Hypertrophy For Dadbods: Muscle Gain For Middle-Aged Men
“How do I pack on more muscle? “
So goes the primal yearning of middle-aged Dadbods across the ages.
Verily, I hereby bequeath to thee the secret knowledge. (Translation: In this article, I'll tell you how to do it. )
I'm assuming you're interested in this topic for roughly the same reasons I am:
You're a middle aged male.
You’d like to look muscular and athletic.
You like feeling strong.
You like BEING strong (as measured by your ability to not humiliate yourself when you're requested to assist in shifting a fridge, or your capacity to not explode a lumbar disc when you haul the pram out of your car boot).
You value good health.
Being a bit muscly makes you feel better, younger, more virile and more masculine (which I suspect is linked to the fact that resistance training influences testosterone for the better).
Who’s this handsome fella?
What's more, I'm assuming you have limited time to train.
(Note: You may have questions about fat loss, too. Fat loss is related to muscle gain and I'll cover it in a separate article another time.)
This article was inspired and informed by the good people at the Barbell Medicine podcast. I highly recommend you check out their website here. They've also produced this podcast on muscular hypertrophy.
What Training Should I Do?
You need to lift weights. (In this article, I refer to weightlifting as ‘resistance training’ or ‘strength training’).
This could be in a gym, at your job (which is probably NOT possible unless you're a landscaping labourer), at your home or in a park.
How often?
Twice per week, minimum. If you can do more, that's great.
However, I admit - begrudgingly - that you'll still get a great deal of benefit - and some hypertrophy - from once per week.
These sessions should include exercises which stress each of the major muscle groups of your body - hitting arms, legs and torso.
It's recommended that you leave 48 hours between stressing each muscle group to facilitate recovery. But if the only time you have available to train is on consecutive days, better to do two conservative sessions per week than one aggressive session.
How heavy?
When this topic is studied, researchers measure "heaviness" according to one-rep-maximum, aka 1RM. This refers to the maximum amount of weight you can lift once only in a given exercise.
The question we're dealing with is: "how heavy do my training weights need to be, in relation to the maximum weight that I can lift once?".
Studies have shown good hypertrophy responses from lifting as little as 30% of 1RM to as much as 85% of 1RM.
When framed like this, we can see that there's a lot of leeway to train how you prefer.
If you prefer heavy weights for fewer reps, you can forge ahead just as you enjoy. God speed. Your sets will be short and intense.
If you'd rather load yourself up with less weight for more reps, you too can get massive with your preferred lightweight strategy. Your sets will require less powerful effort, but they’ll test your resolve for longer.
The key thing seems to be doing as many reps as it takes to get quite close to “failure”, which is the point where you'd no longer be able to do any more reps.
How many sets and reps?
Reps
For compound exercises (where you're moving multiple joints at once, like a squat where the hips and knees both move a lot) you should do somewhere between 3 and 20 reps per set, to the point where you have between 1 and 4 "reps in reserve" (RIR) before you’d hit failure.
For simple/isolation exercises (where one joint only is being moved, like a biceps curl where only the elbow moves) you should do somewhere between 3 and 20 reps per set, to the point where you have between 0 and 3 RIR
Sets
There's some debate about the right number of sets for hypertrophy amongst beefcake academics.
But from what I can see, here's the takeaway for regular Joe Schmoes like you and me:
Minimum 2-3 sets
Doing more sets will produce more hypertrophy, only the increase will not be linear - going from 1 to 2 sets produces more benefit from going to 2-3 sets (NB: there is a "dose dependant relationship" between total volume and hypertrophy - the more you do, the more you grow - but the majority of benefit is derived from the first 2-3 sets)
BUT, it is possible to do too many sets. If you push yourself too much, you may not get the progress you're after. This is because:
1. You'll be so fatigued that you can't push yourself in reasonable proximity to muscular failure, which is key to driving a hypertrophy response
2. You'll become tired, rundown and unmotivated which will interrupt consistent, regular training
3. You'll push your body into defensive mode where it will prioritise just surviving and not growing
Important note: It is impossible to say where the “too much” point is for you. That will take time and experimentation on your part.
