A Guide for Maximizing Hypertrophy with Calisthenics

@drewzz Basically any online fitness influencer too. If someone else is your "goal physique", you're gonna be disappointed. Best thing to do is set performance goals, or have the goal to lose X amount of pounds, or gain muscle mass in general. Most beginners wanna look like the most popular influencer of the moment and will end up disappointed.
 
@raykay Great post, thank you. In the ‘using these techniques effectively’ examples how do you progress them? Surely progressively overload (adding reps) is always required to keep moving forward?
 
@reallylongnickname Progressive overload is a staple of training, yes. You should generally be progressing volume and load over time. You should keep using a technique until your body has become adapted to it, then rotate to something else for a training cycle.
 
@raykay Where are you getting your information for the table re: the hypertrophy drivers that different techniques "activate"? I'm not an expert but my understanding was that adaptation to ALL resistance training was characterized by all 3 of your categories of drivers. I wasn't aware that they could be neatly split up like that.
 
@taiok It's not such a neat split, it's a matter of using specific training techniques that emphasize one driver of growth over the others. All of these methods have some contribution from all 3 mechanisms.
 
@taiok How so? You are inducing specific muscular adaptations in response to a targetted stimulus. I'm not sure what the source of confusion is.

I would compare it to something like long-distance running, your primary objective is to improve cardiovascular fitness, but you have secondary adaptations such as improved muscular endurance of the legs. But if you just wanted to improve your muscular endurance above all else, you would not use the exact same methods.

It's not that a method like adding weight and increasing mechanical tension on a muscle won't also cause muscular damage or metabolic fatigue. It will cause some adaptations related to those two, but it may not be the most efficient way to emphasize all three at the same time.

If your goals are not hypertrophy-related, it's a bit of splitting hairs.
 
@raykay It seems like broscience for a few reasons. The first is that, based on my limited but practical understanding of the state of empirical research on these topics is that a cause and effect relationship between specific training modalities and specific types of adaptation has been difficult to establish. At this point the consensus as I understand it is that things like bands and chains should cause adaptations that are differential to non-band/chain work based on our models of stress-adaptation. But as yet no one can definitively say that "X work promotes Y adaptation to Z degree".

But even if I leave aside that I'm still unconvinced that your evidence supports your conclusions, I'm still left feeling like it's pretty broscience-y for another reason. This is just my personal perspective, but I've been a part of the Reddit and Internet fitness community for like 9-10 years now. I've seen a lot of well meaning posts and posters like yourself come and go. Training modalities ebb and flow in the amount of popular advocacy they receive from the community. As someone who used to voraciously consume every "Lifting 101" post that got posted here and elsewhere by anonymous users (and the posting standards were not as strict as they are now), my experience has been that it is the post is superfluous once one has read the authorities that the poster is citing. In other words, there's a kind of Wikipedia article quality - they might be able to point you in the right direction of some more valuable resources, but in general they're incomplete and sometimes misleading/inaccurate regurgitations of things that more primary sources have stated.

My personal opinion is that all of this is needlessly overcomplicated for the bottom 90% of individuals. I doubt that the top 10% are reading hypertrophy 101 guides on Reddit. I just think that a trainee who is really interested in learning more about these topics would be better served spending their time in other, more primary sources. Those who don't actually care all that much about maximizing their performance but "just want to look better naked" have nothing to gain from this conversation - all of this just serves as a layer of needless complexity.

To be clear, I don't mean this as any kind of attack on your personally or your work here and in other posts. I think they cite reputable sources, are well written, and neatly summarize a wealth of information that a curious reader would probably benefit from applying. I also don't know you personally. For all I know you're a world class bodybuilding coach who likes to post on Reddit.
 
@taiok There are pretty good meta analysis and scientific articles about that.
But I've to side with you (although it's not about taking sides).
Mechanical laod/tension is the only one driver of hypertrophy. The rest are just byproducts occurring with it. Middle damage is actually unwanted. It just takes up more recovery capacity.
Metabolic stress seems to have some indirect contribution to hypertrophy but isn't a necessary driver for it.
 
@hawke213x It's not that muscular damage only occurs with a certain type of exercise, just as there will always be some mechanical tension and some metabolic fatigue with any exercise. However, certain methods of training will emphasize muscular damage more than others.
 
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