There’s a foundational natural law known as the Pareto Principle. It states that 20% of inputs cause 80% of all outputs. That means 20% of everything you could possibly learn about anything will give you 80% of your results in that endeavour.

In this hypertrophy guide, I’ve laid out for you the essentials of muscle building. The 20% that will get you 80% of your results in the gym. I walk you through all the principles you need to know to maximise the rate at which you build muscle.

The list is not exhaustive, but it’s the stuff that moves the needle the most. If you keep these principles in mind and learn nothing else, you’ll get the results you’re after.

Here are the principles:

1. Begin with the end in mind.
2. Progressive overload.
3. The stimulation-recovery cycle.
4. Mechanical tension.
5. Volume.
6. Training intensity.
7. Fatigue management.
8. Periodisation.
9. Exercise selection.
10. Caloric surplus.
11. Adequate protein intake.
12. Demands change as you progress.

This is a long one, so use the table of contents to jump to each of the fundamentals of building muscle. Here’s a hamburger for sustenance. 🍔

1 - Begin with the end in mind 🏁

This principle actually has nothing to do with muscle building specifically, and everything to do with success in general. “Begin with the end in mind” is Habit Number Two in Stephen Covey’s, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

So what’s its relevance here?

If someone wants to build muscle, they must act in a way that supports that aim. In other words, they need to consistently exercise in a way that’s conducive to muscle growth.

Here’s the problem: if you don’t get clear on your goals from the get go, you’ll find yourself chasing seven different aims at the same time. It’ll seem like you’re doing a lot, but in six months time you’ll be disappointed with your lack of progress.

Many, when they decide to get active, revert to what they know. They’ll run, since it’s all they’ve ever done. They might want to build muscle, deep down, but have an associated image problem. “That’s only for young people”, or “My body won’t be able to handle it, I’ll injure myself”. Or they’ll worry what the people in their lives will think.

Limiting beliefs like these can stop you from going after the goals you really want in the first place.

For others, it’s a case of ‘Shiny Object Syndrome’, with a goal of building muscle for a week and a half, then a diet phase for three weeks, then all of a sudden they’re doing MetCons and trying to improve their 5K time.

Look, there’s no way around it. If you want to build muscle, you have to train for it. And anything that doesn’t directly support that goal will limit, slow, or halt your progress.

Action point: Decide to build muscle, train to build muscle. Accept that you can’t efficiently work towards more than one goal at once.

2 - Progressive overload ⛰️

That said, some people step into the gym and intuitively start doing something that makes sense. They want to build muscle, they start resistance training. Whether they pick machines, free weights, or callisthenics, they choose an activity that supports their goal of building muscle in some way.

Unfortunately, a lot of these people get stuck. They make some progress - inevitably - as the new stimulus takes effect. After that, though? They stall.

These folks need progressive overload.

To put it simplest, progressive overload means continually adding weight or reps to the exercises you’re performing as your body adapts.

Why should you do this?

When you expose your body to a muscle building stimulus, it sets off a chain of events at the cellular level that kick your body into a state of muscle protein synthesis (MPS). At this point, your body is primed to build muscle. If the other muscle building principles in this article are met, your body will have what it needs to go about building it.

Over time, though, your body gets bigger, and stronger, and acclimates to the level of stimulus it’s used to being subjected to.

Your body won’t continue to adapt unless you find ways of continuing to subject it to a novel stimulus strong enough to force it to keep adapting (and therefore growing).

Action point: Continually make your training more challenging by adding weight, reps, or both to every exercise to prevent stagnation.

3 - The stimulus-recovery cycle ⏳

Adaptive stimuli cause the body significant stress.

Now, stress is good. It forces growth. But the mechanisms that drive this growth take time to play out. ⏱️

When you rest too little after exercise before stimulating those same muscles again, you run the risk of accumulating too much fatigue.

