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Hey Quaranturnt Crew, We talked about muscular hypertrophy last week, but I ended it with a vague notion of the value of time under tension. How much time under tension is enough? How much muscular damage, mechanical tension, or metabolic stress should I induce? What you’re really asking is “how much do I need to train?” I can’t answer that question directly. But I can give you a framework for how to figure out the answer! I’ll do that by defining some things for you, and then I’ll give you a great link to learn more about that. The way we try to answer this question is by looking at how many sets one must do per week in order to reach various goals. That is, how much demand must we impose on a muscle group in order in order to reach various goals of adaptation. This varies across person, muscle group, and of course how the muscle group is actually stress (e.g. hard tempo sets will have a different impact than some throw-it-around sets). But having SOME answer to these questions, even if vague and handwavy, is more valuable than having no answer.
One quick note I’ll mention but not get into - much of programming for fitness relies on periodization. This means you start out with some amount of imposed demand, then ramp it up to a higher demand, then maybe ramp it back down. This lets you ease your body into intensity, push it as hard as possible, then calmly release that pressure. So as you go through your hypertrophic cycle, you might start at the MEV, and over the course of a couple months, you’ll work up to your MAV. I know very very little about periodization, so honestly you know as much as I do now. To learn more about this, check out Juggernaut and especially their IG videos titled “Hypertrophy guides” for individual muscle groups. Then head to my IG Post and see today’s workout. 
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Hey Quaranturnt Crew, I wrote about superset back on day 26, but I forgot one major reason I really love including them: tactically exhausting a muscle group to help target another muscle group. Let’s say you are interested in strengthening your lats (Why? Well maybe you are a swimmer, maybe you’re a bodybuilder, or maybe you are one of the many in people this group trying to get your first pullup). In order to strengthen your lats, doing pullups, or some scaled variation of them, is a great choice. But it’s a challenge to focus on your lats properly; pullups rely significantly on your biceps as well (especially if you’re actually doing a chinup). So how can you avoid using your biceps? Option 1 is “just know” and use your mind body connection to direct all your attention and strength to the lats. For the rest of you who haven’t been deeply engaged in meditation and strength training for 5+ years, don’t worry, there’s a better option. Tactical exhaustion. Precede and superset your pullup work with some bicep-crushing activities. So do a few sets of curls and then start the pullups with some curls in between sets too. This way you will not have a choice but to avoid using your biceps in the pullup. You already tactically exhausted them to aid in targeting the lats. I use this technique in a lot of the work we do. Like today, I don’t want you using your quads in the table top thrusts - it’s a glute exercise - so how about you get some squats and burpees in, then use them glutes for the table top thrusts. Boom. I exhausted your quads, tactically. You can probably skip this paragraph, but if you want another example, here’s a good one. I use my shoulders too much to keep my jump rope going. So what I do in my workouts is add some extra shoulder press work to tactically exhaust them. That forces me to stick to targeting the wrists for the rope speed! Here is the IG Post.   Hey Quaranturnt Crew, Look up any forum where experienced athletes give advice to their younger selves. Every one of them involves a huge amount of focusing on good form from the start and injury-preventative measures. One of the greatest injury-preventative measures is warming up, which is why I spend a few minutes every day writing out how to warm up for each workout. Warming up has 3 goals:
Please do the warmups, I want you to be able to push yourself hard without getting hurt! See here for a bit more depth on warming up. Here's the yoga link below.   Hey Quaranturnt Crew, I won’t get too deep into this, but I wanted to share a quick classification of hormones out there. There are catabolic (breaking down) hormones like cortisol, the primary stress-response hormone. Then there are anabolic (building up) hormones like testosterone, human growth hormone, and estrogen. Why is this important to know? Well, it reminds us how interconnected everything you do is. This sheds some light on why a difficult break up and hard quarter at work are not likely to move you closer to your athletic goals - you’re constantly flooded with stress and thus catabolic hormones. It helps you understand why too much working out may be counterproductive - you broke yourself down so far that the catabolic impact is greater than what your body can overcome to properly grow. There are much deeper intricacies of biochemistry and fitness, but I don’t know enough and most of you don’t care enough to keep reading. Enjoy your workout, my friends. IG Post here.   