Working out according to a schedule that matches your muscle activation window is a vital key for weight training success. The whole reason you work out is to activate your muscles to get bigger and stronger. If you were to stop working out long enough, your muscles would eventually deactivate and begin to shrink. The whole idea is to workout enough to keep your muscles activated and to avoid a time period in which the muscles deactivate. I call the time period after a workout in which your muscles are activated to get bigger and stronger after a workout, the muscle activation window. Others call it the anabolic window, but the anabolic window refers mostly to a time period in which muscle growth takes place, whereas I want to also recognize a time period in which the muscles gain strength, whether they grow or not.
High Frequency Training if you have a Short Muscle Activation Window
If you look at the homepage of the precision point training website, you will notice that I have written several books that relate to the topic of High Frequency Training. The reason for this is because I am a hard-gainer, and I have found that high frequency is better than low frequency or medium frequency. This is not necessarily true for all people, but after decades of trial and error, I have found it to be true for myself. So, what is the advantage of high frequency training if you are a hard-gainer? The advantage is that it keeps your muscles activated. This is important for those who are as unfortunate as I am to have a very short muscle activation window between workouts.
Low Frequency Training If you Have a Long Muscle Activation Window
I know that there are bodybuilders and powerlifters who only need to hit each muscle group once per week in order to keep their muscles activated. These lifters have a long muscle activation window. I would say if you have found that you only need to hit a muscle group once per week, then keep doing it, but it’s a training disaster for me. It just doesn’t provide the necessary stimulation to keep my muscles activated. It doesn’t matter if I do one set, three sets, ten sets, or twenty sets per muscle group, my muscles go to sleep and start to deactivate when I train each muscle group only once per week.
Perhaps you are reading this and believe that high frequency training does not work for hard-gainers. I recognize the fact that there are probably better forms of training than high frequency training for some hard-gainers, but it depends on why they are hard-gainers. Some hard-gainers are hard-gainers because they have a very fast metabolism and they simply need to eat more to solve the problem. For others, the problem is that they simply need more recovery time between workouts. However, this would be a big step in the wrong direction for a hard-gainer like myself. My main problem is the inability to keep my muscles activated due to a short muscle activation window. If you have the same problem that I have, you need to train more often, not less often.
Don’t Train too Long or Too Hard
The problem with training more often is that hard-gainers are notorious for having poor recovery ability between workouts. Training more often makes it more difficult to recover. This being the case, how can a hard-gainer train more often and still recover? The solution is fairly simple, don’t train too hard and don’t do too many sets. I realize that this solution is completely unacceptable to those who have had it drilled into their minds by high intensity advocates that you must train hard or you simply won’t gain. I have worked out enough to know that those who believe this are wrong. What they are really saying is that you won’t gain fast, which I would agree with.
Hard-gainers are the biggest targets for those in the muscle media who market fast muscle gains. They know that hard-gainers are very frustrated because they work and work and work, yet they have little to show for it. If someone will sympathize with their pain and offer them a quick cure, they are often more than ready to buy into it. They are told that the jackpot of quick gains can be theirs if they just push hard enough and recover long enough between workouts. If you want to believe that, go ahead and try it. It may work. If it does work, awesome; keep doing it as long as it works. However, if it leads to nowhere, or it only works for a short time, I would recommend that you try something else. Like what? Like high frequency workouts in which you don’t train too hard or too long. If you are a hard-gainer, there is a chance that you need high frequency workouts to compensate for the problem of having a short muscle activation window.
The Right Kind of High Frequency Workout
If you want to try high frequency workouts, I recommend that you train each muscle group at least five times per week. Just do two to four sets per muscle group and only push half way to two thirds of the way to failure. Learn to do every rep of every set with perfect form and do five to ten reps per set using basic exercises that build strength and muscle size.
Most People Will Not Get This
Now I come to the part that most people will never get unless they are like me and have bludgeoned their body with high intensity for years without getting anywhere. This may go against your instincts and against everything that you have already been taught, but do not add weight or reps or sets for at least six weeks. Just let your body get acclimated to the workouts. Let your body get comfortable with the same weight, same sets, and same reps. Once the workouts feel easier, add five to ten pounds to your lifts. Don’t add weight too quickly, but also know that if you get lazy and neglect to add weight, you won’t gain.
Fake Hard-gainers
Many will say, “Did you say I can’t add weight for at least six weeks? That means my gains will be really slow.” That’s right, but if you are truly a hard-gainer, it really doesn’t matter what you do, you will gain slow. If this were not the case, you wouldn’t be a hard-gainer, you would be an easy-gainer. Some hard-gainers want to argue with this and say, “I know a hard-gainer who put on 30 pounds of muscle in three months.” If that’s true, he was a fake hard-gainer, he wasn’t a true hard-gainer. He may have started out skinny, but that doesn’t make a person a hard-gainer. He may have tried some other training methods that didn’t work at all and suddenly gained at a rapid pace when he switched over to a seemingly magical training method, but all that proves is that he was using a worthless training method before he switched to a better one. It does not prove that every hard-gainer will gain like a fast-gainer when they switch to a method that happened to work really well for one particular lifter.
Once again, if you happen to have a muscle activation window that only lasts a short amount of time after a workout, you need to use a training method that matches the length of your muscle activation window. This basically means you must engage in high frequency training and adjust the volume and intensity of the workouts enough to enable you to recover quickly between workouts. Once you start doing this type of high frequency workout, be patient, and give the workouts time to work. If you are patient and stick with it, I think you will be pleased with the results. Best of training to you.