The Top 5 Factors for Muscle Growth (+5 That Don’t Matter), From a Bodybuilding Coach

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.

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.

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.

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.

4. Tracking

There isn’t a bodybuilder on Earthincluding 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 you’re in a calorie deficit via some form of nutritional monitoring.

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 lastsand 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.

“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.

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

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