How To Force Muscle Growth – 5 Best Methods You Should Try | BOXROX

For weeks and weeks you go to the gym but you don’t see your muscles growing. Maybe you are doing something wrong? Find out how to force muscle growth with these 5 scientific methods.

A good pump and a sweaty t-shirt after a workout doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing your best to build muscle.

If you want to know how to force muscle growth, ride the wave of knowledge that is Jeremy Ethier.

Jeremy Ethier is a kinesiologist and physical trainer, co-founder of Built With Science. His YouTube channel has over 4 million subscribers and he provides clear information with solid background research.

In his latest video, Ethier explained how to force muscle growth and 5 scientific methods to achieve it.

Watch the video below and his methods to force muscle growth.

How to Force Muscle Growth

The best way to force muscle growth is to apply progressive overload. Jeremy Ethier explains that there are 5 types of overload you need to know to use them when it suits you best. Sometimes one way of overloading isn’t as good as the other, depending on the exercise.

1. Load

If you’re a beginner, this is the best answer to forcing muscle growth: by adding more weight to your movements.

However, you will eventually hit a plateau because you can’t just add more weight to your bench press, say, every week forever. There is a limit to what your muscles can move.

Source: Victor Freitas on Unsplash

2. Representatives

When you think you’ve hit a plateau after increasing your barbell weight, adding more reps is another smart way to force muscle growth.

Even if you add just one rep to your normal set each week, you’ll be lifting more total weight at the end of each week.

How many reps should you increase to? According to a 2017 meta-analysis, as long as you push hard, you can maintain the same weight and increase up to 30 reps and still get the same growth versus adding more weight.

3 sets

Adding sets can be another easy way to force muscle growth. You can simply add an extra set to an exercise using the same weight from week to week.

For example, in any given week, you can do 3 sets of 8 reps of barbell curls using a total of 30 pounds on the barbell. The following week, keep the same weight of 30 kilos and do 4 sets of 8 repetitions of bar curl.

Remember that there is a time when doing more sets for a specific muscle group can be a waste of time. Something called junk volume weight training in the bodybuilding community. As a general rule, never do more than 30 sets of strength training on any muscle group in 7 days.

4. Rhythm

How fast or slow you lift weights can help you build more muscle. By slowing down your reps, you will increase the length of time tension is placed on the muscle to stimulate more growth.

“This is particularly effective for exercises involving smaller, weaker muscle groups, such as lateral raises, where adding a little weight often increases the difficulty disproportionately,” says Ethier.

It’s also helpful to slow down your reps with bodyweight exercises because it’s often difficult to add more weight while performing calisthenics.

Statistics show that you should, at most, slow reps to a maximum of 6 seconds for the entire movement.

5. Form

If you perform the same exercise each week, but each subsequent week you can control your weight more, use less momentum, and feel your muscles activated, you are adding another overload method.

“Better form involves relying more on target muscles and will result in growth even if all other variables remain the same,” says Ethier.