You are 25 years old, 5'10", weigh 155lbs, and haven't trained since college.
How do you get bigger?
You are 45 years old, 6"2', and weigh 175lbs. You used to play football 15 years ago but since then you've only been doing cardio.
How do you get bigger?
You are 30 years old, 5'8", 205lbs.
You have been training for a few years, you squat 435lbs, you deadlift 500lbs and press 220lbs.
How do you get bigger? And most inportantly stay bigger?
It seems to me like the answer to all of these is to increase bodyweight and get stronger on the main lifts. Now, the last guy might need assistance work that needs to be done in a higher rep range, but from what I understand it's not necessarily because it increases the volume of your muscles, but mostly because it gives you a break from the stress of very high loads while keeping a relatively high volume so that you can continue progress on the main lifts, which is what ultimately makes you bigger (because of higher mechanical tension). Even if the main use of the assistance exercises is to hypertrophy, it's still functional to getting stronger on the main lifts, and not a separate thing (for example during the novice phase getting your chin ups up to 3x10 increases the muscle mass which is useful to Press, reduces deadlifting frequency and progress can continue for a long time, and that's why they're in the program, not because they make you look big)
From what I understand there is no way to get bigger in a sustainable way without increasing strength on your squats, deadlifts, bench Press and press, no matter what your level of advancement is (why would ronnie coleman strike for an 800lbs squat when he could've kept a 700lbs squat and do high rep work instead?)
The fact that you might need higher rep range work to achieve this goal does not mean that high rep range work alone is ultimately optimal for size. Eventually you will have to increase the weight on the bar, and doing so with isolation exercises or a high rep range is not sustainable.
I repeat myself, if your concern is aesthetics or more precisely aesthetics for competition (bodybuilding) than it's a totally different area of expertise that doesn't only involve training, but a whole lot about nutrition as well, which is not as important when you just wanna get big and strong.
Please anyone correct me if I'm misinterpreting something.
You think I systematically lied--three years ago--so that one day I could claim numbers? I'm not lying. I'm terrible at the bench; when I did SS, I was squatting 420 x 5 at the end and benching maybe 140 x 5.
Here's a 507 x 5 squat.
Here's a poverty bench.
I basically agree with what you've said here, but this isn't what you were saying before.
And you, of course, are the exception.