Which exercises?
Again, you can follow your preferences to a large degree.
It is better to do some resistance training that you enjoy than to fuss needlessly over minor details.
But if you were intent on selecting exercises to maximise hypertrophy, here's what you'd need to do:
Choose exercises which take you through a large range of motion.
Choose exercises which can effectively isolate the particular muscles you wish to train (NB: an effective isolation exercise will typically have a very supported setup, and just move one joint at a time - e.g. the knee extension machine)
Perform exercises which are not complicated, risky or technical and that don't require lots of balance. A heavy barbell back squat is a good example of a movement that IS complicated, (somewhat) risky and requires lots of balance to execute the movement. The issue with this sort of exercise is that it can be very fatiguing of your nervous system. A fatigued nervous system is less capable of firing strongly to help deliver the muscular tension which is needed to send a hypertrophy-generating signal to your body.
You can use compound movements. These are exercises which move multiple joints at once, like a machine chest press.
Benefits:
These can work multiple muscle groups at once, which is time efficient.
These also tend to map better onto real life situations and activities, which can lead to greater transference of strength improvement to tasks which are important to you.
Drawbacks:
These movements may be more fatiguing and soreness-inducing than isolation exercises, and more technically complicated.
You can use isolation movements
Benefits:
These can be less arduous to approach when you're tired (e.g. I quite like doing machine based isolation exercises if I’m worn out or unmotivated as you can just sit, staring into space in a catatonic stupor between sets. Plus the movement path is specified for you by the machine and I find it ramps down the effort required).
Drawbacks:
Requires complicated, expensive machinery (and therefore a gym membership) unless you’re a cash-up Dadbod.
How hard can I push myself?
Here I’m talking about how demanding your program should be in general terms.
There’s no one correct answer to this question. Just bear the following in mind:
- If you push too hard, too soon or for too long, you increase the risk of injury, extreme demotivation and stalled progress.
- If you don’t push very hard, or are extremely inconsistent in your training, you’ll not experience much muscular hypertrophy.
Growing muscle is energetically demanding. When your body is under stress, it is reticent to spend resources on growing muscle, preferring to reserve capacity for essential functions. It will only allocate energy to muscle growth if it senses it is safe to do so (read: you’re not overly stressed or unwell and you’re getting good sleep).
Again, you need to find your own sweet spot through a process of trial and error. Sorry :(
Diet
You need to have sufficient protein intake.
Protein provides the building blocks for muscle growth. Ideally, if you're looking to pack on some muscle tissue, you'd get 1.5 grams per kilogram of body weight per day from healthy, unprocessed sources like:
Chicken breast
Chicken thigh
Salmon
Beef
Tuna
Tofu
Milk
Natural greek yoghurt
Eggs
Cottage cheese
Generally speaking, unprocessed meats have the highest amount of protein per gram.
Processed forms of protein would include deli meats (like ham and salami), bacon and any other meats which have been altered to taste better or last longer. These cannot form the backbone of a high protein diet.
Supplementing your diet with high quality whey protein can really help.
I like True protein powders because they have a lot of protein per unit of weight with relatively few calories and a great taste. Plus, they're readily digestible (read: no stinky protein powder farts - at least not for me personally).
Another factor to consider is total energy intake. You need to be getting enough calories as it costs your body lots of energy to build and maintain muscle.
If you're restricting energy intake for the sake of fat loss, you can expect this to have a negative impact on muscle gain. Bear in mind it may only be a small negative effect.
BUT, if you're relatively new to weight training, and you're overweight or obese, you ought to expect that you WILL actually gain muscle mass as you lose body fat, so long as your energy deficit is not too large.
Highly trained individuals may, however, experience difficulty in putting on muscle mass without plentiful energy at their disposal. This is known as a calorie surplus. But, be careful not to overdo a surplus as you may gain an excessive amount of body fat, which is bad for your health.