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This is something that is often overlooked. People thinking you have to go all out every session until there's nothing left in the tank - false!
Well, you can, but you should not do it every workout on every set.
Why exactly?
Well there has been a lot of research in the last 5 years on the subject of hypertrophy (muscle gain) and the general recommendation now for gaining muscle is to focus on these 4 things;
Mechanical Tension – Remember that time you lifted heavy weights and you felt like the muscle was about to come flying off the bone itself? This is really what mechanical tension. So you must ensure you lift through a full range of motion in order to keep tension on the muscle itself.
Metabolic Stress – The Pump! Yes, you know what this is. When you have repped out or have done a drop-set and the pump is unreal.
Muscular Damage – You’ll have the term “negatives” & “Positives”. This is what we refer to as muscular damage. So if you train in a controlled manner and place the muscle under tension, you then experience the good old DOMS which is caused by muscular damage – especially during negative phases of your lift.
Volume – Lets ditch the traditional training your chest once a week and going to failure on each set. It’s outdated. Instead, the research shows that increasing your sets to 15-20 per muscle group is much more effective and drives muscle protein synthesis. Now, this may not apply to smaller muscles like your triceps and biceps as they get worked during other workouts, so maybe keep this focus on chest, back, delts and legs and you’ll be making gains in no time. Don’t worry about overtraining, it will be impossible to do.
So just remember for next time. Focus on the principles above and focus on progressive overload and slightly more volume. So if to train chest once a week and do your standard 3 sets of bench, 3 sets of machine press and 3 sets of flies, throw in another session later in the week where you could perhaps do 4 sets of a chest press and then 4 sets of flies. Don’t overdo it though. The struggle we all have finding the right balance and finding the sweet spot.
It will take time, so just be patient.
