The second benefit is that you will be providing a significantly better growth stimulus to your muscles. So yeah, you avoid injury and get better gains by working out with good form. It’s a no-brainer really.

Triceps is quite unique as it requires practically no work in order to maintain size. MV lies somewhere between 0 and 4 sets. You can maintain the size of your triceps by simply doing enough pressing.

Trust me, you don’t want knee-related problems. Additionally, if your program is set up properly and you’re doing everything optimally (designed for the best growth) you simply will not be able to do more than 20 sets and still recover properly to function like a normal human being outside of the gym.

Biceps are not a huge muscle group and almost everyone can train their biceps hard at least twice a week. I recommend starting with 2 weekly sessions where some overloading bicep work is done and then testing the waters with 3 and 4. Unlike back, chest and legs, you can get away with doing biceps more frequently. In fact, frequency is a really cool way to get some extra volume for your biceps

Today we take a look at a legendary muscle group that even has a day devoted to it – international chest Monday.

DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT do pull-downs behind your neck. You can lift a heavier weight if you do it in front and your shoulder is in a safer position. On top of that, the literature suggests that you get BETTER activation of the lats if you do the exercise in the frontal plane. There is literally no advantage to doing this exercise behind the neck. Please stop. Seriously stop.

So it seems like the bro scientists were onto something by doing everything in the 6-12 rep range. Does that mean that you should be working only in the “hypertrophy zone”? No, far from that. Getting better in the strength and endurance zones will have carryover and it will help you break plateaus when you start stagnating.

Here I’ve got only one piece of advice for you, and it is fairly simple – remember that poor exercise form because of weight that are too heavy will make only one thing grow and that’s your ego, because your muscles aren’t getting the adequate tension.

The definition we used thus far is simple. It states that intensity is the weight on the bar. It is actually the simplest possible definition and it is almost never used in that format in practice. However, tracking is easy because everybody and their grandma can tell the difference between an 80 kg squat and 100 kg one. Every machine has weight marks as does every plate and dumbbell. That being said, the weight on its own doesn’t tell us much. For example, a 60 kg girl benching 90 kg for 6 reps is probably having a vastly more exhausting and strenuous experience than an experienced 90 kg bodyweight male would with the same bench parameters.

Obviously this is just a short list of options, but there are many more out there. You could be doing two daily sessions, you could be doing a hybrid split made up of two splits mentioned above (Upper/Lower + Push/Pull/Legs), you could be doing specialized splits to improve a lagging body part or anything in between.

What does this mean for our frequency? Well if you do chest on Monday (as bros normally do) and the muscle building process is done on Wednesday, then you are essentially resting for no reason until next Monday.

For the reasons above we’re introducing a new way of looking at volume and that is through the lens of heavy (effective) working sets. If you are fairly close to failure RIR 1, 2 or 3 you can count that as a sufficiently heavy set which will produce hypertrophy or strength adaptations. According to this new definition, volume is represented as a number of sets which is significantly easier to track and compare in contrast to tonnage-based volume.

The fourth and the fifth aspect of muscle growth are things that actually happen outside of the gym – food and adequate recovery which means that you have to feed your body properly in order to provide high quality support for muscle growth and you have to sleep, avoid stress on the muscle and avoid stress in general when you are not in the gym.

Every even remotely good exercise program is based on 3 elements which constitute the foundation upon which you make modifications and add details in order to reach optimality. As with anything in the world of fitness, in order for a program to be optimal it has to be individually tailored, so a certain dose of individual variation will always exist. This foundation is made up of: volume, frequency and intensity.

As the old saying goes – slow and steady wins the race, a person consistently doing the physical activity over a long period of time (sticking to the plan if you will) will always get significantly better results than someone who only lasts a couple of months on the optimal training program.