There are many types of fatigue, but - in brief - fatigue can manifest in the muscles you’ve worked, or throughout the entire body, brain, and nervous system. Either type can derail your progress if it’s too much for your body to recover from.

The ideal setup looks like this:

1. Stimulate your muscles to grow in the gym.
2. Support recovery processes with sleep, nutrition, and stress management.
3. Rest enough before stimulating those same muscles again.

How much you need to rest before exercising the same muscle group is highly individual, and depends on many variables. These include:

• Your training age.
• Your training volume and intensity.
• Lifestyle factors, including sleep duration and stress.

Novices are incapable of subjecting their bodies to as much stress as advanced lifters. Think of a beginner struggling to squat 60 kilograms for reps, versus an advanced lifter squatting 180 kilograms for multiple sets.

Despite the advanced lifter being stronger, they’re squatting four times the weight at a bodyweight that’s perhaps only twice that of the novice. Their muscles, nervous system, cardiovascular system, joints and connective tissues are all subjected to way more stress. Yes, they’re stronger to begin with, but the movement is far more systemically taxing.

This is just one reason beginner lifters take less long to recover, and can feasibly train the same muscle groups three or even four times a week. An advanced lifter might only get away with training a body part once every five days, depending on their natural ability to recover from the higher amount of work they have to do.

Here’s the take home message: when allowed sufficient chance to recover, the body supercompensates and gets bigger and stronger than it was before. If you cut recovery short, or limit it through your lifestyle choices, you’ll find your body recovers barely enough to sustain your current level of musculature.

Too much work without enough recovery actually leads to muscle loss.

Action point: once you’ve primed your body to grow, it needs to recover. Use your ability to progressively overload week to week as an indicator of sufficient recovery and supercompensation.

4 - Mechanical tension 🦾

Mechanical tension is a bit of a tricky concept. It involves physics and biomechanics, and people are often confused as to what it is.

Why is this important?

Of all the posited drivers of muscle growth, mechanical tension is by far the most important. There still seems to be some debate as to whether the other two (metabolic stress and muscle damage) are additive to mechanical tension, or are simply present at the same time. Correlation doesn’t mean causation, and all that.

Your muscle fibres have mechanoreceptors, which are literally just what they sound like. Receptors that sense mechanical forces. When the mechanical forces are great enough, they set off a ‘signalling cascade’ at the cellular level. In other words, muscle building processes begin.

So, your muscles won’t grow without the mechanical tension they experience when you lift weights. Lifting weights is just a means of generating the mechanical tension in our muscles necessary to grow them.

So how do you make sure you’re experiencing enough mechanical tension while lifting? Here’s the answer.

Your muscles seem to experience the most mechanical tension when you begin to experience an involuntary slowing of contraction speed.

If you did a set of max push ups right now, you’d be able to bang them out at a fast clip - until you couldn’t. As you get closer and closer to muscular failure (the point at which you can no longer lift a weight, your body in this case), you’ll find your push ups slow down, no matter how hard you push.

As you get closer to muscular failure (three reps away, two reps away, one rep away…) your reps slow down even more. Your perception of effort also thunders upwards when you reach this point.

What you’re experiencing here is mechanical tension. These reps, the ones where you’re pushing harder but moving slower, these are known as effective reps. These are the reps where mechanical tension is high enough to begin triggering adaptations.

Interestingly, thanks to various quirks of the human body, there are always about five effective reps in any working set taken all the way to muscular failure. That means, whether you can do five push ups or fifty, your body is exposed to the same hypertrophic stimulus.

It’s actually slightly more nuanced than that once fatigue relative to the size of the stimulus comes into the conversation, but we’ll leave it there for now. Entire theses can be written on mechanical tension, and there’s still some debate about it. The practical takeaway is this…

Action point: take the majority of your sets to, or just shy of, muscular failure to maximise their hypertrophic stimulus.

5 - Volume 💦

Volume is the product of three training variables: sets, reps, and working weight.

