Bodybuilding coach Joe Bennett knows a thing or two about building muscle. Beyond working with physique pros like Terrence Ruffin and Dana Linn Bailey, the “Hypertrophy Coach” has also built a damned-good physique of his own.
- When it comes to muscle growth, nearly all roads lead to Rome. Bennett believes there are five dominant factors that affect hypertrophy — the meat and potatoes of muscle-building.
We’re also going to look at five additional muscle growth factors that Bennett deems “less important”. If you’ve been wondering how to prioritize things on your bodybuilding journey, Bennett is here to light your way.
Top 5 Factors for Muscle Growth: Joe Bennett
Bennett outlined his perspective on the “big” and “little” factors that influence muscle growth on social media on Aug. 19, 2024. If you aren’t following Bennett, you should — he’s one of the best content creators in the game.
Here are Bennett’s top five factors for muscle growth, simplified:
Sitting comfortably at the top of Bennett’s totem pole isn’t any fancy training technique or nutrition “hack”; it’s enjoyment. Let’s take a closer look.
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1. Enjoyment
“You need to enjoy the process, and enjoy your ‘why,'” Bennett said, recalling his first time setting foot in a weight room and being totally entranced by it all.
He’s right, though. If you’re pursuing muscle growth, you’ll have a much easier time making gains if you view every workout as a privilege rather than a burden.
Studies tell us that people who enjoy their workout routine are far more likely to stick to it long-term. (1)
2. Consistency
Bennett rated consistency and adherence just below enjoyment. “Without discipline, none of the commonly-discussed training variables for muscle growth matter,” he explained.
Think of most medications; if you don’t “take your vitamins” consistently or as prescribed, you won’t get the intended effect or, at least, not as much of it. The same holds true for hypertrophy training.
Data on habit formation vary, but one paper from 2012 suggested it can take up to 10 weeks to truly engrain a health-related habit. (2) Coincidentally, if you’re a beginner bodybuilder, that’s about as long as it takes to start seeing real change in the mirror.
3. Effort
According to Bennett, effort is “queen” when it comes to muscle growth — highly important, but not the end-all, be-all of making gains.
Early in your bodybuilding career, it’s pretty easy to put the pedal to the medal and operate at 100% on a workout-by-workout basis. However, this won’t hold, and you might find yourself crashing into a wall if you don’t know how to throttle your speed.
The longer your athletic career, the more precise you’ll have to be about managing your recovery. (3) As you increase strength and build muscle, training begins to take a greater toll on your body, slowing down the rate at which you “bounce back” from hard workouts.
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4. Tracking
There isn’t a bodybuilder on Earth, including Bennett and his muscled-out clientele, who improvise their training and nutrition for muscle growth. Tracking, logging, and monitoring your workouts and diet is integral to long-term success.
If you don’t track your workouts in some form, you’ll have trouble sticking to progressive overload. The same holds true for nutrition; if you’re trying to lose fat, you need to know you’re in a calorie deficit via some form of nutritional monitoring.
A 2017 meta analysis on strength training showed that tracked (using periodization) workout routines vastly outperform non-structured training. (4)
5. Expectations
Rounding out Bennett’s top five factors for muscle growth is the importance of managing expectations. In your first year or two of training, you can suffer from an embarrassment of riches; muscle and strength gains pour in faster than you know what to do with.
Nothing good lasts, and this is unfortunately true for bodybuilding. The abundance of mass you add in the early stages will inevitably slow, and it’s important to not be disheartened by this. It happens to everybody.
Bodybuilders often suffer from negative psychological issues related to their sport. One research article from 2021 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology described the self-imposed expectations associated with careers in bodybuilding. (5)
“Less Important” Factors for Muscle Growth
Think of the five muscle growth factors above as the foundation of your bodybuilding career. They are the soft skills that enable you to stick to your workout, diet, and achieve your goals when you pull back and look at things in terms of years, not weeks.
So, what’s left? Bennett outlined five “less important” factors that you should pay heed to, but won’t make or break your results long-term:
- Alignment: How the exercises you perform align with your specific anatomical structure.
- Resistance Profile: Where along the range of motion is an exercise too hard, or too easy?
- Workout Splits: The logistical organization of your hypertrophy training.
- Volume: How much challenging (as in, not a warm-up) work you perform for each major muscle group, usually weekly.
- Reps in Reserve: How close you are to muscular failure, measured by number of reps “in the tank” at the end of a set.
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Do these things matter for muscle growth? Absolutely, but Bennett wants to ensure you don’t major in the minors.
If you don’t enjoy your bodybuilding workouts and are consistent with them, track your efforts over time, and manage your expectations, you might burn out long before you achieve your potential.
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References
- Teixeira DS, Rodrigues F, Cid L, Monteiro D. Enjoyment as a Predictor of Exercise Habit, Intention to Continue Exercising, and Exercise Frequency: The Intensity Traits Discrepancy Moderation Role. Front Psychol. 2022 Feb 18;13:780059. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.780059. Erratum in: Front Psychol. 2024 May 06;15:1417755. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1417755. PMID: 35250719; PMCID: PMC8894246.
- Gardner B, Lally P, Wardle J. Making health habitual: the psychology of ‘habit-formation’ and general practice. Br J Gen Pract. 2012 Dec;62(605):664-6. doi: 10.3399/bjgp12X659466. PMID: 23211256; PMCID: PMC3505409.
- Sousa CA, Zourdos MC, Storey AG, Helms ER. The Importance of Recovery in Resistance Training Microcycle Construction. J Hum Kinet. 2024 Apr 15;91(Spec Issue):205-223. doi: 10.5114/jhk/186659. PMID: 38689583; PMCID: PMC11057610.
- Williams TD, Tolusso DV, Fedewa MV, Esco MR. Comparison of Periodized and Non-Periodized Resistance Training on Maximal Strength: A Meta-Analysis. Sports Med. 2017 Oct;47(10):2083-2100. doi: 10.1007/s40279-017-0734-y. PMID: 28497285.
- Macho J, Mudrak J, Slepicka P. Enhancing the Self: Amateur Bodybuilders Making Sense of Experiences With Appearance and Performance-Enhancing Drugs. Front Psychol. 2021 Jun 11;12:648467. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648467. PMID: 34177704; PMCID: PMC8232052.
Featured Image: @HypertrophyCoach / YouTube
