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TRAINING FOR
MUSCLE MASS:
AN UPDATE
Recent study findings have seriously challenged decades of firmly held belief that
heavy loads, high volume and post-exercise anabolic hormones are required for
the growth of muscle, writes exercise physiologist Tony Boutagy.
n 1988, at a weightlifting meet in
Canberra, the Russian Leonid
Taranenko successfully clean
and jerked 266kg. Due to restructuring of the
weight classes in 1993, 1998 and 2018,
Taranenko’s official world record is, sadly,
no longer recognised (that honour now
belongs to the Georgian Lasha Talakhadze,
who lifted 264kg in 2018, after coming back
from serving a 2-year ban for doping).
Despite not officially being ‘recognised’,
Taranenko’s lift is the heaviest weight to be
lifted in weightlifting ever – and he performed
this feat of herculean strength 31 years ago.
I
Training to increase muscle
strength
If you look to classic texts on strength
training from that period, such as Vladimir
Zatsiorsky’s Science and Practice of
Strength Training, Dietmar Schmidtbleicher’s
Strength Training: Structure, Principles,
And Methodology or Yuri Verkhoshansky’s
Programming & Organization of Training,
you find a very consistent approach to the
development of muscular strength.
All strength authorities agree that the
repetition range for the development of
maximal strength is between 1-6, the
number of sets for each primary exercise is
4-8 and the rest between sets is 3-5 minutes.
A casual glance through the autobiography
of the world’s most successful weightlifter,
Naim Suleymanoglu (The Pocket Hercules),
detailing his training in the 1980’s or the
Russian Weightlifting Yearbook, which
outlines the strength routines of the world’s
best at the time, reveal an astonishingly
high percentage of primary lifts for maximal
strength being performed in that range:
60% of the yearly repetition range for the
snatch and clean and jerk was 2, and 93%
of all squat sets for the year was performed
between 2-7.
How much has changed in the actual
training methods used by the strongest
weightlifters decades ago, when the clean
and jerk world record was set and classic
textbooks written? The answer is, not much.
The sets, reps, volumes, exercises and
training methods remain very similar to the
programs that Taranenko used in the 1980’s.
Put another way, a very long time ago,
the Russians had worked out the training
methods to maximally increase strength
and little of significance has changed since
those days.
So what about muscle size?
But what do the early texts say on the
topic of training for muscle hypertrophy?
Zatsiorsky 1 states that the training protocols
to induce muscle hypertrophy have a rep
range of 5-7 or 10-12, short rest periods (1-2
minutes), three or less muscles trained per
workout (a split routine) and a high training
volume per muscle group. This view of
hypertrophy was echoed by the ACSM’s
position stand, published in 2009 2 , and
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