Muscle Club Mass Formula

Mechanical tension, muscle damage, local metabolic stress and central factors (genetics, hormones) are the main drivers of muscle growth.

Tension is the dominant factor out of the two.

So how to we increase tension in the muscle?

The obvious answer is MORE WEIGHT… progressive overload and that works.

BUT

The less obvious answers that are also important.

Stretch, sticking point and repetition style are the factors that most don’t consider when thinking about muscle tension.

Quality of tension is more important than time under tension for size gains in advanced natural lifters. Beginners will be challenged and adapt with low tension so super slow training is safe and effective for beginners.

Over time mass and athletic returns will be much lower on slow training styles.

To increase quality of tension make the sticking point closer to the fully lengthened position of the muscle and have fascial pull as well as load pull.

There are hundreds of 40+ women who look more jacked than 90% of men from training CrossFit.

The training is high volume… so much so that if coaches are sloppy with programming or preparation for competitions it’s potentially deadly.

So much muscle is broken down that the kidneys start to fail… it’s something that is joked about in CrossFit but should be understood by anyone wanting to gain mass.

Neural (electrical) impulse causes muscle to fire and pull. Electrical signalling creates tension. Tension drives adaptation.

It follows that the more electrical signal we can get to a muscle the more tension we can create and the more damage we can cause.

There are a few major implications from this.

When you have pain the muscle isn’t going to grow.

Pain causes the body to send less neural drive to the area.

Inhibiting the muscle is the intuitive intelligence of the body decreasing the muscle tension that’s causing connective tissue, bone or muscle damage in the area.

We can go more into healing tissues another time but what’s most important is

1. blood flow,

2. healthy blood

3. Not so much tension that significant damage / repair is required.

4. Light stretching to introduce tension and tissue remodelling without causing pain or excess damage.

If the body intuitively rebuilds itself to live through the immune system, circulation, digestion and all the other systems that keep us alive without our conscious attention… would it not follow that LIFE PRESERVING MECHANISMS are at play when we attempt to max out our neuromuscular systems?

The body will shut down strength to preserve tissue health.

Broken bones, ligaments and tendons are life-threatening.

For this reason the stronger we can make our bones, ligaments, tendons and other connective tissues… the more force we’re going to be able to produce in the muscles.

Strong tendon unlock new muscle gains.

So how do we strengthen tendons?

Most people think of isometrics.

In fact isometrics are commonly used early in rehabilitation because they generally DON’T maximally tax the tendons.

Consider this. If you wanted to hang 50kg off a cable with 50kg load tolerance… how would you hang it? Very gently right?

You wouldn’t be bouncing it up and down or dropping it from a few meters. Force equals mass times acceleration therefore loads will be much HIGHER when rebounding forces are added together with load.

Stretch strength is the most conservative way to progress tension. This is the foundation of the ATG “Strength Through Length” idea which has helped thousands overcome tendon pain.

Bone also respond to load.

https://primalbarbarian.com/can-bone-size-affect-your-muscle-size-potential/

Yes.

Blood flow restriction training builds very muscle dominant muscles.

This means muscles with less connective tissue.

Less collagen means more fragile.

There was a top sports team in the USA that ran this experiment… big muscle, increased tears.

Sled work gets massive quad pumps. Without long range quad training sleds in isolation probably aren’t the best way to prevent quad strains.

Combining PUMP and TENSION is going to bring the BIGGEST results.

Sprint cyclists and Tom Platz might be the best examples of this principle in action.

The fastest athlete I’ve trained - Trae Williams trained sets of 20 one one leg day and sets of 3 on the other. He used eg press and hack squats. He could also do high repetition floating and dead start nordics curls. He experimented with programs from top Strength Coaches but found he ran slower when his quad size or strength dropped.

Maybe he has great genetics.

Certainly he was training his legs more simply harder than most athletes.

Have you seen someone who’s waist is equal to their height who doesn’t have MONSTER Calves?

