Training For Growth, Not The Ego
The first thing people do when they step into a gym is try to lift as heavy a weight as they possibly can. This is understandable; you're new to weight training, and you want to see what you can do. Fine.
But many people get stuck in this stage - they hit the gym week after week and spend all of their time trying to push out a few more quarter-reps with a weight they can't handle. They use momentum, gravity, and fast-twitch muscle fibers to get the weight up for maybe one or two terrible repetitions. They do this so they can tell themselves that they have a huge bench or an impressive deadlift.
This is not the way to train if you want to get big.
Stimulating muscle growth is simple. Not easy, but simple.
All you need to do is subject a muscle to increasing amounts of stress over time and allow it sufficient time to recover in between each bout of stress. You need to make the stress last long enough to cause small amounts of damage, and it must involve a certain amount of weight. Basically, you need to lift a moderately heavy weight using the muscle itself - not momentum - and keep the muscle under the tension of that weight for long enough to generate an adaptive response.
Different Rep Ranges For Different Muscles
Not all muscles are the same.
Your muscles are composed of different kinds of fibers, and these fibers are surrounded by muscle fascia - a tissue which essentially keeps your muscles in the correct shape.
Different fibers respond to different types of stimulus.
When performing explosive, short-duration movements (e.g heavy cleans, explosive jumps, one-rep max bench presses, etc) you utilize your fast-twitch muscle fibers. These fibers are activated quickly and they produce the most total force - hence why you use the during a clean and press.
When performing more controlled movements for long periods of time, you use primarily short-twitch muscle fibers. These will come into play when doing things like high-rep sets of preacher curls, or calf flexes on the step mill, or 30-rep sets of pulldowns.
Different muscles have different ratios of fast-twitch to slow-twitch muscle fibers. You therefore need to train different parts of the body in a different manner to maximize growth. There's little point focusing on fast-twitch muscle fibers when there aren't many there (which is why people don't train for a one-rep max on calf raises or shrugs).
Fascia Stretching?
Some of you might have heard of fascia stretching.
This is where you fill a muscle up with blood and then hold a weighted stretch in order to pull the fascia tissue which surrounds a muscle.
The idea is that the fascia tissue limits muscle growth; your muscle fibers can only grow into the space that the fascia allows. By stretching the fascia, you create more space for potential muscle growth.
There is some credence to this idea. It is, after all, why some people have naturally great calves, or naturally big arms - their genetics have given them "loose" fascias in this region, as well as large muscle bellies.
We don't think this is something that 90% of trainees need to concern themselves with. However, if you have a lagging body part, fascia stretching is definitely something you might consider.
