About Steroids

So, all gyms are closed so how can you still make gains at home? Something I’ve had to take on for most if not all clients & redesign their plans & has made for a lot of chaos but there is a way. Remember, the mechanisms of hypertrophy are mechanical tension, metabolic stress & muscle damage. Thus, although the loads available at home may not be adequate enough to sig. stimulate hypertrophy in low/mod rep ranges, in high ones & thus, taking advantage of metabolic fatigue, they STILL can be
Your “survival pack” for home workouts is thus going to be the use of high-volume training with a plethora of intensity principles including:
• 20+ rep sets
• AMRAP sets
• Supersets
• Blood flow restriction training
• Drop sets
• Little rest (30-60s max)
• Cluster sets
• Myoreps
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These have all shown to sig. enhance metabolic fatigue & thus hypertrophy. The key here is that you take your sets as close proximity, if not to complete to failure. Correct, your muscles know nothing but stress & tension. The Henneman size principle which states that motor units fire from smallest to biggest as effort increases e.g. we start a set of bench with 100kg. For the first few reps the effort is low & we fire more small/slow motor units. Come rep 10, the WEIGHT is the same but our small/slow motor units have fully fatigued & the effort is a lot more thus we fire more larger/faster motor units until we eventually fail on the 12th rep (all the muscle fibres in the chest have been recruited & fully fatigued not able to produce enough force to move the weight). The same effect would happen for benching 50kg & fail at rep 24 or bench 160kg & fail at rep 5. As far as the muscle knows, regardless of weight, all the fibres were recruited & eventually fatigued to the extent of inhibiting them from producing force be it heavy or light
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One study compared intensities of 5,10 or 20RM & TUT of 35, 70, & 140s showing no sig differences in motor unit activation. Even Schoenfeld (2015) compared loads of 8-12RM to 25-35RM TO FAILURE in TRAINED males concluding that “Both groups sig increased lean mass in their bis, tris & quads, but no statistically significant between-group diff.

03.04.2020