However, since reps necessarily decrease as you add weight to a movement, these two variables more or less cancel each other out. For that reason, you can think of volume as the total number of working sets you perform for a muscle group.

Your total volume for a given muscle group is the combined volume of every exercise you perform for that body part in a single session. Volume can also be considered on a weekly basis. For example, if you train your upper body twice a week, your ‘total weekly volume’ for chest would be the total number of sets you performed on exercises involving your chest that week.

While there’s some debate as to how large a part volume plays in hypertrophy (some swear it’s the most practically relevant variable. Others swear it plays little to no role at all), we can make an educated, practical guess and consider it like this:

There’s probably some minimum amount of volume (working sets, taking to (or just shy of) muscular failure) necessary for you to grow. There’s also probably some maximum amount of volume, above which your body won’t be able to recover.

Even those who swear volume has nothing to do with hypertrophy prescribe around 10 working sets a week for each muscle group.

So, while some prescribe 5-15 sets per muscle group per week, and others prescribe 10-20, or even as high as 30, 10is the number you see most often. This is also a roughly accepted maximum for the number of sets you should perform for a single muscle group in a single workout, giving you a margin for error if you only train a muscle group once a week.

For that reason, it’s smart to start with around 10 sets per muscle group per week, increase slowly from there, and see how your body responds. Or, if all this is getting super confusing, have someone else worry about all the variables and create the program for you.

For some people, 10 sets may be too many. Others might need much more volume than this. Here’s the take-home point:

Action point: Start with around 10 sets per muscle group per week. Increase slowly from here and take note of how your body responds.

6 - Training Intensity 😡

“Intensity” is one of those training terms that different people use in different ways. For some, “intensity” refers to the percentage of 1RM (one rep max). For example, hack squats performed with weight equivalent to 85% of the maximum load you can complete one rep with would be a set at a higher intensity than one where you used 60% of your 1RM.

For others, intensity is all about how hard you train. What this means, in practical terms, is how close you push to failure on each set. Looking at intensity this way, it’s actually possible to increase intensity further still by pushing “beyond” failure. This demands that you use intensity techniques like drop sets, rest-pause sets, or forced reps.

This latter definition can also be referred to as “intensity of effort”.

Generally speaking, the higher your intensity of effort in a particular exercise, the fewer sets you’ll be able to do and still recover.

As with volume, there seems to be a minimum threshold for intensity of effort. If you don’t take your sets close enough to failure, your muscles won’t experience enough mechanical tension and, therefore, won’t get enough stimulus to grow.

Unlike volume, though, it’s hard to take intensity of effort too far unless you begin adding sets (in other words, volume). Higher intensity of effort eats into the amount of volume you can perform, since both trigger fatigue.

For most people, the practical application of this is the same as that for mechanical tension: take all of your working sets to failure, or one or two reps shy of it. Research shows little benefit to using intensity techniques over training with straight sets, except for the fact you can accumulate more effective reps in less time when you use them. For those short on time, intensity techniques like the aforementioned drop sets, and rest-pause sets, can be useful.

Action point: As intensity of effort increases, volume must fall to prevent fatigue accumulating.

7 - Fatigue management 😮‍💨

When you’re ticking every box, training hard, with sufficient intensity and volume to trigger muscle growth, what comes next?

As I alluded to earlier, once you’ve stimulated your muscles enough for them to grow, you need to let the stimulus-recovery cycle occur so your body can supercompensate and grow bigger.

This means balancing the fatigue induced by the size of the stimulus your body needs to grow muscle with the various factors that affect recovery.

If you’re too systemically fatigued to output the same effort in your next workout, it’ll trigger a less powerful hypertrophic stimulus. Similarly, if you accumulate too much muscle damage over time, you’ll experience muscle loss rather than muscle gain. If your tendons, joints, and cartilage take too much of a beating, you’ll eventually get injured, be unable to train, and lose the gains that you made while pushing hard.

