Increase the weight, increase your reps (or time under tension) or increase both.  This has been the tried and true means to progressively overload ones muscles in the pursuit of greater strength and size since Cavemen were doing squats using a thick tree branch and boulders tied to the ends.  But as any advanced lifter will tell you, there comes a point where despite the 5, 10, 20+ lbs. increases in strength on a given exercise increases in lean muscle mass does not follow.

So what’s a lowly lifter who desperately wants to squeeze out every last bit of genetic potential to do?

Find new ways of creating overload!  New ways to disrupt homeostasis.  After all, the body is an extremely adaptive organism and if it can blunt muscle development for the reason that it increases metabolic demands then it will.

Here are four ways to break homeostasis’ strangle hold and create an overload environment to drive new muscle growth.

1. Increase Volume

I make this suggestion with hesitation.  The reason why is that most people overuse this variable to the point where their progress is stalled because of an inability to recover.  However for those that follow low to moderate volume training programs, doubling or even tripling the volume of one or many workouts can present new and usual demands.

2. Increase Frequency

As with volume I suggest this with a hint of hesitancy because so many are guilty of taking the “more is better” approach to exercise.  Over the long-run more is not better; this we know through the study of stress physiology (you can’t argue with real science Broscience guy).  However for a short-term increase in demands (1-4 weeks) there’s not a simpler way bombard the muscles than training them more frequently.

3. Change Rep/Exercise Performance

This is one method of increasing demands that doesn’t require you to shuffle around your schedule to account for more time or days in the gym, making it an extremely efficient way to up the demands.  The only limits are those of creativity and the willingness to check your ego at the door.  This is not about how much you can lift or the number of reps performed.  This is about disrupting neural patterns.

In ‘non-Exercise Science Nerd’ terms this means breaking the usual pattern of how your reps/exercises are performed.  This increases the metabolic demands of the exercise because the muscles must work harder to overcome a change in the skill.  Think of how much more difficult, exhausting and disrupting to the muscles it would be (in the short term) if a baseball pitcher who typically throws overhand was told to start throwing sidearm.

4. Do it all!

Let’s face it, if you’ve been training for over a decade and have “been there done that” then your body is very well in tune with nearly everything you throw at it.  Sure you still get tired, fatigued, your muscles get sore, but none of that is nothing new and certainly not enough to persuade the body to add more muscle.  At this stage sometimes the best the best thing you can do is to do it all.  Change things in a massive unexpected way.

Now comes the disclaimer.  This is not how to train all the time…that’s just stupid.  This is a planned part of an intelligently designed training program that allows for proper balance between exercise demands (stress) and recovery for long-term adherence.