Building muscle is something that many people want to achieve but few people truly understand how to go about. First thing to understand about is that it will take patience and discipline to achieve your goals and won’t happen overnight.

People seeking to build muscle will go into what is known as a “Hypertrophy” training phase. Simply put, hypertrophy is an increase in muscle growth. Textbooks will tell you to do anywhere between 6 and 12 reps per set, and while true, there’s merit in having multiple ways to achieve this to prevent boredom in your training and plateauing.

Over the years I have adjusted my thoughts on rep ranges for hypertrophy. I consider the total volume of reps that I am doing on a certain exercise. For example, as opposed to continuously doing 3 sets of 10 reps on bench press, I could easily switch it up and go with 10 sets of 3 reps and my total volume is still 30 total reps. While still hitting the same volume the amount of weight lifted is much higher because I am only doing 3 reps in each set. As I’ve used 10 sets of 3 reps as my example, we could also mix it up with 6 sets of 5 reps, or 5 sets of 6 reps. All these examples will allow us to keep different demands on our body and help us avoid hitting a plateau by simply adjusting the intensity of the lift. These practices I will use primarily on our big three lifts (Bench, Squat, Deadlift).

When I am focused on auxiliary lifts (Ex. Pull-ups, Rows, Curls) my approach to muscle hypertrophy will primarily focus on time under tension (TUT). On exercises I rarely go below 6 reps in a set and often go as high as 15 reps in a set. TUT will exhaust and breakdown the muscle fibers and with the proper recovery they will grow back stronger and bigger to help us achieve our goal of muscle growth. TUT doesn’t have to solely be created through rep ranges though. TUT can often times be created through proper rest intervals. If a rest interval ends up being too long, we will just continue to exhaust the same muscle fibers in each set. Using the proper rest intervals for hypertrophy will allow us to recruit and exhaust more muscle fibers and lead to more muscle growth. Typically, in my auxiliary sets, I will use 60 seconds rest but just like rep ranges this doesn’t have to be a set number. Hypertrophy rest intervals can range from 30 seconds up to 2 minutes.

While there is not just one way to go about building muscle, these are some methods that I have seen to be very effective over my time training. Going forward I would encourage you to try out sets and rep schemes that we have outlined here. On our Brick House Strength team, you can see how we utilize these methods daily to create muscle hypertrophy.