General Rules for Muscle Hypertrophy

Last week I made a quick Facebook post that got quite a lot of attention. In fact, it got more attention than half of the posts I spend hours writing and editing, and it only took me about 58 seconds to write it between sets of deadlifts at the gym. Strength and conditioning are passions of mine. They were my love and full time focus before I entered the world of physical therapy. Needless to say I am still very active in the gym as well as in the corresponding literature.

However, since my earlier days I have shifted my interest slightly away from maximal strength and more towards a hypertrophy/physique focus (if only I could get right in the kitchen and cut down on drinking….but damn all these great craft breweries!!...IIFYM all day long). Now strength and hypertrophy to a certain degree do in fact go hand in hand, but training for maximal strength will look a lot different than training for maximal hypertrophy and physique. Take for instance your power lifters vs body builders and physique competitors. In many instances the body builders are much larger, yet not nearly as strong as the power lifters. There are certain factors that seem to influence hypertrophy that don’t directly correlate to strength and vice versa. However, the aim of this post isn’t to get into these details. I simply wanted to take this opportunity to create a more visually appealing and legible chart based on my quickly jotted Facebook post. I was pumped to see so much interest on this topic from the physical therapy world!

I added a few more lines of info I felt were pertinent. Hopefully you can take this chart and use it to easily spread solid evidence based information on muscle hypertrophy. Enjoy!

 

 

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