For those of you reading this article and who don’t know who I am, my name is Chris, and I have been training for over 10 years and have been a personal trainer and coach for 6 years. My specialist area is natural physique development, basically how we can maximize muscle growth while still looking aesthetically pleasing without the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
Some think the above statement is impossible; I certainly did when I started training and soon found out people were using drugs to build their physiques. I was pretty disheartened and started to think the only way to build a truly impressive physique was through the use of drugs, but I knew I didn’t want to go down that route. So, it became my mission and passion to prove that you can build an epic physique naturally. It has taken a lot of time, learning, continual effort, but I am at a stage where I have built my physique to a high level, having competed in 11 bodybuilding shows from 2019-2023 as a Men’s Physique Athlete. In that time, I have won a natural British title and competed at the amateur world level. More recently, in 2023, I competed in a non-drug tested federation where I was up against guys on steroids, and I ended up winning my height category… proof that you can build an epic physique naturally!
10 years of natural physique development
I would like to let you guys in on two key underrated factors that have really helped to level up my physique and maybe something you look to implement into your training, if part of your goal is to build muscle.
See, when I first got into bodybuilding, I automatically assumed that bodybuilders lifted a lot of heavy weight but were very stiff and very immobile. Although I noticed many bodybuilders were like this, they didn’t always look the best or they didn’t have a very aesthetic appeal to their physique. Then I started to notice some of the guys and girls with the best natural physiques I’ve ever seen were doing the splits on stage or contorting their bodies into crazy poses. How can some of the best natural bodybuilders be so mobile?
Well… one of the key factors to muscle growth is whenever we are challenging a muscle in a movement, we want to be able to take a muscle through as full of a range of motion as possible. In fact, most of the current research coming out at the moment is showing that a lot of muscle growth occurs in the stretch of that muscle, not the contraction or “squeeze” that people (including myself) typically think more muscle growth occurs.
A couple of articles if you are interested in reading further: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6510035/ , https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1050641123000834#:~:text=Eccentric%20training%20produced%20greater%20and,Vrd%20increased%20in%20both%20trainings
So therefore, I believe it’s imperative that you keep up your mobility and practice taking your movements through as great a range of motion as possible to maximize muscle growth. So, if you need to work on this, get booked in with Dion and follow his advice... shameless plug! In fact, if you’ve been focusing on just lifting heavy weight but skimping on your range of motion, you are leaving gains on the table. You are going to have to take that knock to your ego, drop the weight, and work on a full range of motion… I know when I made this step, I saw huge changes to the way my physique progressed.
My second point is it’s not just enough to be lifting that weight in any old manner; you can’t simply think of lifting the weight from point A to B. You need to be spending more time and controlling the weight in the lengthening part of the motion (also known as time under tension). Now we know lengthening the muscle is key to muscle growth. For example, in a squat, we want to be controlling the descent as we are stretching our quads and glutes through both knee and hip flexion. Trust me when you slow down the stretch (eccentric phase) focusing on keeping your attention on the target muscle, you are going to initially notice how hard the movement becomes, but after a while you’re also going to get a tonne of muscle growth from this. Controlling a movement in this manner is a skill, that’s why bodybuilders sometimes look like they are moving a heavy weight in slow motion like it’s nothing.
Combining a full range of motion with control over the movement, then being able to understand training to a high intensity (topic for another blog), is your trifecta to unlocking gains with your training… that’s, of course, if you are recovering well outside of the gym.
I hope you found this article useful, and if you are interested in finding more about building muscle, please feel free to give me a follow on Instagram at @crendallcoaching.
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