Module 4a: Hypertrophy

Armor building and fatigue resistance. | Module 4 - Hypertrophy and Resilience | Technical Essay

When most people think about hypertrophy, they think about tissue growth and getting “swole.” In fact, hypertrophy is talked about so much in fitness-spheres online that it’s become as painful an irony as any other “evidence based” training program. If knowledge is so readily accessible to everyone, why isn’t everyone walking around jacked out of their gourd?

Photo by Simone Pellegrini on Unsplash

It’s hard not to call attention to the fact that reciting “correct” facts – according to “the science” – takes almost no effort, particularly in the age of AI. Actually doing the stuff, making changes, is a totally different story.

It’s one thing to talk, even honestly, about a problem and maybe even accurately about a solution, but another thing altogether to actually suck it up and follow through with action. How many people use “bulking” as an excuse to eat junk and avoid cardio?

Most people (in America) aren’t just “over fat”, they’re “under muscled.” As another aside, this is part of the problem with newly trending GLP-1 drugs. Just like any “supplement” or pharmaceutical intervention, if we haven’t addressed the underlying behavioral causes, there will be downstream consequences to pulling any biological lever. Nothing happens in isolation in the system of our organism.

To add further confusion, Hollywood and bro-culture have convinced us that “strength training” only means “getting huge.” We’ll talk about maximal contractions in the next module (power), but it’s easy to see where this derails into convincing yourself that you need to get big(ger) in order to get strong(er) — which is isn’t necessarily true.

When your effort and experience don’t match your knowledge and rhetoric, you end up just “getting big” and not strong; or assuming that because muscle mass is “associated” with lifespan, more is always better. Except, you’re forgetting that larger animals usually don’t live as long.

This is where the caveat of “functionality” comes in – another word I hate because it’s been so abused. It’s not inaccurate to think of building tissue as both “armor building” and a “metabolic sink.” A functional sink needs input pressure, holding capacity, and drain flow. If one is severely lacking, the unit is unusable.

The biological crux here is that more tissue requires more oxygen to run, so the endurance foundation we’ve built is paramount. While it’s certainly nice to look good, getting out of breath tying your shoes or needing assistance to wipe your backside (because of either obesity or your massive “gains”) isn’t very attractive or functional.

For the purposes of this project, I’ll use the terms strength-endurance and hypertrophy interchangeably – one simply refers to tissue morphology and the other to movement expression.

Modern literature has heavily critiqued the idea that we can selectively provoke adaptations in sarcoplasmic hypertrophy (pump) versus myofibrillar hypertrophy (fiber size and number). That doesn’t mean we can’t train either, it just means that the experience in practice is more transient or conjunctive than technical wording might suggest.

Perhaps this is a confirmation bias, but the idea of focusing on somatic experiences seems to be reinforced here. We can get out of the habit of “trusting” arbitrary rep and set ranges, much like we talked about the distance vs. duration conundrum in Module 3 (endurance).

So, how do we solicit a feeling of resilience by overcoming challenges without being threatened? Simply put, we create fatigue and resist quitting. In creating this module I had to do some homework myself, but common themes in most hypertrophy programs included:

• We need stimulation to adapt.

• We need recovery to grow.

• Strength endurance implies time under tension (stimulation).

• Use both bilateral (compound) and unilateral (isolation) movements.

• Cycle in antagonist movements for injury prevention.

A lot of programs start with the “big” compound (barbell) lifts and “fall off” to the isolation exercises to squeeze out more reps and subsequently more tissue breakdown. I assume that is a carry over from pure bodybuilding. From a strength-endurance perspective I think it works better with things somewhat reversed.

• Start with a general aerobic warm up.

• Then warm up a bit more with mobility or dynamic movements.

• Pre-fatigue with unilateral and isolation movements (to build awareness of imbalance).

• Work the compound / bilateral movements (with your expectations and ego in check).

• Cash out with low load, high reps, and metabolic burn (the final pump).