6/4/2023 0 Comments Rest time for hypertrophy![]() ![]() This is probably the main reason high-carb diets are so popular among bodybuilders and it makes it incredibly hard to see if you’re looking bigger because of your training or because of your higher carb intake. It’s not uncommon for a guy to gain 4 pounds of what looks like muscle when they go from a low- to a high-carb diet. Going on a higher-carb diet increases intramuscular glycogen stores, which attracts a lot of water into the muscles, ~3 grams per gram of glycogen.Even if you’re actually tracking your body circumferences over many months of training, there are several problems with this little n = 1 case study. A large part of the ‘muscle growth’ that occurs during the early stages of strength training is actually edema: water retention caused by muscle damage, not growth of the muscle tissue itself. You think those stiff-legged deadlifts are the best hamstring builders? Maybe they just caused major muscle soreness and you mistook the swelling for muscle growth. You think partial rep curls are the key to a big biceps? Maybe they just gave you a big pump which you mistook for muscle growth. ![]() Yeah, you think you can, but it’s too slow of a process that takes too long and is too subjective to observe. You know what you cannot observe well? Muscle growth itself. That means they base their training on what they can concretely observe and feel, in particular the pump and burn you get during training and soreness the days after. Lots of partial reps, training to failure, moderately high rep sets, training a muscle infrequently with short rest periods (or they try if they’re not too gassed). ![]() In my observation, gym bros and bodybuilders all train pretty much the same way everywhere. People often ask me how they train in Taiwan or Ecuador or some other exotic location. And after having lived and trained in over 50 countries, I think I know why. Ok, not everything, obviously, but quite a lot of “everyone knows this” ideas turned out to be wrong. Everything the bros told you about how to train was wrong. ![]()
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