How often should you train a muscle group? It's a question that leads into the most important aspect of program design.

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In today’s world, we have more accumulated knowledge available to us as individuals than entire generations did not so long ago. It’s great to have the world of knowledge at your fingertips but knowing how to make best use f it is another thing entirely.

Here are 10 guidelines/rules to help you read and understand fitness science.

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How does your brain choose which muscle to use during an exercise?

The nervous system ‘matches’ the areas of the muscle with the best leverage to the task. But there are also individual differences, even when using the same exercises.

We don’t always recruit the same muscle or even the same muscle regions with an exercise.

This has been shown in studies. Different parts of the same muscle can grow asymmetrically depending on the exercise used.

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The holy grail. Lose fat, build muscle at the same time.

Recomping is hard, but possible. The biological processes that grow muscle and burn fat compete with each other. The fastest way to lose fat is via a calorie deficit. Building muscle is fastest in a surplus. But it is possible to hit maintenance calories and do both. It's much easier under some circumstances.

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Exercise selection is a rabbit hole. And once you've found your 'perfect' program - how and when do you change it? It's all about finding balance between personal preference, making progress, and optimising for performance over time.

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Sign up for my Free Training Program Secrets Mini Course.

Follow me on Instagram (I lost my old account, by the way. The new one is @coachluketulloch).

I have a new instagram account: @coachluketulloch

I've been answering questions on my stories and thought I'd do a podcast to go a little more in depth on some of them. Enjoy!

Forget everything else for a second. This is the one thing you MUST do if you want long term muscle growth.

Progressive overload simply means training must stay challenging over time. It makes sure your training stays effective as you get bigger and stronger.

Why? Because it maintains the number of stimulating reps in each set as your progress.

The reps closer to failure are the most stimulating to muscle growth.

As you approach failure on a set, your brain recruits more and more muscle fibres to keep lifting the weight. The largest groups of fibres are saved until last - meaning the last few reps are stimulating the most muscle fibres and making them grow.

But unless you add reps or load over time, you'll start dropping these reps.

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As we approach muscular failure, muscle fibre recruitment goes up. This stimulates the motor units that contain the majority of the large, highly-responsive fibres to grow. So in simple terms, the idea is that the last 5ish reps before failure are “stimulatory reps” because they involve both full motor unit recruitment and a high level of tension.

But recent research indicates training to failure is not necessary. So should you train to failure? Are 'effective reps' a crock of shit?

Listen in and I'll give you my take.

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One of my biggest frustrations with the fitness industry is confusing terms. Often there is a mix-up with technical definitions and colloquial use of terms - words like progressive overload, protein synthesis, fatigue, lean mass, intensity, failure/training to failure, hypertrophy, water, bloating, and so on.

In this episode I try to clear up what we mean by these terms, because it has implications for understanding messages in research and social media.

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@_luketulloch