Want to get HUGE? Here are 5 things you should include in your workouts to build extreme muscle mass.

So many bodybuilders hit the gym with one goal — to get stronger. A stronger muscle is a bigger muscle, right? To a degree, yes.

Training a muscle to exert more force over time will thicken the myofibrils, the actin and myosin strands in the muscle fibres, but they’re not the only hypertrophic constituent. There’s also the sarcoplasm, the muscles’ energy fluid. More on that later. First, let’s talk about the idea of heavy training.

Attacking a muscle with heavy weights is important, but ‘heavy’ is relative to you — and dependent on muscle fatigue. For example, you may struggle with 20 pounds (9 kg) on a certain exercise at the end of a body part workout, so 20 pounds is ‘heavy’ for you on that exercise at that moment — and it maximally taxes your muscle strength.

Perhaps a better way to put it is that the weights you use must be ‘challenging’ rather than ‘heavy’. And, yes, you should strive to increase them when possible, which may not be very often. If adding weight to exercises was easy and possible at every workout, everyone in the gym would be bench-pressing 800 pounds (363 kg) after a year of consistent workouts.
Also, let’s not forget that many big-bench pressers don’t have big, muscular pecs. There’s a lot more to building maximum mass than just getting stronger.

Low rep training Vs high rep training

Heavy low-rep training primarily thickens the myofibrils, the force-generating strands in the fibres. Powerlifters target the myofibrils, as well as nerve force, with low-rep sets to increase strength. As mentioned, the thickening of those strands does accounts for some growth, but a lot of the major muscular hypertrophy occurs in the sarcoplasm, the energy fluid surrounding them.

The sarcoplasm contains glycogen from carbs, the mitochondria, ATP from creatine, calcium and myoglobin, an oxygen-binding protein. That’s the reason that bodybuilders who train with higher reps, supersets and other long-tension-time techniques are generally more muscular than most powerlifters — their training increases the sarcoplasm.

Performing at least some sets with higher reps and/or short rests between sets expands the sarcoplasmic fluid. You should build the myofibrils as well, but the sarcoplasm is a major player in the development of maximum muscle size.

That’s exciting on a number of levels and leads us to five things you should include in most of your workouts to build extreme muscle mass fast.

1. Synergy. It’s also known as muscle teamwork, and you get it on the big, compound exercises. For example, on decline-bench presses your chest is the primary mover, but your triceps, delts and even lats assist. Multi-joint exercises are usually more natural movements than isolated ones. The body was designed to work best during synergistic exercises — what I call ‘midrange’ in Positions-of-Flexion mass training. Because of that, they usually involve more muscle mass.

2. Stretch. I often reference the animal study that produced a 300 per cent muscle-mass gain with a month’s worth of stretch-only ‘workouts’. You create exceptional size-building power by putting a muscle into a full stretch against challenging resistance, and it’s beginning to emerge as one of the major muscle-size builders. Exercise examples include flyes for chest, sissy squats for quads and overhead extensions for triceps. POF body part routines all contain a stretch move.

3. Continuous tension. This is best produced via contracted-position exercises in POF — usually isolation exercises like pushdowns for triceps, concentration curls for biceps and leg extensions for quads. Those moves put the target muscle into its contracted position against resistance and there is resistance throughout the stroke with no rest anywhere along it — or at least there shouldn’t be. The continuous tension produces occlusion, or blood-flow blockage, which triggers large gains in sarcoplasmic mass — if the tension time is long enough.

4. Hypertrophic tension time. Low-rep work gets you 20 seconds of tension time or less, which builds strength — myofibril thickness and nerve force; however, the optimal hypertrophic tension time is 40 to 90 seconds. Even the low end, 40 seconds, takes a while, and you’d have to do 30 reps or more beyond that to get the upper end of 60 to 90 seconds — either that or slow your rep speed.

5. Muscular fatigue. You must train the target muscle until it’s spent. In other words, you should do enough volume to reach the growth threshold. That can be different for different people — and even for different muscles. Short rests between sets can accelerate cumulative fatigue — as in the 4X mass method with its 35-second rests — and that’s a good thing for extreme-growth stimulation, especially in the sarcoplasm.

Be sure you cover the five mass-building keys most of the time, and at least every few weeks apply number 6: Change. That’s how you trigger bigger mass gains.

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