Hey Quaranturnt Crew, For the final pillar in muscular hypertrophy, we have metabolic stress. This refers to the build up of chemical byproducts and the shortage of metabolic inputs in your muscle. After a good amount of work, you start really feeling the burn, that’s a build up of byproducts like lactic acid. Additionally, unless you’re doing slow aerobic work like jogging, you are running low on oxygen. Both of these factors lead to stress on the muscle cells. And, again, your body has to adapt to that imposed demand. I’m not educated enough to know what about this leads to more muscle mass. I imagine the body is building more systems in the muscle in order to manage the build up of waste, but that’s totally just conjecture. I need to find a book. I’m planning on getting this one if anyone wants to join me. With the 3 pillars of muscular hypertrophy behind us, I want to touch on the concept of time under tension. Max brought this up for us a couple weeks ago if you remember. Now that you have the fundamental principles under your belt, you can understand how time is an important factor. How much muscular damage can you do in 1 second of work (pls don’t take that to the extreme…)? How much metabolic stress can build up if you only work for 1 second? How much of a signal is sent to your body if you only endure mechanical tension for a second? More time → more signal → more results. To a point, that is. Your body can only handle so much before it shifts from “let’s build for strength” to “OH MY GOD WERE DYING”. Here’s the IG Post.   Hey Quaranturnt Crew, Tomorrow we will finish off the last pillar of muscular hypertrophy, but today we have another feature. In college, I did an a capella group for freshman year, and from there came one of my best college friends: Kim Onah. Her voice is cited as one of Beyonce’s greatest inspirations. Her wholesome care for those around her makes the cold and dark into cozy and bright. And her smile could make you forget a gosh darn international pandemic.  Kim is a core example of the Quaranturnt spirit I’ve been striving to incite. She does the workout just about every day, she texts me about it regularly, and she seeks to learn and grow with humility and determination. Thank you all for being a part of this, and Kim, thank you for being my friend for almost ten years now 😮 And here is her 🌞Good Thing 🌞  IG Post here!   Hey Quaranturnt Crew, Before I dive into the second section of muscular hypertrophy, I want to share a really powerful simple tool you can use to feel better in your body. I call it the Yoga Quickie. This is a <15 minute yoga flow you can use between work meetings, to start off your day, or bring your mindbody back to a calm neutral at the end of the day. I am going to commit to doing this every day for the next week, and I’m confident I’m going to feel like a better machine rather than a creaky broken skeleton! Now for mechanical tension, the second pillar of muscular hypertrophy. Mechanical tension is the stress that is put on the muscle itself. Not the tearing of the muscle, but the pulling of the elastic band that the muscle is. It’s the stretch the muscle resists and overcomes as you do the movement. In order to do this, the muscular system must employ various chemical pathways, strong nervous system signals (more on that later when I get to recovery!), and unified recruitment of multiple muscle fibers (see muscle anatomy here). All of this is a signal to the body, which your body will adapt to by increasing the strength and size of the muscle. There’s certainly a lot more in this topic, but honestly that is the limit of my knowledge. I’m looking into finding the right book to read up on this so I can understand this at a deeper level. For now, check out this IG Post for the workout. And here's the yoga referenced below.  Hola Quaranturntadores, A handful of you have asked me about how to build muscle, or more scientifically, muscular hypertrophy. The first thing you are likely thinking about is Arnold and body building and scary veins and being huge. Aka, I just lost all the girls and ⅓ of the guys here. But you shouldn’t think about muscular hypertrophy like that. I’ve never talked to someone who didn’t want to build *some* muscle - guys are usually interested in pecs biceps and shoulders, while most girls are zooming in on instagram booties on the daily. So I am confident all of you want to understand this, just don’t limit your thoughts to people like Kali Muscle. There are 3 means of inducing muscular hypertrophy:
Today I’ll describe muscular damage a bit. Muscular damage is pretty self-explanatory in that it is literally damage to the muscle fibers. Small tears in the muscle tissue lead to repair and regeneration for larger muscles. This is the primary source of that feeling of soreness. There are two ways you cause damage to the muscles, and they’re pretty intuitive if you think about it. The first is by doing new movements. Any sort of novel stimulus will cause your body to work in ways it hasn’t before. Muscle fibers will contract against forces coming from directions they aren’t used to. Muscle fibers will team up with new muscle fibers. And all of it will be work your body isn’t yet accustomed to, so the system will be unprepared and the muscle structure will fail (aka tear) in a handful of places. The second is by stretching the muscle while it is contracted. That means you are squeezing it tight, but still lengthening it. At first look this might seem like an unreasonable scenario, but that is actually what you are doing every time you go down in the squat, or lower