The most effective (and brutal) training for muscle growth

Alongside my gymnastic training (which is predominately strength based), my favourite type of training is muscle hypertrophy - developing lean muscle. There are various ways to achieve this but one of the most brutal, but effective techniques is German Volume Training (GVT). I’m not entirely sure of its origins, but broadly speaking, it’s a training technique that was developed in Germany (East Germany?) in the 70s to help athletes develop muscle in their off-season. I learnt about GVT from reading Muscle & Fitness magazine in my 20s but really started to understand it when my PT college tutor told me about work by a US strength coach called Charles R Poliquin. I followed his excellent GVT programmes on Bodybuilding.com and put them into practice with my own clients.

Overview:

GVT is where specific muscle groups perform a very high ‘volume’ (number) of repetitions each week, with carefully calculated increases in weight every week. Exercises are focused on compound moves (exercises that work multiple muscles at once e.g. squats, deadlifts, benchpress, pull-ups etc) and before training starts, a baseline is created for each exercise (the approx weight that you can ‘lift’ 10-15 times for a specific exercise).

Programme structure:

There are 2 main phases, each taking 6 weeks but I’m going to focus on the first phase here.

Week 1: Having established a rough baseline weight for each exercise you’ll perform 10 sets of 10 repetitions (with proper form) with a 90 second-2 min rest period in between sets. (Due to the high volume, GVT takes a fair bit of time so I’d recommend pairing exercises e.g. if you want to work your chest and back then perform a super-set with benchpress and back rows)

Weeks 2-6: assuming you were able to lift 100 reps in total per exercise on week 1, then on week 2 you need to increase the weights by 2.5-5% per exercise. Continue increasing the weight by roughly the same % until you’ve finished 6 weeks worth of training. If you struggle to complete 10 sets of 10 reps with the weight then reduce the weight slightly and see if you can perform the required 100 reps.

A few things to bear in mind:

GVT is very demanding - give yourself at least 1 day’s rest between sessions and perform no more than 4 exercises in one session
To be effective, you need to record the weights you lifted each week, calculate the % increase for the forthcoming week and stick to the programme.