Hypertrophy Specific Training (HST) is a fancy way of explaining a method of an effective approach to promoting muscle growth. Muscle hypertrophy is a term for the growth and increase of the size of muscle cells. The most common type of muscular hypertrophy occurs as a result of physical exercise such as weightlifting, and the term is often associated with weight training.
To avoid getting too fancy, HST can be broken down into four simple points of emphasis:
- Train each body part every 48 hours, or basically three times per week.
- Increase the weight each and every workout.
- Decrease the reps every two weeks.
- Decondition the muscle before you do it all over again.
With that all being noted, seems pretty simple, right? Well, it is not the easiest to put to action. You want to make sure before developing an HST program that you get all your RMs (rep maximums) established. This is going to be the jumping point for your program and movements.
The rep range maximums you want is your 15, 10, and 5 rep maxes. The whole body will be trained three times a week using basic exercises such as squats, bench press, shoulder press etc. The workout plan is divided into five 2-week periods (10 weeks total). During the first 2-week split you will do 15 rep sets, 10 rep sets during the second 2-week split, followed by 5 rep sets during the third. The fourth 2-week period you will do negative reps or alternatively do another 2-week period of 5 rep sets while increasing the weight if possible. The fifth 2-week period is for resting or strategic deconditioning. (negative reps are when the weight is too heavy to lift unassisted)
