Essentials: Optimal Protocols to Build Strength & Grow Muscles | Dr. Andy Galpin
In a Nutshell
Strength training is essential for preserving muscle power and neuromuscular function with aging, far more critical than muscle size alone, and can be started effectively at any age. Effective programs require consistency, progressive overload, and proper execution rather than specific exercises, with the 3-5 framework (3-5 days, exercises, reps, sets, minutes rest) providing a simple structure. Hypertrophy needs 10-20+ weekly sets per muscle group near failure, while strength requires compound movements done explosively when fresh, with both benefiting from 3-5% weekly progression and strategic variation every 6-12 weeks.
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Strength training and hypertrophy training provide benefits far beyond aesthetics. The field has done a major disservice by convincing people that strength training is only for athletes or growing bigger muscles, while cardiovascular training is solely for fat loss and heart health. This creates unnecessary barriers and leads to poor actions. Exercise provides independent benefits from endurance training and independent benefits from strength training. Resistance exercise and strength training is the number one tool to combat neuromuscular aging, and this cannot be achieved through any other form of exercise besides heavy overload strength training. If you want to be alive and live by yourself, you must be able to engage in human movement, and any dysfunction in the neuromuscular system prevents this. The only way to preserve that or fight aging-related loss is to strength train.
People hear that you lose about 1% of muscle size per year after age 40, which is true. However, you lose about 2 to 4% of your strength per year, so the loss of strength is almost double the loss of muscle mass with aging. Muscle power loss is more like 8 to 10% per year. The problem with aging will not be preservation of muscle, though that is important. It will be very specifically preservation of muscle power and strength. Your ability to stand up and move, catch yourself from a fall, and feel confident doing a movement is a function of muscle power more than muscle size. Functionality is what matters, and the ability to do whatever you want to do physically and feel confident doing it as you age can only be obtained through strength training.
Strength training is the only exercise route available for keeping the nervous system healthy and young. The wonderful thing about strength training is you don't actually have to start at a young age. A paper showed that people over age 90 saw improvements of 30 to 170% in things like muscle size and hypertrophy over a 12-week period. If you are 50 and haven't been strength training, you are not toast. You should absolutely start now and will be able to get to a fantastic spot very quickly.
Strength represents an actual function. It is the ability to create more force across a muscle or muscle groups or total movement. Hypertrophy specifically refers to an increase in size with no actual mention of function. A muscle can grow larger without technically being stronger. However, there is a strong relationship between strength and hypertrophy. In the general public, these two things often get lumped together as the same thing.
People who are new to training or intermediately trained have a huge overlap between strength and hypertrophy. Once you get past that intermediate level, they become disentangled. It is quite easy to get stronger and not add much muscle mass if you want to get stronger without adding muscle for personal preference or aesthetic reasons. Strength is a measure of force, while hypertrophy is simply a measure of size.
Consistency beats intensity. Adherence is the number one predictor of physical fitness outcome. The goal is to do something you will engage in, put effort into, and be able to repeat consistently over time. Progressive overload is the second critical component. This is the number one mistake people make outside of not doing training at all. You must have some sort of overload to cause adaptation to continue and cause stress. Individualization is the third component, accounting for personal preference and equipment availability. The fourth component is picking the appropriate target by running testing to figure out where your biggest limitations are.
If you can do all these things, you will be in a good spot to balance specificity and variation. If you want to grow your biceps, you must make sure your biceps are working. However, over-relying on specificity increases the likelihood of overuse injuries, which hampers consistency over time. Going too far in the variation direction means you are doing lots of different exercises but not providing enough stimuli directly on the muscle or movement pattern to get very far.
Exercises do not determine adaptation. You cannot simply choose exercises because you want to get stronger. What determines adaptation is the execution of the exercises. A deadlift will not increase your strength unless you execute it in the proper fashion, which includes more than just technique. The same applies to power exercises like box jumps. Unless you do them powerfully, you will not actually increase power.
The 3 to 5 concept applies across all training: 3 to 5 days per week, pick 3 to 5 exercises, do 3 to 5 repetitions per set, do 3 to 5 sets, and rest 3 to 5 minutes between each set. If you execute any exercises chosen at high intent, this allows running the gamut from 3 days a week doing 3 exercises for 3 sets of 3 to 5 days a week doing 5 sets of 5 of 5 exercises. The only thing needed is to slightly increase the load over time, looking for a 3 to 5% increase per week.
When trying to get stronger, the goal is to get better at producing a certain amount of force through movement. Force equals mass times acceleration. Intentionally going slower only reduces acceleration, so it is hard to argue that going slower will improve strength. You need to practice lifting heavier at a faster rate.
For hypertrophy, the goal is not a functional outcome but what is needed to cause the most amount of hypertrophy. The optimal cadence is up to you. You can do any combination, even the same cadence used for strength training, and get the same hypertrophy adaptations if you modify the other variables appropriately. As long as the core concepts are hit, the specific cadence choice represents an 80/20 rule where 80% of the benefit comes from the concept and 20% from this small detail.
On the strength side, you need to be under control and add enough load to stimulate strength without getting hurt with acute trauma. On the hypertrophy side, you want to load enough to hit volume. If you go slower in repetition, such as a 5-second eccentric and 2-count rise, you can stimulate the same amount of hypertrophy with either less weight or fewer repetitions.
The conjugate model used by the strongest powerlifters keeps almost the exact same weekly structure but makes very small changes in exercise variation. For example, always benching on Wednesdays but changing to close grip bench one week, a special type of barbell the next week, or changing the range of motion the week after. This provides enough specificity while giving enough variation so it is not the exact same stimuli in the exact same spot repeatedly.
