Gym Hacks vs Basics

What do you think gets more views, basics, or shortcuts?

You don’t need to give this a seconds thought.

People are lazy. People have goals. People want a shortcut to those goals because they are lazy.

Shortcuts aren’t hard and boring, they’re easy.

These are what the biggest fitness creators are pushing.

• “Here’s a tier list of bicep exercises!”

• “You need the deepest stretch possible!”

• “Boost your testosterone with these 5 simple things to get more muscle!”

It’s because the things they recommend are so easy that they get so many views, binge watchers, and stay on top.

So what actually is a gym hack?

Oddly depending on how it’s presented the basics can become gym hacks.

• “Have as much fun as possible in the gym”

• “The most important thing is being consistent”

• “Train really intensely”

These are gym hacks if that’s all the advice is, the most important thing that makes the basics the basics.

They are fundamentals.

The basics are recommendations that are grouped together based on the fundamentals.

These fundamentals are demand, and supply.

They’re motor unit recruitment, and mechanical tension.

They’re protein and calories.

So knowing that (and the stuff I’ve wrote about in their respective lessons) we can make some easy recommendations.

Here’s what following the basics would have us do.

1. Maximise our stimulus

   1. 4-6 sets per week per muscle

   2. 0-1 reps from failure

   3. highly motivated and driven sets

   4. proper warmup sets

   5. 2-3m rest breaks

   6. 2x frequency

2. Make sure supply is good

   1. 1g protein per LBS of bodyweight

   2. getting all our essential fats

   3. making sure you’re a healthy bodyfat and maximising carbs

3. Check it’s working

   1. Make sure there’s progressive overload

   2. Look at what the scale/mirror are saying

That’s it.

Following those will literally give the best gains possible as it’s maxing sure the demand is as high as possible, and making sure the demand is there.

Sure have good other nutrition and sleep and mental health bla bla bla, but that’s not really direct training.

It’s also ridiculously simple to follow.

Now let’s work out what recommendations those gym hacks would make us prioritise…

1. Get as big of a stretch as possible on every exercise

2. Make sure that the form is perfect and is robotic

3. Disadvantage the muscle you want to train so it’s in the worst possible place to train it

4. Overfeed so that you can build the most muscle possible

5. Get a huge pump so you can bring blood into the muscle and get other stuff that’s good for growth

6. Focus on that insane mind muscle connection

7. Make sure you’re always sore and increase sets if you’re not getting sore

8. Have as many sets as possible, keep adding these

9. Make sure your exercises have a huge burn so you know you’re working the muscle well

10. Do a ton of cardio to improve your capillaries so that the muscle gets a ton of nutrients

11. Do nucleus overload so that your muscle can break the scientific limits and get a super good stimulus

12. Do really intense exercises and sprinting as that boosts testosterone

13. Sleep for 10+ hours a day to maximise testosterone

14. Eat a ton of saturated fat to get as much testosterone as possible

15. Make sure to do a deload every month or take entire months off

16. Add an arm day because normal workouts don’t grow arms

17. Do intensifiers and go beyond failure to increase the stimulus your muscles are getting

18. When progressive overload slows down switch exercise

19. Have a super super slow eccentric and make sure you’re focusing on it

Okay, wow.

These are our recommendations, these are the shortcuts!

Incredible.

It really does hurt when I get guys asking me if they should do this stuff to get better results, especially as I have so much info about all this out there 😭 

Let’s break it down one by one and explain what these “hacks” would actually do.

1. Stretch add a ton of unnecessary damage to your workout, sometimes change what muscle an exercises biases

2. Robotic form get in the way of progressive overload as a lot of your cognitive load is on balancing a glass of water on your head

3. Disadvantage a muscle makes it so you’re NOT biasing a muscle and instead are reducing it’s involvement

4. Overfeeding makes you get fat, makes you have to cut, doesn’t give additional growth

5. Pump makes you end the set prematurely, causes unnecessary damage

6. Mind muscle connection can be good (isolations/brainless technique movements) otherwise makes the exercise worse

7. Soreness just something that means you’re not used to it, prioritising this means you’re adding unnecessary damage for no reasons

8. Junk volume does nothing, adds more fatigue, gets in the way

9. Get the burn makes you end the set early, adds more unnecessary damage

10. Capillarization is something that happens to support muscle, you cannot force growth through it, or get it before to help

11. Nucleus overload is an invention from someone that has no idea what he’s talking about, and doesn’t work

12. Sprinting/intense for testosterone is something that effects growth in no way, and also doesn’t effect testosterone in a meaningful way

13. Oversleeping is something that shouldn’t be forced and is something you should listen to your body for

14. Tons of saturated fat both won’t help testosterone, and will hurt your entire cardiovascular system

15. Deloads do nothing at all. A month deload is just going to make you lose most of your muscle

16. Arm days aren’t necessary in a routine and adding them won’t be a silver bullet to fix things

17. Intensifiers and (beyond failure) don’t do anything helpful for your stimulus and just add fatigue

18. Switching exercise just means you gained some technique and coordination, and then when that slowed down decided gains were over, they weren’t.

19. Slow eccentrics can be good for injury prevention but they aren’t insane for growth, milking it just adds fatigue.

You can see how all of these gym hacks that people start stacking do nothing.

Every single one of those gym hacks that are learned have to be unlearned in order for you to make proper progress with the basics.

People are insanely attached to each hack.

Has anyone questioned the fact that a hack, is a “hack”?

So all that being said, save your friends from this.

Send them the newsletter, send them my channel, save them.

Feel free to email me about The Deep End/Shallow Lane if you’re trying to get this dialled in a bit more.

At the end of the day the people who make the most progress have mastered the basics.

Along the way there might be tips and tricks they learn, these don’t really matter though.

It’s adding a small 1% benefit most times.

Those out there who focus on gym hacks, and shortcuts, they lose.

Your Hypertrophy Hero,
Fletcher

P.S. Later today I’ll start breaking down my workout skeleton on my YouTube channel to help people who struggle with reading walls of text.