In other words: fail to manage fatigue, fail to grow muscle.

We manage fatigue through recovery and intelligent choices in our workout programming. Too much volume with too great an intensity of effort, for too long a period of time, will wipe you out or injure you.

Don’t be tempted to treat that as permission not to train hard. Especially as you get more advanced, your body needs a strong stimulus to continue to grow. If you begin training less hard, your training won’t provide sufficient growth stimulus.

Fatigue is an unavoidable byproduct of training hard enough to stimulate growth. Since fatigue accumulates over time, it makes sense to structure your training in such a way as you accumulate fatigue while triggering growth over weeks or months, then pull back for a week or two to allow long-term fatigue to dissipate, and your body to recover.

At the same time, you’ll want to optimise your day-to-day recovery capacity to ensure fatigue accumulates as slowly as possible, even while you’re training hard. That means prioritising your:

• Sleep.
• Nutrition.
• Supplementation.
• Stress management.
• Non-exercise activity.

… and any other factor you find impacts your ability to recover.

Action point: Manage lifestyle factors influencing recovery to ensure fatigue accumulates as slowly as possible. Actively pull back on your training every few months or so when fatigue is high and motivation is low.

8 - Periodisation 🗂️

Periodisation is a fancy word, but in practical terms it means breaking your training down into ‘blocks’, ‘cycles’, or ‘periods’ to help you manage fatigue over time.

Different blocks in your training can have slightly different goals. For example, you might decide to do a strength-focused block to get stronger, allowing you to lift heavier loads in a subsequent hypertrophy block.

Most of the time, though, periodised training tends to ramp up volume over time, with other variables (weight, reps, intensity of effort) shifting around to accommodate these increases in volume.

Periodisation becomes more necessary as you become more advanced. Many beginners will find themselves able to continue adding weight and reps to the same movements for months on end without accumulating substantial fatigue or wear and tear. Advanced lifters need to work harder to get any growth stimulus at all, which makes strategic overreaching a necessity.

Strategic overreaching is the practice of purposely doing more work than your body can recover from for a period of time.

This happens on a lower level every time you train. After all, every session - even every set - necessitates a recovery period. If you want to hack squat four plates per side for three sets of ten, and take the first set to failure, you’ll have to rest at least three to five minutes to stand a chance of matching those reps. And, if you didn’t do enough work to force a recovery period for those muscles, you wouldn’t have subjected them to sufficient stimulus for them to grow.

This ‘strategic overreaching’ is necessary in the longer-term, however, for advanced lifters to stimulate continued growth. That means from week-to-week, and perhaps even for months on end, they slowly accumulate fatigue faster than they can recover and dissipate it.

Eventually, fatigue will get so high, they’ll have to take a more extended period of recovery. During this time, the nervous system, joints, and cartilage are all allowed to recover, while psychological fatigue dissipates too.

The process of waving volume, intensity of effort, and other variables higher and lower over the course of a training cycle allows steadily increased stimulation (progressive overload) while actively managing fatigue in the short- to medium-term. Eventually, systemic fatigue rises too high and an active recovery period where you reduce your training volume, reps, load on the bar, or some combination, is necessary. If fatigue is high enough, you might even take an entire week or two off.

This is periodisation in essence.

Action point: periodise your training by manipulating training variables including weight, sets, and reps, to manage fatigue in the short term while still applying progressive overload.

9 - Exercise selection 🏋️

You only have so much time in the gym each week.

If you work long hours at a stressful job and know you don’t get enough sleep, the exercises that work best for you long-term are unlikely to be the same as those for someone who makes a living from their physique, sleeps nine hours every night, and is in the gym every day without much stress.

That’s (part of) what makes exercise selection so important.

Remember the first principle, too: beginning with the end in mind. When you’re clear that hypertrophy is your goal, the exercises you choose will reflect that, and everything else will fall into place around it.

So, what exercises should you choose?

