How do you get stronger, improve your maximum lifts and also improve your physique overall if you only have two days a week to dedicate for lifting? What’s the best approach to weight training when increasing both strength and muscle is the goal but you have extremely limited time?

When should you increase the weight you’re lifting? How much weight should you add? How do you know if the weight is too heavy? How do you know if the weight is too light? If you’re attempting 3 sets of 8 to 12, do you have to get all 3 sets of 12 before you increase the weight, or just hit 12 on one set? If you increase the weight but then you can’t get enough reps, what then?  What if your left arm doesn’t get as many reps as your right arm, with the same weight? What if you flat-out can’t increase the weight at all? What then?

Once you’ve planned out a weight training routine that follows all the best practices of good program design, the single most important thing you can do to gain muscle is consistently apply the principle of progressive overload…

How hard must you train to gain muscle? Is pushing yourself all the way to failure – when you can’t do another rep – a critical part making muscle gains? How high does your intensity of effort have to be when you train? If you’re not gaining muscle, is it because you’re not training hard enough? If it’s not intensity, what is the real trigger for muscle growth?

Do muscle mass gains always follow strength gains? Are they one in the same? How do lean powerlifters stay in the same weight class but keep lifting heavier? How do bodybuilders get bigger when they’re not lifting heavier? If your strength is down in a workout (no personal bests) does that mean your workout wasn’t productive and you won’t gain muscle?

There are some long-held and well-revered rules and laws in the science of resistance training that are rarely challenged – we could even call them “sacred cows” – and the ideal number of repetitions for gaining muscle has always been one of them. Everyone knows that to gain muscle, you need to lift moderate to heavy weights for low to medium reps, right? … wrong! Read on to find out what breaking new research says about high reps and muscle growth…

How do you make your muscles grow? That’s easy! All you have to do is lift more weight every time you go into the gym. Everyone knows that. Just keep getting stronger! If you gradually lift more weight, that’s called progressive overload and that’s the trigger to gain more muscle, right? Well, not exactly…

If your primary goal is fat loss, shouldn’t you just focus on cardio and hold off on the weight training? And if they say you can’t gain muscle when you’re in a calorie deficit, why bother lifting at all – why not just follow your diet and do cardio and then start lifting later? This is a very common question and always an area of great confusion. I believe that’s because the answer is somewhat counter-intuitive…

Muscle building mistakes has been a common theme in bodybuilding magazines for decades, so you might think this topic has been thoroughly exhausted and needs no further discussion. The truth is, one area where the most disastrous errors are made – progressive overload mistakes – has been virtually ignored.  That’s why most people spend more time stuck on progress plateaus than gaining muscle.

Last year, I used some of the tactics from today’s guest post to finally hit 30 reps of strict chin-ups for the first time in my life at age 46 (bodyweight at the time – 191 lbs). I had been able to consistently do at least 20 reps in a row and could work myself up over time to about 25 reps or so, but then always hit a brick wall. The one technique that was most effective in helping me hit my PR was the “grease the groove” method, where I actually practiced pullups and chinups multiple times per day, every day! Might sound crazy, and it’s not how I usually train for bodybuilding, but for pull up endurance, it worked just as promised… – Tom V.