Dr. Andy Galpin

That's no problem whatsoever.

But we don't want to leave big chunks of muscles completely unchallenged.

That's going to present problems more likely, if not now, down the road.

So we also wanna challenge these muscles across multiple stimuli, meaning exercises.

So whether you prefer your body weight, machines, dumbbells, kettlebells, or any number of other strategies, those are absolutely fine.

All are incredibly effective, and at the highest level, it actually doesn't really matter that much which of those strategies you try, because at the end of the day, it's just about stimulating the muscle.

However you go about that is absolutely fine.

So you have lots of options there.

Perhaps in a future episode, we'll get into the details and spend the entire discussion on that, going over pros and cons of those different strategies and tactics.

But for now, at, again, the most zoomed out level, you've got a tremendous amount of options regarding which exercise you select and which modes and methodologies you do to engage that resistance exercise.

The range of motion is critical.

You want to use the largest range of motion you can while still being safe and protective of both the exercising joint as well as the joint above it and below it.

So an example here, let's just say you're interested in growing your quadriceps.

You want to have a lot of activity over both the knee and hip joint, but you want to make sure that you're doing that in a case in which you're not compromising your low back and, say, your feet.

And so making sure we're protecting the joints above and below the muscle group is important as well.

So we really want to challenge our muscles as much as we can in a variety of ways there.

In terms of how much to do, the repetitions per set doesn't really matter such that you can have success in a number of them.

Anywhere between, say, as low as five repetitions per set all the way up to 30 or more repetitions per set can be equally effective for muscle growth.

The total amount of sets per week is probably the bigger determinant.

From there, you probably want to be in the neighborhood of about 15 to 20 working sets per muscle per week.