Increase Muscle Growth

Siim Land is a self-published bestselling author (Metabolic Autophagy, Stronger by Stress etc.), high-performance coach, and prodigy of biohacking. The topics he covers range from health and fitness to productivity and mindset.

“Your body is slowly deteriorating with age, including losing muscle mass and muscle strength. The only thing that can mitigate that is resistance training – being strong will save your life when you’re old.” – Siim Land

Overview

In this challenge, you will learn how to do resistance training for the sake of increasing muscle mass and muscle strength.

The objective is to enhance bone density, increase muscle mass, and muscle strength, and improve body composition.

The challenge is to find your working set intensities for muscle strength and muscle hypertrophy. Then, you ought to start doing resistance training at least 2-3 times a week.

Foundations

Recommended tools include weightlifting equipment, gym, and calisthenics exercises.

If you have issues with joints, consider using resistance bands to reduce the strain on joints while allowing you to work on both strength and hypertrophy effectively.

Instructions

1. Establish your working sets for muscle strength and hypertrophy. For strength, you can do a movement for 3-6 reps, and for hypertrophy 6-12 reps.
2. If you are training strength, then do 4-6 sets of 3-6 reps per exercise.
3. If you’re training hypertrophy, then do 3 sets of 6-12 reps per exercise. In total, train 2-3 times a week.

Conclusion

Resistance training can be manipulated in terms of volume, intensity, and frequency to achieve different goals. Typically, training for strength focuses on lifting heavier weights with lower repetitions to increase the maximum amount of force a muscle or group of muscles can produce. In contrast, training for hypertrophy aims at increasing muscle size, and it usually involves lifting moderately heavy weights for a higher number of repetitions. The differences are as follows:

Hypertrophy Training

• Primarily increases muscle size by enhancing the cross-sectional area of the muscle, focusing on sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.
• This leads to significant neuromuscular adaptations, enhancing the ability of the nervous system to recruit motor units more efficiently and synchronously.
• Increasing muscle mass may contribute more to elevating resting metabolic rate, potentially aiding in weight management and fat loss.
• The increased strength of muscles and connective tissues and enhanced neuromuscular control can be more effective in preventing injuries related to muscle weaknesses and imbalances.
• Leads to a more significant release of muscle-building hormones like growth hormone and IGF-1 due to the higher volume and metabolic stress.

Strength Training

• Increases muscle density and the strength of connective tissues, focusing more on myofibrillar hypertrophy, and does not necessarily lead to a substantial increase in muscle size.
• While it also leads to neuromuscular adaptations, the emphasis is more on muscle fiber growth and less on neural adaptations compared to strength training.
• While it also increases metabolic rate, the emphasis on muscle density oversize may result in smaller changes in metabolism compared to hypertrophy training.
• The increased muscle mass can provide better support to joints and reduce the risk of injuries related to muscle strains.
• While it also induces hormonal changes, the response may be less focused on muscle growth and more on neural adaptations and strength gains.

Both types of training can improve bone density and overall bone health, reducing the risk of osteoporosis.