How to Increase Muscle without Increasing Weight
Increase intensity without adding weight.
A very obvious way to make an exercise harder, and thus force more adaptation, is to add more weight. This is a pretty well known strategy and usually the first one people think of, however it’s not the only one available. If you remember back to the progressive overload post, you can also increase reps, increase range of motion, and play with the tempo to increase the demand put on muscle fibers. Here I'd like to talk about how increasing the range of motion of an exercise puts more mechanical tension on the muscle fibers and thus increases demand, which in turn increases muscle growth.
First off, what is mechanical tension and why is it important? In this context, mechanical tension is the tensile force that is put on loaded muscle fibers. Tensile force is one that is pulling the muscle fiber in opposite directions.
The muscle fiber has to resist this force and actively contract against it and this makes the fiber adapt and grow in order to handle the demand. So mechanical tension is important because it makes muscles bigger and stronger through the adaptation to this force.
As mentioned above, one way to increase mechanical tension and thus muscle mass is by increasing the force applied to the muscle fiber by adding more weight. It is well known that lifting heavier weights or adding resistance increases muscle size. But this isn’t the only way to increase mechanical tension. Another way to do this is to increase the range of motion of an exercise, which puts more tensile force on the muscle fiber, thereby forcing adaptation and increasing its size. Stretching the muscle fiber more fully produces more force - when the muscle fiber works in these end ranges of motion, it increases demand. In practice this means that you need to get a full range of motion in exercises and go deeper in a squat or lower in a chest press. Exercise selection is very important here in order to select exercises where the range of motion can be increased. For example selecting a heel elevated SL squat will provide more ROM than a reverse lunge, thus putting more tensile force on the working muscles.
Notice the knee angles
The takeaway here is that it’s good to use a variety of strategies to increase mechanical tension. That could mean adding more weight or it could mean increasing the range of motion or both. Just make sure that you’re not sacrificing range of motion for increasing weight. I think it’s better to be able to work through the full range of motion even when increasing weight, so small weight increases are key here. I’ve yet to see any research stating whether increasing one over the other is better, but movement quality is always the goal so make sure you’re not sacrificing quality work for more weight. Get that full ROM and reap benefits that not only include bigger muscles, but better range of motion and more mobility.
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