There’s plenty of evidence (both anecdotal, and from the research), that best growth follows a combination of compound and isolation exercises.

Compound exercises are more systemically fatiguing. They require longer rest periods, too, as they’ll often challenge other bodily systems. Squats pose a challenge to your cardiovascular system, for example, as well as your nervous system and the muscles themselves.

But factor in that compound movements stimulate multiple muscle groups at the same time, and on the balance they’re efficient movements. Especially for those who are short on time and aren’t advanced enough to warrant prioritising muscle groups.

Action point: choose a mix of compound and isolation exercises to meet your weekly and per-session volume requirements, bearing in mind your time to train and recovery ability.

10 - Caloric surplus 🥑

As much as you’d want to believe it’s possible, only true beginners can achieve muscle growth while in a calorie deficit. That means it’s possible for them to both build muscle and lose fat at the same time.

Even these folks, though, would make better gains if they bumped their calories up above maintenance.

For most of us, though, a caloric surplus (eating more calories than your body burns) is necessary to build muscle. Your body needs the raw materials to put on new tissue.

When you’re totally new, your lack of muscle mass poses such a low energy demand for your body to maintain that it’s more than happy to use circulating amino acids to build more, even when energy is relatively scarce.

Beyond a certain point, though, that balance shifts.

Here’s the truth: muscle mass is energetically expensive. It requires a lot of blood, oxygen, and other nutrients. Muscle cells don’t die off and get replaced over the course of your life in the same way other cells in your body do. Your skin cells, for example, are always getting scraped off and replaced. Rub them with your fancy pumice stone in the shower, or your scabby shower brush (hey, we’re not judging) and off they come. New ones form at the basal layer to replace them.

Your muscle cells don’t do that.

For that reason, elaborate processes of repair and upkeep go into keeping your muscle cells operational over your life. There’s a constant flux between muscle protein synthesis (MPS), and muscle protein breakdown (MPD). When the net balance favours MPS, you get repair and growth. When it favours MPD, you get muscle loss, known as atrophy.

In fact, it’s these very processes we manipulate to facilitate continued muscle growth over time. But all of this requires energy and nutrition. You use your muscles actively in your daily life in a way you don’t use other types of tissue like fat. If you were to stop training, your body would pretty soon figure out it doesn’t need all this expensive tissue any more, and it would start getting rid of it to lighten the caloric burden.

Fat, on the other hand, just sits there. It requires no upkeep, no maintenance, no blood flow.

So - back to this principle. We have to force the body to build more muscle mass. It really doesn’t want to do it. And the more we build, the less it wants to do it. That means making sure it has no excuse not to do it. When there’s not enough energy to go around (from not eating enough food), your body has one such excuse.

So, to continue building muscle over time, we need to eat more energy than we’re burning. 250-500 calories above maintenance is a good number to shoot for. Despite the modern glorification of eating like an idiot and getting fat in the process, your body can only build muscle so fast. You will gain some fat as you do this, especially as you get more advanced, but that’s what fat-loss phases are for.

Action point: When you’re aiming to actively build muscle, eat 20-30% above your maintenance calories. For most people, 500kcal is a safe bet.

11 - Adequate protein intake 🍖

Following on from the previous principle, you need adequate protein intake to build more muscle mass. Not just adequate calories.

There’s pretty much no debate here. You want about one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight. For my friends here in the UK, there are 14 pounds (lbs) in one stone, so if you’re 13 stone, 9lbs, you’d weigh (13 x 14) + 9 = 191 lbs. You’d need 191 grams of protein per day.

Some people recommend far more than this, but the research indicates you can actually get away with less. Responses are individual, but 0.7-1.0g/lb is the ballpark. If you really struggle to get enough protein in, you’ll probably be fine on the lower end.

Somewhat counterintuitively, it’s when you’re in a fat loss phase that bumping this number up even higher has its benefits. That’s because, especially as your diet drags on, your body really starts to feel the lack of nutritional resources. You need to supply the body with enough amino acids from food that it doesn’t even think about breaking down muscle tissue to get them.

