If you’ve been weight training for a while, you may find yourself asking, ‘why have my muscles stopped growing?’ This is often followed by the statement ‘it’s strange because I’m adding more weight to my lifts every week so I know I’m getting stronger.

The problem with that statement is this… If you’re bodybuilding, your mission objective is to increase the size of your muscles, not to become a power lifter, so don’t worry about the weight you are lifting or your muscle strength too much.

 

TIME UNDER TENSION (TUT)

So, why have your muscles stopped growing? The answer to this question is very simple: Your muscles need more TIME UNDER TENSION, not more weight…

‘Gaining size’ (hypertrophy training) and ‘getting stronger’ (strength training) are accomplished in two completely separate styles and methods of training. You can become stronger by adding more weight to your routine but this doesn’t necessarily mean you will gain any mass or size. The reason being that if you are lifting in a fashion where your tempo is too quick and your rest periods are too long, your muscles are under tension for a very short amount of time and then under no tension for too long whilst resting.

 

INCREASE YOUR WEIGHTS

Increasing your lifting weight is quite easily achieved if you are putting the hours in at the gym; all you need is a considerable amount of power and an explosive movement/technique to get the weight up. BUT, as previously mentioned, you will eventually hit a brick wall if you are training for size.

So let’s look at how we can utilise TUT training to its full potential. Time under tension put simply is ‘the amount of time you put your muscles under tension for during exercise’.

 

ADD MORE VOLUME

You want to be adding more VOLUME to your sessions, so things like drop sets, negative reps, slowing down the tempo of your reps, not ‘locking out’ which will release the tension and shorter rest periods.

You may have to decrease the weight you have been lifting but that isn’t a concern as you are not training for strength, so please don’t be concerned about this AND your sessions may finish quicker as your putting your muscles under tension for a more condensed period of time.

 

SUGGESTED TRAINING

An example of the variables and parameters to stick to for your training could be:

 

VOLUME
3 sets of 10 repetitions

 

REST
60 seconds

 

INTENSITY
65-75% of your one-rep-max

 

TEMPO

3-1-4 (tempo is the 3 phases of a repetition, if you take a bench press for example the first phase of the lift will be 3 seconds, once you hit the peak hold for 1 second and then lower the weight for four seconds)