Today’s topic is learning how to overcome muscle growth limits. In this article, you will learn how to overcome muscle growth limits and the best way to prevent them from happening in the first place.
What are the limits to muscle growth?
Local limits: going to a point where a certain muscle cannot grow any more from stimulus (steroids, hard workouts, food, etc.) For example, if your max sets for a muscle group are 20 sets per week and you try to add one more set, that set won’t be beneficial, and it can even be worse for making progress. That means that not always more is better, especially for building muscle.
Another example of local limits is your protein intake.
You don’t always need to consume as much protein as you possibly can. Taking a lot of protein is a myth. If you are natural, your body won’t come close to using up the protein that you have eaten, so in reality, you are wasting protein, wasting money, and wasting your time. I can’t stress enough, but don’t overdo anything if you don’t want to experience local limits.
This is the same when you are riding a bus and the capacity of the passengers that can board the bus is 100 people, and trying to squeeze in ten or twenty more people is useless because the rest of the 100 people will lose some of their space because of the given event, so stay away from adding more.
Systemic limits: exercising too many muscles at high intensity. Systemic limits happen when you are doing too much volume for small muscles, and the bigger muscle groups suffer because the body can’t recover fast enough and doesn’t have the resources to give the most nutrients possible to all the muscle groups, leading to an imbalance in your potential to get maximum muscle growth.
In short, your body will give nutrients to both small and large muscle groups, but it will be less for the big muscle groups because the small ones are taking up a good chunk of the nutrients available.
But there is one good news to this phenomenon, and that is if you are a beginner or an intermediate lifter, you don’t need to have a care in the world for this problem because your muscles aren’t as big and don’t require so many resources that your body can’t heal or spread them correctly, meaning you can comfortably train both small and large muscle groups.
What happens when you don’t train all the muscles hard?
You are losing money. Don’t get me wrong, if you are training only chest legs and back, you will get massive chest legs and back, but why would you do that if you are a beginner or an intermediate?
When you are at a beginner or intermediate level, you aren’t even capable of reaching your systemic limits; you only need to worry about the local limits. In short, you need to worry about how much your individual muscles can take from the workout, not the whole body.
So train your muscles correctly, and don’t worry about systemic limits if you are not an advanced lifter.
How do you tell if you have hit your maximum recoverable volume?
If you have come to a point where your muscles cannot recover from session to session, you have successfully hit your MRV (maximum recoverable volume), meaning you need to tune down the volume that you are doing.
Another good indicator that you have hit your limit is that you are losing motivation to train, your sleep is bad, and your sessions are bad.
I’m giving you an example if you training your back really hard and you go home and try to get some rest and someone says to you now we’re gonna training arms to failure and shoulders, I’m betting that you will hate that guy and reject his offer, the same goes to you, you need to know your limits and not push yourself to a point where you cant recover for the next session.
That doesn’t mean you cant go failure but keep in mind that more sets aren’t as good as they are portrayed to be.