yourself in the pushup, or extend in your pushups. This lowering portion of any movement is called the eccentric (as opposed to the flexing part which is called concentric). In eccentric movement, the muscle is holding tension, but being stretched out. This causes tears and thus soreness and muscular hypertrophy. To imagine what is going on more tangibly, think of someone taking steps up a snowy mountain, but still sliding down - the snow will get dragged around and torn up. The flexing of the muscle is the skiier trying to hike, the sliding down is the continued extension of the muscle, and the destruction of that fresh powpow is damage to your muscle. If you are impatient and want to read about the next couple of means of muscular hypertrophy, then check out Bret’s article here. If you are impatient and just want the workout, then see my IG post here.   Hey Quaranturnt Crew, Today, I want to give a quick breakdown of a muscle you probably aren’t aware of: the Transverse Abdominis (aka TVA). The TVA is a core muscle that wraps around you horizontally like a thick belt. It isn’t something that you’re looking to post on Tinderstagram; it’s a few layers under the surface. But it’s an incredibly important muscle that provides maximal stability to your spine. How does a belt-like muscle give you spinal stability? You have to imagine the spine like a string - it’s very flexible without any proper support. If you take a string and put it against the wall, it falls down in a pile. But if you take a blown up balloon and some rubber bands, then tape the rubber bands over the balloon on the string, the string will stay rigid against the wall. Your core muscles are tension-inducing rubber bands and your lungs are the balloon. This is why weightlifters take deep breaths and hold that breath tight when lifting, they’re using the Valsalva Technique to give their spine great support. This is what a lifting belt is for btw, it lets you push against something to squeeze that balloon tighter against the string. So how can you strengthen your TVA for better support and stability when moving around or lifting heavy things? This level of targeting is something I could learn a lot more about. My best understanding says you should do a lot of the work I already tell you to do. Static holds, internally static with externally dynamic movements, and honestly the work we do in deadlifts and squats is hard to beat. For more information on various lesser-known parts of your core, check this article out. Or just jump to the IG Post of the workout today.  Hi Quaranturnt Crew, Thanks for letting me spread love for my sister her yesterday. Today, I’m back to my rambles. Here is one of my favorite quotes in history: Strength is never a weakness ~ Bill Starr This quote ends up applying in so many ways. I’ll skip over the wider applications related to mental fortitude and general preparedness. I’ll keep it purely athletic today. But still there are so many amazing ways this plays out. I have four athletic applications of this quote I’ll give you. First, the obvious application in straight lifting, duh. In order to squat more, it would be helpful to have stronger legs, a stronger core, stronger back muscles, etc. But that’s not very interesting. But what about injuries? Does strength help with injuries? The resounding answer is YES. The #1 thing you can do to prevent injury is get stronger. If you have the strength to control your body in the unstable/chaotic/badly positioned scenario that leads to the injury, then you likely won’t get injured as much. Also, if you’ve ever been to PT, they basically just give you well thought out strengthening exercises 90% of the time. So that should tell you how important strength is for recovery as well. One of you responded to my bone stress injury post the other day saying you had to quit running due to a hip fracture that miiiight have been prevented by having more strength in the structure. Would strength definitely have prevented it? No, but it certainly wouldn’t have caused it. It wouldn’t have been a weakness in that situation. The next situation I’ll apply this quote to is explosive movement. Think jumping high or pitching a fastball. Does strength mean explosive power? NO. I’ll avoid that topic for now, but someone who trains to lift heavy weight slowly will adapt specifically to that imposed demand such that they can lift heavy weight slowly. So explosive power doesn’t come from that directly. That said, if you are stronger, it is easier to repurpose that strength into explosive power. 700lb squat strength won’t get you all the wayto the hoop, but again it would not be a weakness for someone trying to dunk. Now ok, you can hear my earlier examples, but no way is strength important for more cardio intensive work like doing a bunch of burpees, killing yourself with thrusters, or running stairs right? Wrong again my friend. Strength continues to play a valuable role. The short of it is that any exertion that requires you to push closer to your max effort limits may end up restricting blood flow, so if taking a big jump is really hard for you to do once, it’s going to be harder to do repeatedly as you run low on blood flow! Read more on this amazing instagram post by Evan Peikon (looove how this dude thinks and teaches). Ok, 480 words. I’ll leave it there. Strength is never a weakness. I love you. Goodbye. Here's the yoga flow referenced below.  |
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