What would happen if you had to wear a 40kg weight vest all day… everyday?

Any muscle trained with extreme volume will grow.

Knowing you’re winning and running with the top pack increases testosterone.

When you finish a session KNOWING you WON you will gain more than if you tell yourself that you lost.

Win often! Gain confidence. Keep winning.

Activating the testes also increases strength instantaneously and aggression with the bar. Legendary powerlifting gym Westside Barbell under Louis Simmons apparently iced their balls before big lifts to get more testosterone into the blood.

Being sexually changed for more creativity, confidence and a better life goes back to Success Bible “Think & Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill.

Muscle goes where the body demands it.

There is a soft limit to how much muscle tissue as body can have. If one muscle group is used disproportionately to the others then it will grow the most. You can see this with the forearms of mechanics and black smiths or the calves of soccer players or the hitting arm of the tennis player.

The reverse is also true… any muscle that isn’t stimulated will decrease in size relative to those being used. This is clearest when chronic pain is present or if a limb is immobilised like when bicep and triceps size and strength decrease because of a wrist in a cast.

Now that we’ve understood the extremes we can see that to some degree we have to choose where the mass will be and where it won’t be.

Maximally hypertrophied arms and shoulders will be at the expense of some chest and calf development.

Since there is a soft limit to the total / maximal amount of muscle in the body we choose where the mass goes.

Those who cheat can add more total muscle but sometimes they end up with disfigured physiques… the shoulders get freaky big compared to the calves. Mass placement is very important to the aesthetics of a physique and performance. Charlie Francis said “looks right, flies right.”

There is an underlying intelligence that keeps us alive. It beats our heart, it heals our wounds, it defends us against pathogenic invaders. It also drives us to eat, breathe, drink and pro-create.

This innate intelligence doesn’t want our structures to break.

A snapped achilles in ancient times was often a death sentence or at least a massive burden on the tribe. Same for all serious injuries.

If a joint is becoming unbalanced and unstable the body will by innate intelligence decrease the neural drive to the muscles around that joint. Charles Poliquin’s famous stories about adding 10-20% to experienced athletes bench press numbers WITHOUT bench pressing were based on this concept.

1 Sentence

Lengthening muscles increases their health and ability to grow. In the process connective tissues also becoming stronger increasing anabolic potential.

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Muscle health is a key factor in muscle growth. Longer muscles have healthier fascia and blood supply and are therefore able to grow faster. Making longer muscles also brings more tension to the muscles in the process. It’s the lengthening exercises that are most anabolic so gaining tolerance to length is going to encourage more growth. When you gain length with size you retain more youthful movement, athletic ability and you need less warm-up be explosive or lift heavy because the tissues aren’t in a default shortened position.

1 Essay

Charles Poliquin was a student of the methods of bodybuilding legend Vince Gironda… this lineage holds more keys to mass than the conventional wisdom printed in a stack of modern bodybuilding magazines as high as the Burj Kalifa.

Gironda was very particular about the exact movement execution because he knew it would impact the fibres hit and therefore the shape of the physique. Gironda’s training used more stretch than most bodybuilders.

Charles took this even further with his Fat Tool, ART, Stretching For Success, PIMS method and more. Charles believed in MUSCLE LENGTH and CONNECTIVE TISSUE QUALITY for size more than any coach in history.

Charles was able to add more functional lean mass to athletes while losing fat mass than any coach in the athletic world. As a result his athletes won. Anabolic steroids undoubtedly increase athletic performance therefore becoming maximally anabolic naturally is an advantage. Men’s world records are higher than women’s in athletics and weightlifting even with the same anthropometry because genetically men have more muscle mass and stronger neural drive.

Explosive animals with stretch briefly with tension multiple times per day. Watch any dog that is able to run (sausage dogs and dogs that fit in handbags often lose this trait) and you’ll see it stretch many times per day.