How to DOUBLE Your Muscle Growth & Testosterone (7 Science-Based Tips)

we will touch on muscle hypertrophy muscle growth and building big muscles as well as improving muscle strength we will mainly be talking about muscle as it relates to the nervous system if your goal is to build larger muscles there's a way to use your nervous system to trigger hypertrophy to increase the size of those muscles so there's an important principle of muscle physiology called the that's when you start to get changes in the muscle that's when you open the gate for the potential for the muscles to get stronger and to get larger you can forget

the idea that the muscles have memory or that muscles grow in response to something that's just happening within the muscle it's the so when you hear the science of muscle and muscle hypertrophy you might think oh well I'm not interested in building muscle but muscle does many critical things it's important for movement it's important for metabolism the more muscle you have and not just muscle size but the quality of muscle that's a real thing the higher your metabolism is and indeed the healthier you are in addition muscle and musculature is vital for posture and we

don't talk about posture enough we all have been told we need to sit up straight or stand up straight but posture is vitally important for how the rest of our body works it's vital to how we breathe it's actually even vital to how alert or sleepy we are we also going to talk about muscle as it relates to aesthetic things as our posture changes our aesthetic changes as our posture and aesthetic changes how we move changes and as we improve muscle quality whether or not that's increasing muscle size or not that changes the way that

our entire system not just our nervous system and our muscular system but our immune system and the other organs of the body work so there are a lot of reasons to use resistance exercise that extend far beyond just the desire to increase muscle size CU I know many of you are interested in increasing muscle size but many of you are not really exciting is that in just the last 3 years or so there's been a tremendous amount of information to come out about the Practical steps that one can take in order to maximize the benefits

of resistance exercise of any kind there's a lot of information saying that you need to move weights that are you know 80 to 90% of your one rep maximum or 70% or cycle that for 3 weeks on and then go to more moderate weights there there are a lot of paths as um as some people say there are a lot of ways to add up numbers to get a 100 and what's very clear now from all the literature that's transpired and especially from the literature in this last three years is that once you know roughly

your one repetition maximum the the maximum amount of weight that you can perform an exercise with for one repetition in good form full full range of motion that it's very clear that moving weights or using bands or using body weight for for instance in the 30 to 80% of one rep maximum that is going to be the most beneficial range in terms of muscle hypertrophy and strength so muscle growth and strength now it is clear however that one needs to perform those sets to failure where you can't perform another repetition in good form again or

near to failure so we can make this simple perform anywhere from 5 to 15 sets of resistance exercise per week and that's per muscle and that's in this 30 to 80% of what your one repetition maximum that seems to be the the most scientifically supported way of offsetting any decline in muscle strength if you're working in the kind of five set range and in increasing muscle strength when you start to get up into the 10 and 15 set range I do want to mention something very important which is that everything I'm referring to here it

has to do with full range of motion okay and you might ask well what about the speeds of movements this is actually turns out to be a really interesting data set think about a set in the gym or think about a set of push-ups or a set of pull-ups initially you can move very fast if you like if you want to generate hypertrophy the goal really is not necessarily to move super slow but to isolate the muscle and therefore not to use momentum rather than lift weights as they say challenge muscles if you want to

get stronger you're going to be Distributing that effort over more muscles and more of your nervous system as long as you're not moving the muscle so quickly that you start to distribute the effort to lots of other muscles it doesn't really matter because as the the set gets harder the motor units that you recruit will increase the number of neurons that you recruit and the number of muscle fibers in particular these high threshold muscle fibers will increase and so it's really only for purposes of hypertrophy that you really need to be concerned about how quickly

the weight is slowing down in an earlier episode I talked about estrogen and testosterone and during that discussion I talked about the use of resistance exercise specifically for increasing testosterone both in men and in women and indeed that is a powerful effect of resistance exercise and indeed it's mediated by the nerve to muscle connections we talked about that in that earlier episode I just want to briefly mention that protocol since it's distinctly different from the other protocols I've talked about today the protocols I've talked about today thus far of hypertrophy Based training provided the training

is 60 Minutes or Less will cause increases in serum testosterone that's been shown over and over again and if the session extends too long past 75 minutes and is of sufficiently high intensity chances are testosterone levels will start to drop and cortisol levels will go up in ways that can be detrimental to recovery and the goals of the training but that's different than training that specifically Al geared toward increasing testosterone and that involved doing six sets of 10 repetitions even if it requires lightening the weight on one set to the next with about 2 minutes

120 seconds rest in between sets which if you think about it is pretty short rest and is pretty darn hard work now what's interesting is that there's a very limited threshold for increasing testosterone that protocol of six sets of 10 repetitions led to these big increases in serum testosterone but if people did 10 sets of 10 so just four more repetitions per set then testosterone did not increase in fact you got more of this catabolic cortisol like pathway you get other benefits from the so so-call 10 sets of 10 protocol but not the testosterone increase

and maybe even reductions in testosterone now it's important to point out that that six sets of 10 was done with big compound movement so things like squats or deadlifts or chinups or things of that sort and those were done as single sessions not in concert with a bunch of other exercise although if athletes are doing that there's no reason why they couldn't also do other types of training elsewhere in the week another thing that Andy galpin's group is testing is at the offset of training after your run after your weight training session they and other

groups including some Elite athletes and other groups that are very interested in in physical performance are using a tool where they deliberately disengage for 5 minutes at the end of training they deliberately engage this calming or parasympathetic arm of the nervous system and you can do that through any number of different tools I'm a big fan of respiration tools because they're always available to you your breathing is always there I talk about some of these tools in previous episodes but you could use things like non-sleep deep breast nsdr at the end of a training session

you could do 10 physiological size double inhales through the nose followed by long exhales that will definitely engage the parasympathetic nervous system at the end of training so rather than finish your training session and then just hop onto your phone serious athletes and people who are serious about recovery initiate that recovery I know several groups because I'm working with them that are using physiological size between sets in order to recover their nervous system and maintain nerve to muscle contract ability maintain Focus throughout their training session enhance their focus by doing a few physiological size so

double inhale exhale in between sets so they're getting very focused and very intense about their strength work or explosiveness work or muscle isolation work during their sets and then in between sets they're deliberately disengaging the nervous system and then they're re-engaging it again [Music]