That’s why you can bump protein intake up as high as 1.4g/lb of bodyweight while you’re dieting and still benefit. For our 13 stone, 9lb individual, that would mean 265g protein per day. Note that this is true for lean, well-muscled individuals. If you’re a newbie on a ‘minicut’, just stick with the ballpark figure of 1g/lb at all times, and you’ll be fine no matter what your goals are.

Note that these numbers hold true for women, too. Since they’re based on bodyweight, and the ranges allow some margin for error, a 130lb woman who wants to maximise her muscle mass can probably get away with 0.7-0.8g/lb. That means 91-104g of protein.

Increasing your protein intake to meet these requirements almost always necessitates a change in grocery-shopping and cooking habits. I’d suggest tracking your protein intake consciously through an app like LifeSum or MyFitnessPal until you’re sure you can hit your target every day without trying.

To put on muscle, the research strongly indicates that total protein intake throughout the day is by far the most important factor. Much more so than timing your protein ‘doses’, how you split it up, or even where you get it from.

Yep, vegans and vegetarians, you can still build plenty of muscle mass when total protein throughout the day meets these targets. Plant-based sources are inferior to animal proteins for several reasons, but if you fill in the gaps in amino-acid profile and protein totals (without destroying your gut by eating unholy quantities of beans 😷), you’ll make progress just fine.

Action point: Aim to eat 1.0 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight daily.

12 - Demands change as you progress 🧑‍🎓

We’ve alluded to this throughout this article, but advanced lifters (those with five or more years of lifting experience) have different requirements to those who are beginners.

The nice thing is that five years really isn’t that long. There aren’t many other disciplines where you can be considered ‘advanced’ after just five years of four to eight devoted hours per week.

That said, your demands will change. Things you got away with in the beginning (poorer nutrition, lower protein intake, insufficient sleep) will all take larger and larger bites out of your potential gains the longer you’ve been training. You’ll find yourself needing to work out harder, or longer, or both. You’ll also find certain exercises start to aggravate your joints, and you’ll need to actively manage fatigue by swapping exercises in and out of your routine.

But, like with anything, 20% of all the knowledge you can acquire, when applied, will net 80% of the results you see. Focus on the big, boring basics we’ve outlined here, and you’re well on your way to transforming your body with minimal stress, hardship, or sacrifice.

Action point summary

1. Begin with the end in mind - Decide to build muscle, train to build muscle. Accept that you can’t efficiently work towards more than one goal at once.
2. Progressive overload - Once you’ve primed your body to grow, it needs to recover. Use your ability to progressively overload week to week as an indicator of sufficient recovery and supercompensation.
3. The stimulus-recovery cycle - Start with around 10 sets per muscle group per week. Increase slowly from here and take note of how your body responds.
4. Mechanical tension - take the majority of your sets to, or just shy of, muscular failure to maximise their hypertrophic stimulus.
5. Volume - Start with around 10 sets per muscle group per week. Increase slowly from here and take note of how your body responds.
6. Training intensity - As intensity of effort increases, volume must fall to prevent fatigue accumulating.
7. Fatigue management - Manage lifestyle factors influencing recovery to ensure fatigue accumulates as slowly as possible. Actively pull back on your training every few months or so when fatigue is high and motivation is low.
8. Periodisation - periodise your training by manipulating training variables including weight, sets, and reps, to manage fatigue in the short term while still applying progressive overload.
9. Exercise selection - choose a mix of compound and isolation exercises to meet your weekly and per-session volume requirements, bearing in mind your time to train and recovery ability.
10. Caloric surplus - When you’re aiming to actively build muscle, eat 20-30% above your maintenance calories. For most people, 500kcal is a safe bet.
11. Protein intake - Aim to eat 1.0 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight daily.
12. Demands change as you become more advanced.