The Formula For Optimal Hypertrophy & Character Building

The Importance of Rest & Recovery

We get it, you're a high achiever. But hear me out: Rest is not your enemy, it's your secret weapon.

Building muscles is a lot like making dough, it requires patience, kneading, and a lot of resting. And its always more rest than you have the patience for. But the wait is necessary.

After all, it's during that resting period that the magic happens - the dough rises, and the muscles grow. Now imagine putting in all that work, only to pull out a flat, unimpressive flaccid loaf of bread.

Ignoring rest and recovery can lead to a state of chronic stress in the body, where repair and growth simply can't keep up with the damage being done. Over time, this can lead to diminishing returns in your workouts, fatigue and increased risk of injury. Overall, you’re gonna have a bad time.

Reasons you should take it easy today:

1. It’s Friday: and a long weekend (in Canada).

2. Muscle Recovery: Exercise, especially high-intensity workouts, cause microscopic damage to muscle fibers. They grow by repairing. And rest is needed to get there.

3. Nervous System Fatigue: High-intensity training, especially heavy lifting, puts a great deal of stress on the central nervous system. When you train hard you need rest. Between sets and after workouts.

4. Hormonal Balance: Overtraining can disrupt the balance of hormones in your body, particularly cortisol and testosterone, which play crucial roles in building muscle and burning fat.

5. Mental Wellbeing: Just as your body needs rest, so does your mind. Overtraining can lead to burnout, decreased motivation, and increased risk of mood disorders.

How to Strike A Balance

What is the perfect balance? Well, it depends on YOU. As a general rule I try to run a 3 days on, 1 day rest, with most of my weekends in the summer I don’t lift at all. If I’m feeling rested and it’s my 4th day in a row, I lift. If I’ve only been 2 days in a row but my whole body aches, I go for a walk instead.

At the end of the day, it’s a marathon not a sprint. You gotta do what you can keep up with long term and you actually enjoy. Unless you’re training for Mr. Olympia, you don’t need to be surgical about it. Just go as often as your body will allow you and train your ass off.

Up Your Intensity - Thank Me Later

Striving for muscular hypertrophy? Want to be a thicc boy?

Here's something you need to understand: More ain’t always better. Specifically, when it comes to volume in weight training, science actually tells us that low volume, high intensity workouts with significant rest periods are optimal for muscle growth.

Research shows that doing 10 sets per week per muscle group is all that is necessary for optimal growth if you train hard enough. The key lies in the intensity. This means training to absolute failure. Knee shaking, face trembling failure. Train until you can’t get the weight up even an inch off the ground. And then try pushing one more time. Then and only then are you finished your set.

The gist of it is - if you want to avoid plateauing, start counting your reps where most other people finish. It’s in this margin of extra effort that 90% of your gains will occur.

Whether you believe it or not, doing 6-8 sets with this level of intensity will give you a scientifically better outcome than doing 15 sets. Anything over 10-12 sets a week per muscle group is more or less redundant if you’re training hard enough.

Why Is Low Volume Optimal For Hypertrophy?

Now, you might be wondering: why is low volume, high intensity more beneficial? The answer lies in a phenomenon called "muscle protein synthesis" (MPS). Essentially, MPS is your body's way of repairing and building muscles after exercise. High intensity workouts trigger a larger MPS response, leading to greater muscle growth.

However, intensity alone is not enough. Adequate rest periods in between sets (around 3-5 minutes) are crucial to maximize the MPS response and allow for full recovery. This was demonstrated in a 2016 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, where longer rest periods led to greater increases in muscle strength and hypertrophy.

Pairing this extremely high intensity with a sufficient amount of time for rest in between sets will show you a whole new world of gains. 3 minutes might seem like a long time of sitting around at the gym but your central nervous system NEEDS it. I typically target 3 mins for upper body sets like shoulder press, and 5 minutes between lower body like hack squats.

Here’s my regiment (that I’ve seen a huge improvement in strength/growth from):

• 4-6 sets per muscle group per workout MAX

• 10-12 sets per muscle group per week MAX

• 3/5 min rest periods between sets for upper/lower body movements

DWYSYWGTDWYSYWGTDI

As I mentioned in my intro - I’m currently spending the long weekend on an island with some close friends of mine.

Reliable considerate, salt of the earth folk you can trust with your life. And they’ve inspired this last section of what I’ve called DWYSYWGTDWYSYWGTDI.

Now you might be asking yourself, get on with it wtf are you on about?

It all ties back to a wooden piece of desk decor an old teacher of mine kept in his office. It read:

Do What You Said You Were Going To Do When You Said You Were Going To Do It.

While my intent is often earnest, I have a lot to improve on. And the guys I’m with this weekend often remind me with their actions how important it is to keep a promise. By simply doing the things you said you would when you said it would be done, you build an irrefutable stack of evidence that you are in fact - him.

I am well aware of how weird it is that I still think about this wooden piece of home decor that my teacher likely purchased from Wayfair for $25. It was 12 years ago. And it is rare a day that goes by that I don’t think about it.

Am I psychotic? Perhaps. Am I better for it? 💯%

A simple yet succinct sentence that has immensely effected how I treat and judge those around me. And more importantly - the friends I keep. Jon, a Natty Lyfe co-founder, is as reliable as they come. We now run 2 businesses together and guess what - when he says he’s going to do something, he does it. Not only does it tell people you’re reliable, but also that you are prudent, capable and not to be fucked with.

Ultimately it comes down to your ability to communicate, capableness and commitment to accountability. Something I think makes a good friend, a competent colleague, and a person you ultimately want to keep close.