Muscle Gains For Newbies

Do you remember when you first started going to the gym and trying to pack on muscle? How easy it was - you'd go to the gym every week and you'd almost certainly be stronger adding 5 to 10lbs to your bench press each and every time you trained!!! I'm 8 years into my training now and I can assure you that no longer happens to me. If it did, I would be benching somewhere around 1,000lbs, so it's obvious that the initial rate of acceleration curls off somewhere along the line.

But do you really understand why it is that you are able to handle so much more weight at the start of your lifting career. Well, if you don't I'm going to tell you, because it actually has little to do with the size of the muscle and more to do with what's known as the CNS (Central Nervous System). You can consider your CNS like roads or highways that connect your brain to your muscles. Messages (cars) are sent down these highways to the muscles with certain instructions. Just like when you train a muscle, that muscle grows and adapts to the stress that you put under it, the same applies to the neural pathways. Therefore in the first few weeks when you are unaccustomed to a certain movement, your neural pathways will grow and adapt to the stress that you're putting it under and get better at sending the messages to your muscles. In turn this means that a great amount of the motor units in your muscle will be recruited, resulting in the strength gain that you experience.

Interesting huh? Now, the other key thing to note here is that the heavier the weight you lift in any given exercise, the more stress is being placed on the CNS. That's why olympic powerlifters and weightlifters concentrate primarily on low rep movements, because CNS plays a large role in the amount of weight you can lift.

So, we've established that the CNS can help us lift heavier weights but we also know that if you lift heavier in two months than you're lifting at the moment then you'll be bigger (as long as the diet is in check). Do you understand where I'm coming from now?

My point is this...If you can do a period of high intensity training with heavy weights that targets your CNS heavily, then in theory you should be able to drop back to the higher rep ranges that is more suited to muscle growth and lift more than you could before. Rinse and repeat until it plateaus.

At a very high level, I have essentially just described to you dual factor training. This is a powerful training idealogy that a lot of the professional weightlifters and powerlifters use to bust through plateaus. It is not so common in bodybuilding circles, but that's not to say that it isn't effective for bodybuilding.

Dual factor programs are a logical progression step from training protocols that are no longer allowing you to bust through plateaus. Dual factor is an advanced training technique and should only be used by those who know what they're doing - if a beginner tried to jump straight onto a dual factor program he/she would more than likely end up injured or completely overtrained.

In summary, if you stuck in a rut, give dual factor a go....you might well be very surprised by the results!