of Japanese researchers had subjects do nothing but the bench press three times a week for six months. As you can see here, they experience increases in chest and triceps muscle size from week to week, which seemed to correlate well with their progressive increases in bench press strength. Do note, however, that the correlation between strength and muscle size is far from perfect. But it does become increasingly significant as you gain more experience in the gym. For example, this 2016 paper found that in untrained individuals, since they initially gained strength very rapidly from neurological adaptations, the correlation is quite weak. And in this case, only 2.5% of their increases in muscle strength was likely due to increases in muscle size. Contrast this with a study on well trained men by Baker et al. And the correlation becomes much stronger. And in this case, 65% of their strength improvements was likely due to increases in muscle size. So what does this mean? It simply indicates that strength becomes more indicative of growth as you gain more experience. And therefore, to speed up growth, you need to have some form of progressive overload plan in place such that you're getting stronger over time. And one easy yet effective method you can use is something called double progression. Lets say you do four sets of bench one week with a goal rep range of six to eight reps each set. With double progression, all you're doing is trying to increase your reps week by week until you successfully hit the top of the rep range every set. Then you proceed to add a little bit of weight and repeat the process over again. So throughout the weeks, you first progress with reps and then progress with adding load, which some strength research indicates is the better option for strength improvements. However, strength improvements aren't always reflective of muscle growth. Even if you become very strong, if you're not doing enough volume, then you won't be maximizing growth. Which brings me to point two, ensuring that you're doing enough volume. A good example that illustrates this point is a 2010 meta analysis by James Krieger. He found that as you increase the number of sets performed per exercise, muscle growth increased as well. In fact, comparing four six sets to a single set, you'd expect experience about 80 to 85% more growth. But rather than simply doing four six sets for all your exercises, I'd instead suggest sticking to a weekly guideline that multiple papers are in agreement with, which is to ensure that with your workout split, you're doing roughly 1020 sets per muscle per week. So for instance, with the chest, the following is an example of how you could hit 12 sets per week for that muscle. You want to start at the low end as a beginner, and then you'll gradually have to increase this over time as you progress. Next, you want to ensure that you're training hard enough in order to recruit as many muscle fibers as possible and provide them with enough stimulus for growth. And to achieve this, you need to be putting enough effort into each set such that you're training relatively close to failure. In fact, one 2012 paper from the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that at least for the deltoids, sets need to be taken within three reps short of failure in order to maximally activate the working muscle. And if you stop well short of failure, hypertrophy, hypertrophy becomes inferior, which researchers have speculated is likely because you're not recruiting enough muscle fibers for a sufficient enough time to stimulate sufficient hypertrophy. However, at the same time, you don't want to train to absolute failure, especially on compound movements, since this is going to negatively impact the rest of your workout. So instead you want to push yourself hard enough during your set such that you only have around 13 more reps left in the tank upon completing your set rather than going to absolute failure. This, in combination with the previous tips, will ensure that you are indeed doing everything you can with your training in order to build muscle at the fastest rate possible.
That's pretty much it for this video. To summarize everything for you, here are the main points that you want to keep in mind. It's the little training details like these that really are what make all the difference and it's what's going to enable you to progress as fast as possible. And if you're looking looking for an all in one evidence based program that shows you exactly how to optimize both your training and your nutrition in order to transform your body as quickly as possible from your starting point, then what you can do is simply head over to builtwithscience.com and take my starting point quiz to help determine which program and which approach is best for you. Anyways, as always, if you haven't already, I'd really appreciate a follow on Instagram and I post a lot of informative videos and content like this on a regular basis, so give me a follow on there so you can stay updated with everything I'm doing. And as always, if you enjoyed this video then please don't forget to give it a like Leave a comment down below. Subscribe to my channel and turn on notifications for my channel as well as this all really does help me out and I'd really appreciate it. That's it for today everyone. I've been working hard on some really exciting content I have coming up, so stay tuned for that. I'll see you next time.
It.
