I know what you’re thinking. Another trainer spouting the same spiel about getting good at the basics. You’d have a point. But a lot of the articles I’ve come across over the years have been focused on the importance of learning the movements, becoming efficient with technique, and not overcomplicating training before you need to. Instead, I want to talk about standardisation of your training, and the importance of replicating the effort and quality of your workouts, which in my opinion is just as important but often overlooked when it comes to achieving hypertrophy. It’s more than just banging out reps and sets and seeing total volume or load go up.
So, what do I mean by standardisation?
To put it very simply, it means minimising deviation when executing your reps. At a very fundamental level, the reps (alongside the sets and rest intervals you’re going for) largely determine the stimulus of the workout. It makes sense that we want those reps to be of high quality, and in order to do so, our execution needs to be on point but also matched from workout to workout. Without this, the more complex variables like volume and use of intensifying techniques like supersets or drop sets are going to be pointless.
Mindful training involves paying attention to the details and being honest with yourself about the quality of the work you’re putting in each time. So as not to go off on a tangent, let me list off some variables that you should be replicating and some reasons as to why these are important if you want to get mo’ jacked.
ROM
Range of motion. Don’t be that guy or girl at the gym that does rack pulls from mid-quad, or start cutting the range of motion short on a bench press when the weight starts getting heavy to stroke your ego.
If you’re only ever doing half reps or partial ROM, and consistently increasing load, you’ll definitely get stronger in that range. But you’re doing yourself no favours because when you’re forced to do a full rep, you probably won’t be able to complete it without drastically reducing load. That supposed strength that’s been increasing each week has actually been hiding your weaknesses, because you’ve not trained with a full ROM and earned those weekly weight increases. To achieve any training related goal hinges on progressive overload, which your body knows how to quantify. If you’ve been hitting full ROM on an exercise one week, and you all of a sudden start to reduce the depth, this is no longer the same exercise to target that muscle, pure and simple as the muscle isn’t being placed under the same amount of tension. Match the ROM on each rep, match the tension of each rep, to replicate and progress the stimulus from the previous workout.
Tempo
Similar to ROM, if you’re working with a specific tempo for an exercise, you need to be strict with it. If the plan calls for a pause in the lengthened position, take the pause. If it calls for a 3 second eccentric, make sure it’s 3 seconds, not 1 and a half because the weight feels tough. Changing these variables on the fly will affect the stimulus of the rep, and our goal is to chase specificity for as long as we can before we need to change things up.
If you’re doing a top set and the tempo on the eccentric of your last rep goes out of the window, make a note of it in your logbook, so that next time you can focus on making sure the tempo is matched across each rep in the set. This way you could even progress your previous session without doing more weight or reps as the quality of the set would improve by focusing on the execution.
Tension
This is essentially the pulling force between the two ends of the muscle from insertion to origin. The more tension there is, the more of that muscle tissue is active. For hypertrophy goals, this is a key factor as you need to know first how to get tension where you want it, and then how to keep it there. Once you can keep it there you can then either maximise the amount of tension (intensity) or your ability to sustain that tension throughout the set, so that you can get the desired outcome in terms of stimulus.
To put this into perspective, you could be doing a set of leg extensions and aiming for 12 reps. You’re mentally not present for the first 8 of these reps and the last 4 are where you switch on and think about dorsiflexing the foot and pulling your kneecaps into your hips. Do you think the tension of the first 8 reps is the same as that of the last 4? Definitely not. It takes constant focus and effort to maintain tension in the target muscles to ensure the appropriate stimulus of each rep.
Now, obviously, if you’re increasing load each week this will mean a different amount of tension, but you still need to make sure that you’re creating tension in the muscles that you’re trying to target and keeping it there to for the duration of the set.
If you want to get better at building muscle, ceaselessly focus on each rep. Make them look as close to each other as possible. When one variable suffers in the pursuit of progressive overload, make a note and make sure you bring this up to the standard before chasing heavier weight or extra reps.
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