It can be useful having a checklist to refer to whether you're an athlete looking to build a specific body part or a regular fitness enthusiast who wants to get develop more muscle overall. In being able to cross-check your results with your methods I like using the analogy of a recipe when it comes to building muscle. When you're cooking a new dish, you follow the recipe using the right ingredients and cook for the appropriate length of time. If you deviate, likely, you won't end up with the dish that you want. Developing muscle is very similar in that if you follow the right method and use the right dosages, you're going to end up with a bigger build. This recipe must consider the interplay between 3 important factors:
Intensity: how heavy is the load?
Volume: what is the total quantity of the work you've done?
Frequency: how many times per week do you train a body part?
Very often, people look at what they're currently doing, and if it doesn't work, the answer is to do more. That can sometimes be the answer, but very often it's not the first one, and in some cases, is the wrong one. Below let's outline 4 areas to address in hierarchical order to check that changes are warranted and necessary.
Are you recruiting the target muscle?
This is a crucial first step before doing anything else. When muscles get put into the positions they need to, they will work. Our exercise selection, then, becomes an important factor to manage, because we all come in different shapes and sizes. For one person, a back squat may recruit much more glutes and very few quads due to their individual mechanics, while for another, they are able to target their quads very well. The figure below illustrates this.
If you're not recruiting the desired muscle, make sure you're choosing the right exercises that fit your body and mechanics.
Is your training intensity correct?
Intensity comes before volume. We don't add before we know the quality of what we're doing now is suitable. Imagine building more floors onto a building with poor foundations. It can be done for a short while, but eventually, the building will collapse. Muscle hypertrophy occurs anywhere between 30-80% of your 1RM, which makes load selection important. Once the appropriate load has been chosen for the exercise, it's on the part of the individual to push themselves to complete effective reps. Effective reps refer to reps that are approaching failure or in close proximity to failure. There's a general consensus that we should be aiming to leave roughly 2 reps in the tank on our sets to ensure appropriate intensity.
Are you doing enough volume?
It's only after intensity is accounted for that volume is considered. While there are guidelines for volume protocols for muscle groups, individual thresholds will vary. At the start of a programme, it's a good idea to keep track of the total volume per body part, and if a body part is lagging or simply not developing, then volume can be increased. An increase in one area will affect an increase in another area, and the interplay between volume and intensity is a careful one. We all have a maximum adaptive volume that it's counterproductive to exceed as it yields diminishing returns. We also have a minimum effective volume, in other words, the number of effective sets that we should not go below in order to maintain muscle. At some point, if the volume has to be brought up for a lagging body part, it may become necessary to lower the volume for another depending on where the cut-off points are for the upper and lower ranges. To put it plainly, our goal should be to determine what range of work sets correspond to these ranges for muscle groups, which differ from person to person and muscle to muscle.
What is your training frequency like?
It makes sense that we need to split the total volume of effective sets we're doing across a training week. There is only so much effective volume we can handle during a single session (the general consensus is that 8-14 sets per muscle group per session) before fatigue hinders our ability to take sets closer to failure with the right intensity (load). If our total weekly volume for quads is 16 sets, then we don't do all those sets in one session. Rather, we should aim to split the sets across multiple training sessions so that we can preserve the quality of work for each of those sets (recall point 2 of our checklist). As a rule, then, with an increase in volume, eventually there comes a point when we need to look at our training frequency to be able to drive progressive overload. Higher frequency training has obvious benefits in that it allows us to divide up the total volume and ensure that we're not exceeding our maximum adaptive volume per workout.
Bonus checklist.
Sleep & Nutrition
No list would be complete without mentioning sleep and nutrition. If you believe that you're already doing all the required things mentioned above but your sleep and diet is poor, then you're not doing all the things mentioned above to the best of your ability. You won't be able to train with enough intensity being under-recovered or if you don't fuel yourself properly through adequate protein, carbs, and fat. It's extremely rare to see anyone nailing every aspect of this checklist and not see progress.
Final Thoughts
Numbers won't lie. If you suspect that you're not making the kind of progress developing muscle that you'd like, you now have a checklist to refer back to. In order to use the checklist to its full, you'll need to have at least a good if not a complete picture of how the doses in your programme, and your own individual responses to intensity, volume, and frequency. These will become more apparent with time and will also change over time.
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