A major mistake people make is changing exercises entirely way too often. Do not change anything on exercises for 6 weeks, probably realistically 10 to 12 weeks, then make some changes. It takes about 3 weeks to figure out the groove of an exercise, how well you can load it, what is too much, and what position works. Changing before that time frame means you will not be able to progressively overload because you will not know exactly where you are at on all the exercises.
For exercise choice, select compound movements. For strength development and power, think about movements rather than individual muscle groups. Train explosive hip extension like a vertical jump, pushing or pulling movements, and rotation. Select big movements by the movement patterns you want to introduce and maintain a reasonable balance. You do not want to go an entire 6 months without doing anything in the rotational area or 8 to 10 weeks without doing something that is a lower body hinge.
Exercise order should put power and strength work at the beginning of workouts. Do not do anything fatiguing before this, including cardiovascular training or repetition to failure work. These movements need to be done when the nervous system is tremendously fresh because they are the most neurologically demanding, complicated, have multiple steps, are often in multiple planes, and coordination is difficult.
Volume is generally 3 to 20 sets total per workout. Frequency can be as high as desired depending on recovery. If truly pushing maximum strength, a few days to recover will probably be needed. Progression involves a 3 to 5% increase per week of intensity and upwards of about 5% increase in volume per week. Run this for 5 weeks, then have some sort of deload or back off week.
Intention matters significantly. You can get large improvements in strength at 50% of your one rep max if contracting as hard as possible. A plank exercise demonstrates this: you could contract the least amount necessary to hold the position, or contract as hard as possible by pulling scapula down and back, squeezing the core, quads, and glutes. This still helps strength production even though the load is the same.
Hypertrophy training is idiot proof in terms of programming compared to power and strength training. The precision needed is much less. There are countless styles of training that all work for hypertrophy. The classic dogma requires challenging the muscle to need to come back bigger and ensuring the nutrients are there to support that growth. All you have to do to not fail is make sure the training is hard enough, and it will work.
The only wrong combination for hypertrophy is infrequent training with low intensity and low volume. As long as one of those three variables is high, results will occur. It is important to do some combination of bilateral and unilateral exercises. Bilateral exercises include movements like squats where both feet are on the ground. Unilateral exercises include movements like a rear foot elevated split squat.
Unilateral movements such as single-leg leg press, single-leg curl, or pistol squats are essential for hypertrophy because they prevent muscular imbalances that can develop over months and years of training. The choice of implement—dumbbells, kettlebells, barbells, bands, or bodyweight—is secondary to the goal of creating the appropriate stimulus in the tissue. Different implements simply accommodate individual anthropometrics, biomechanics, and technique preferences.
The same exercise performed differently can emphasize different muscle groups. In a high bar squat, the bar sits higher on the neck with a more vertical torso and knees tracking further past the toes. This position places greater emphasis on the knee joint and quads while reducing work on the spinal erectors and back. In contrast, a low bar squat features a lower bar position near the shoulder blades, wider stance, and greater glute drive backward, shifting emphasis to the low back and glutes with less knee involvement.
A key principle states that the body part moving farthest from the midline is likely activating most. Front squats or high bar variations are generally more knee-dominant, while low bar squats are more hip-dominant.
When trying to grow a specific muscle group that isn't responding despite consistent training, the exercise selection itself may be the issue. Even if research shows squats are excellent for quad development, individual factors like stance, neural activation, or biomechanics may prevent adequate stimulus. In such cases, isolating the muscle group through machine work may be necessary to ensure development. Machines allow focus on the target muscle without stability concerns, low back positioning issues, or neck positioning worries.
For hypertrophy training, exercise order is flexible unlike strength and power training where compound movements must come first. Options include:
- Performing the most interesting exercise first
- Using pre-fatigue by starting with isolation work (for example, doing biceps isolation before pulling movements so the pre-fatigued biceps receive maximum stimulus during subsequent compound work)
- Beginning with single-joint or compound movements based on preference
The key consideration is not which muscle groups to package together, but rather achieving adequate weekly frequency and total volume per muscle group. A common error is treating "legs" as a single muscle group when legs contain multiple distinct muscle groups. Typical splits that dedicate four days to upper body and only one day to legs create imbalances. Each lower body muscle group should be treated separately in body part splits rather than consolidated into one weekly session.
Minimum volume: 10 working sets per muscle group per week Realistic target: 15-20 working sets per muscle group per week for intermediate and advanced trainees Advanced requirement: 25+ working sets per muscle group per week
A set of 25 repetitions that feels only moderately challenging at the end is insufficient. Similarly, a set of 5-6 repetitions that doesn't approach failure won't drive adaptation. The target is getting within approximately 2 reps in reserve (RIR) of failure—stopping when 2 more repetitions could have been completed.
When time is limited, training goals determine the appropriate adjustment. For hypertrophy, reduce load and rest intervals to maintain volume despite shorter sessions. For strength, reduce volume by half while preserving high loads rather than attempting to maintain volume with compromised intensity. Life disruptions affecting 10-50% of workouts require this type of chaos management.
While research suggests frequency matters less than total load and proximity to failure, practical constraints make higher frequency preferable. Body part splits can work for consistent lifters, but most people benefit from more frequent patterns. Training a muscle group once weekly makes it difficult to achieve necessary volume unless that single session is extremely demanding.
Recommended approach: 3 days per week of total body training provides resilience against missed workouts, as a missed session only delays muscle group training by 48-72 hours rather than a full week. A hybrid approach of 2 days total body plus 2 days body part splits offers additional protection against life disruptions while maintaining adequate frequency.
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