Hypertrophy Ladders
How to Build Muscle in Less Time
Intensity is one of the most overused and abused tools in fitness. Countless group workouts and products push people to “go hard or go home” in every workout. I’ve had to teach group workouts. The truth is, the consumer wants to get smoked. Often times if you don’t, they don’t “feel” like they got a good workout. Especially for people who aren’t accustomed to actually achieving their goals or getting results, feeling like they worked hard is often times what they are actually after.
To be honest: getting smoked is easy. Getting better is hard. Anyone can make you tired, but not everyone can make you better. People often get confused, but muscles don’t. Muscles adapt. A bunch of random exercises thrown together is not surprisingly, NOT the best way to elicit a specific adaptation. This to me is the essence of training. Training is movement to elicit a specific response, exercise is movement for movement’s sake. There is nothing wrong with exercise. Lots of people need more of it. The problem is when people exercise to try to elicit a specific response. That is when you need to start training.
One of the most common training goals is to gain muscle. There is certainly no shortage of effective hypertrophy programs out there, but there are a few principles all effective hypertrophy programs will accomplish. Unlike the emphasis of so many workouts and products being pushed today, if your goal is to gain muscle, you need to optimize your effort toward frequency, not intensity. This is especially true for natural athletes. This is why so few people at your favorite group workout make any progress. Look around. Many people show up, work hard, and stay the same.
When training to gain muscle, we need frequency over intensity. In order to train frequently, many top-level bodybuilders use splits, training one part per day. Many not top level bodybuilders read about the workouts of top level bodybuilders and copy their routines. Here’s another radical idea. If you’re not a top-level bodybuilder, you shouldn’t train like one. Crazy I know, and I hate to burst your bubble, but many of them are on steroids or enhancements you aren’t. They can recover much more quickly than you can and can this subject their muscles to more stress. We’re talking practicality, not morality here. For natural athletes training to gain muscle, total body workouts are preferable. For the natural athlete, protein synthesis triggered by strength training total body will be greater than that triggered by training a single part.
Even though part splits are the choice of many top-level bodybuilders, many of the all-time greats built their physiques on total body training. Arnold’s Golden Six workout is what he famously used before entering professional bodybuilding and consisted of barbell back squats, wide grip bench presses, chin-ups, behind the neck press, curls, and situps. Put another way, as movements, he hit legs, push, pull, push, pull, abs. Arnold is known as the greatest bodybuilder of all time, perhaps there is something to be learned from his bread and butter program. I have lots of crazy ideas like that swirling around in my head.
Total body workouts also have the advantage when it comes to frequency versus part splits. Even if one took a day between each workout and took off on Sunday, he would train each muscle group three times a week on a very minimal total body split. In order to train each muscle group just once in a week, our part splitting counterpart will need to make it six training sessions. Beyond the novice phase where literally everything works, this is not an optimal way for natural athletes to make consistent gains.
Typically when frequency goes up, intensity comes down. Not that high intensity/high frequency doesn’t exist, it’s just that no one can sustain training that way for very long. You may be able to get away with it a couple times a year, but there is no shortage of folks who kill themselves regularly in the gym to maintain or get slowly worse. In all effective hypertrophy programs, you will see techniques to increase volume, not intensity. The usual way that people increase volume is to decrease intensity and increase the number of repetitions. More simply stated, lighter weights with more reps. That is the conventional wisdom.
I have only one issue with this equation and that’s the lighter weights part. Accumulated fatigue ultimately limits the load. In a typical set of ten, the first six reps or so are easy. It isn’t until the last few reps that one actually begins working. This is the primary reason that I began programming ladders into hypertrophy. If you’ve been to a group fitness workout, you’ve probably raced through ladders as a competition subtracting or adding a rep of a couple exercises each round. I love those ladders for metabolic conditioning and finishers but for hypertrophy, there are better varieties available. One does not have to be restricted to simply adding or subtracting a rep each round. This tip comes from the legendary Dan John, for hypertrophy ladders of 2/3/5/2/3/5/2/3 and 2/3/5/10 work great. Working in this fashion once can increase the load beyond their normal 5 rep or 10 rep load.
Think of 2/3/5 ladder versus a standard 5x5. The total number of reps is twenty-five in each scenario. However, working 2/3/5 one will be able to load the bar with more weight and get the reps done in a shorter period of time. The sets of 2 and 3 are relatively easy. One hard set then recover to the point you can do 2. You can almost always get another 2. It is surprising how fast these ladders run and the perception of exertion is decreased despite increasing both intensity and density in most cases. The 2/3/5/10 ladder is identical to German Volume Training if done five times. It’s 100 reps either way. I go with Dan’s recommendation here and usually run it three times, but the option is always there. Using ladders in this fashion is an excellent tool for hypertrophy training.
Here is one of the easiest ways to work all of this into an effective hypertrophy program. Think movements not muscles with me for a minute here. I want you to pick three leg movements. One hip hinge, one squat variation, and one unilateral. Next, pick a vertical and horizontal push and pull. Lastly, pick a bicep and a tricep exercise. I know arm training has gotten a bad rap lately but anyone who doesn’t think curls are functional hasn’t grappled so we don’t really worry about what our “functional bros” have to say on the topic. Plus, you probably want to look good if you’re being honest. I’m all for it on whatever level you’re at. We have nine exercises. Resist the urge to add more variety and actually get better at these exercises over the next few weeks. Start each workout with a 2/3/5 ladder of a leg movement. Pair up two of your upper body movements and run a 2/3/5/10 ladder. If your space accommodates you can turn this nice into a super-set that will increase your density and decrease your training time even more. Throw in some ab wheel and kettlebells or some metabolic work if you’ve got some training time left or just get on with your life.
Come back next session with a new leg movement and two more balanced upper body movements and let the volume, intensity, and density of the program do the work for you. If you’re used to crushing yourself to make little to no progress you will be amazed, and probably a little pissed off with all the time you’ve wasted in the past when you see what’s possible with a little thought put in. Invariably, you will be tempted by variety and novelty you see all around you. Again, resist the urge to add too much novelty. Allow your body the time and ability to adapt and get the most out of the exercises you have selected before switching. These choices aren’t forever. After a 3–4 weeks one can take inventory, reassess goals and priorities, and try out a few of those new things you noticed.
The truth is, there is more than one way to fry an egg. I’m tired of seeing the black and white reductive types of pitches that the fitness industry all too often produces. This is ONE way to train for hypertrophy. I like it because it saves a ton of time. There were other times in my life I frankly had more time to give so if that were a part of the equation, maybe I would still choose to split things differently. With where I am at in life now, responsible to my clients, my wife, two businesses, and an infant time is my most precious commodity. I see and hear from so many people in the same situation but I don’t see them using the time they do have in the most efficient manner. I’ve used nearly every program and split at some point and understand the method to the madness with each. Using the least common denominators from a number of established programs and a few smart tweaks, it is possible to create an efficient and effective hypertrophy program that can fit anyone’s schedule.
