Bodybuilding for the Functional Fitness Athlete

Few things cause as much angst for functional fitness folks than the prospect of bodybuilding.  Since it’s inception there has been a natural tension between these two different tribes of gym bro’s.  On one hand, bodybuilders couldn’t care less how functional they are as long as someone’s mirin’ on their instagram.  Where as functional athletes spend the majority of their time talking about metcons, paleo diets, and rolling their ass’s on pieces of foam.  You might think that these two groups have very little in common, but you’d be wrong.  This article will cover recent research on increasing muscular size, hypertrophy, and how this applies to us, because lets face it guys, secretly we want to be jacked and functional.

Benefits of Hypertrophy

Besides the obvious benefit of barely being able to fit through doors, being jacked has several other positives to recommend it. There is a very strong correlation between muscular size and strength.  It is not one to one, but most of the time if you get bigger you will get stronger.  Muscle is also more metabolically costly to maintain, which has a tendency to decrease body fat levels.  Lastly hypertrophy training is much less taxing on your ligaments and joints than heavy olympic lifting/ power lifting which makes up a good portion of your average athlete’s training schedule.  Now that its obvious we need some hypertrophy in our lives, how do we go about getting it?

 

 

Factors Affecting Hypertrophy

There numerous factors that will cause a hypertrophic response, or your muscles to increase in size, and I won’t go over all of them otherwise I’d be writing a text book.  The most important factors are: training frequency, volume, rep range, intensity, nutrition, recovery.

Training Frequency

The frequency in which each muscle group is trained is key for optimal muscle growth.  This paper investigated the difference between training each muscle two days a week vs. once a week and found that twice a week provided superior results.  They did not mention whether three times a week would have been even better, but I would imagine not.  The body only has a finite capacity to recover and most folks would not be able to handle three times a week at the types of volume we will be using.

Volume

Volume is perhaps the key ingredient for hypertrophy training.  It is also one of the biggest differences between what a normal bodybuilding routine and a workout looks like with bodybuilders having much more volume.

If you want to increase your muscular size you should be performing 40 – 70 reps per muscle group per session according to this article.  This is quite a wide range of reps, but your muscles can receive as much stimulus from 40 reps at a challenging weight as 70 reps at a lighter weight as you will see a little further down.

Traditionally bodybuilding has had an imperfect understanding of volume.  Most bodybuilders know they need to increase their weights and do more overall work but they don’t really understand how to go about doing this in a structured manner.  Much of the time bodybuilders will fall into the trap of doing the same routines week in and week out with little variance or planned progression.  This is not ideal for muscle growth

Generally speaking a 5% increase in volume, measured in ft-lbs, per week is a sustainable increase.  This increase in volume can come from increasing the weight or reps you are doing, but more about this later.

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Rep Range

Traditionally 8-12 reps per set has been labelled the hypertrophy range with reps lower building strength and higher reps building endurance.  This relationship is fuzzy at best.  It is clear that 1-6 reps at 80% plus weights do build strength better than other rep ranges; however, you can also build almost the same muscular size in that same rep range, you just have to do more sets to bring the volume equal with higher rep training.  In fact when volume is held equal groups using heavier training with lower reps and groups using higher reps with lighter weights achieved same types of results.

There has been further research questioning whether or not we should stick to one rep range or vary our rep ranges.  Interestingly enough there was no real difference between the group that used one rep range and the varied group as long as volume was held equal, noticing a trend?

Intensity

When we talk about intensity we are referring to the weight relative to our one rep max (1RM).  Hypertrophy training should stick 60-80% intensities for the majority of sessions.  That is not to say that we can’t vary outside of these ranges, simply that our results will be sub optimal if we spend too much time in these areas.

Nutrition

I have save the most important two factors for last.  The best designed plan will do nothing if you do not eat the right amount and type of food.  You can’t run your car without gas and you can’t run your body this way either.  First you will need to determine your basal metabolic rate or resting energy expenditure using this calculator.  This will give you the amount of energy you need simply to exist with no extra demands put on your body.

Now you will need to figure out your macro nutrient split.  Protein is the easiest.  You should eat at 1-1.3 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight. Carbs and fats can be split as you like to make up the total caloric intake.  I do not like to stick to a certain number or percentage because there is such a wide variety in responses to lower or higher carb diets and low or high fat diets. The important thing to remember is that we have to be in a calorie surplus to gain muscle, but not so much that we get fat. The following is an example that you can use.

Calories for Hypertrophy = BMR+Exercise Expenditure+200 to 500cal

Example: Tom is a 30 year old Male at 5’8, 180lbs

Tom’s Calories: BMR = 1851, BMR + 1hr Exercise (500cal) + 500 = 2851cal

Protein intake: 180lbs x 1.3 = 234g (936cal)

Carbs: 200g x 4cal = 800 cal

Fat: 123g x 9cal = 1107 cal

*Protein and Carbs have 4cal per gram, Fat has 9 cal per gram 

Tom’s Macros: 234g protein, 200g carbs, 123g fat will put Tom in a 500cal surplus on training days.  On non training days his ratios will be the same but with lower overall calories.

Recovery

This is the most important part of hypertrophy training.  Read that again.  You cannot out train poor sleep and poor stress management.  I recommend at least 8 hours of sleep a night, more if you can swing it.  Likewise stress at home or on the job can play havoc with your best laid plans, so you need to ensure that you have time away from the gym to do things you enjoy and be with people you like.  The best training plan for you is the one you can just barely recover from.  If you out run your recovery you will regress, and if you don’t work hard enough your results will be less than ideal.

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The Plan

Finally, here is the plan.  You’ll notice that it sticks to compound movements with a few isolation exercises.  I’ve limited the exercise selection to the equipment found in most gyms.  Each muscle group will be worked twice a week, either in the hypertrophy section or the WOD, on a different day.  The weights increase linearly 5% per week as we spoke about earlier.  Following this template will give you a month’s worth of workouts.  After three increasingly hard weeks there will be one deload week.  To start this cycle again, begin with the weight you used with week two and increase the weights 5% each week until the deload.

Final Thoughts

I hope this has shed some light on hypertrophy training.  There really is no secret to this type of training and there is no reason why a functional athlete cannot reap the benefits from it.  Remember the key factors for this program are adequate recovery, volume, and calories.  

I recommend running this plan for about 3 months.  This is a long enough time period to put on some appreciable muscle mass without gaining an excess amount of fat, and yes you will gain some fat. There is no way around it.  

Luckily once you pack on that hard earned mass you can lean back out using this diet plan. Stick with it, be consistent, and pretty soon gym bro’s will be mirin’ on your instagram too.

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