First principles thinking in hypertrophy?

First principles thinking in hypertrophy?⭕️

Applying first principle thinking, is a great way to break complex problems down to their foundational elements, allowing for clearer understanding and innovative solutions.

When it comes to understanding muscle growth, we know that Mechanical Tension is the primary driver, and other mechanisms (like Metabolic Stress, Muscle Damage, etc.)—that can still occur in tandem—don’t seem to cause growth by themselves when Mechanical Tension is not present.

Therefore, we can still trace back hypertrophy with Mechanical Tension, and then build our model to maximize it with our training, as this is the fundamental principle that triggers the mechanisms of muscle growth.

From a recent meta-regression analysis, we can find an interesting positive correlation between hard sets and hypertrophy, and that’s likely because sets that are closer to failure accumulate sufficient tension for the highest-threshold muscle fibers, leading to their growth.

And how can we replicate this “Mechanical Tension” stimulus? By increasing the number of times we reach that “trigger point”, by increasing training volume.