"First and foremost, we have to have to maintain a calorie surplus, because, regardless of whatever else you're doing, how hard or often you're training, you simply cannot magic something from nothing," Delaney explains. "You need some calories left over to enable the muscle-building process to occur...by creating tiny tears in your muscle fibres during training, which then grow back bigger."
"We can replace [the term] 'volume' with 'quantity', which is usually measured in [the] number of working sets. We can talk about weekly volume per muscle group, how many working sets you perform over the week for a particular muscle group; or total workout volume, which is how many overall sets there are in a workout," Delaney explains. "Frequency is just how often we're training a muscle group and, again, we tend to talk about that in the context of a week. A high-frequency training split would be one that has you hitting each muscle group often, such as a full-body split."
Gents, don't be sleeping on adequate rest. "There's a few ways that sleep, or lack thereof, can affect your ability to build muscle. First, a lack of sleep will be detrimental to your workout performance. A set that stops at two reps from failure, or what feels like it, when you're tired and lethargic; is not worth the same as when you're fresh and full of energy." Delaney goes on to share two studies that prove deep or 'slow-wave' sleep is vital for muscle repair and, if sleep is inadequate, "not getting your eight hours can have a detrimental effect on your hormone levels."
"You can do everything that I've described in this video, but only do it for a week or a day on and off, you're not going to get very far," Delaney explains. "Your body will adapt to the demand placed on it, but that is a consistent process, so if the demand one week is the usual five resistance training sessions, but in the following week you do zero, you'll begin to adapt to that...your body will tip towards the average demand placed on it."
Lastly, as your strength and fitness progresses, Delaney stresses that you should always be looking to progressively overload either the reps you're performing on each movement, or the total weight you're lifting. Also, "as you repeat your movements week in and. weekout, your mobility might start to increase and you might start to use a wider, longer, or bigger range of motion," Delaney explains. "Two. or three years into training, you'll need to think about progressive overload more methodically.
