18 year old man wants to get more muscle mass, but how?
Question:
I am 18 years old young man and I have started going to gym about 3 years ago. I’m quite active in different sports, I play soccer, basketball and other sports for fun almost daily. I have been working out with a certain routine, Mondays: Legs, Tuesdays: back and shoulders, Wednesdays: chest and arms, Thursdays: Legs, Fridays: back and shoulders and on Saturday: chest and arms. Now I have seemed to hit a wall, I don’t get any progress anymore. I am 6’1” tall and weight only about 165 lbs. My goal has been to get more muscle mass, but for some reason I don’t seem to be able to achieve that. I eat 4 – 5 times a day. Is there something wrong with my exercising program, is it too much to have aerobic exercise in addition to the gym training?
Answer:
There are few things you can easily try to get your exercising back on track. First of all, it is really good that you have a program for the gym, it is probably the single most important thing when you want to get achieve some results. Usually as you start exercising you get fast progress in the beginning and after some period you start to hit the wall and the progression stops. At this point you start to need to get your exercising more systematic to keep your muscles getting the stimulus they need to keep on growing. It isn’t just for the beginners, also more experienced exercisers do get once in a while to situation where they seem to get no progress at all, this is due to adaptation. You muscles will adapt to a high level of exercising and you stop getting better results, even if you would do more exercising.
I personally am in favor of whole body workouts, three times a week using the HST training method. I have felt that it is really effective and easy exercise system, if you want to get bigger and stronger muscles.
If you want to stick to your body part exercising days, I try to give you few hints. First of all, reduce the number of exercising days to four times a week for a period of three months. After this you can try a system of five exercise days in a week for 3 months.
You should try to avoid of doing aerobic exercises on the same day as you workout at the gym. For those who want also to lose weight and gain some muscle mass, a short 30 minute jog after hard workout is a good way to burn fat, but it will also lose the muscle gaining effect of your training.
Remember to keep at least one complete day off of exercising! Many beginners and more advanced exercisers seem to forget this at some period of time, you need to give your body time to regenerate! Otherwise you will hit that invincible wall of no progress.
Change between hard exercising weeks and weeks where you do muscle pumping exercises. On the hard weeks, do 6-8 repetition sets with big weights. On the pump weeks, do 12 - 15 repetition sets lighter weights. You can also try to do supersets on the pump week, this means of doing two exercise sets of different movements back to back with no pauses.
Keep a journal of what kind of weights you are using on different exercise and weightlifting moves. Remember to add more weights if something starts to feel too easy!
Try to add more weights to your exercising moves, after 2 – 3 weeks, and keep on doing this as long as you can. Remember though, keep the movements clean! If some weight is too big, the use less weights! The most important thing is to keep the movements clean and safe!
Use a spotter who will help you to get the most out of your hard workout weeks and help you if your muscles aren’t able to do that last repetition of some exercise.
Somethings to consider to help your exercising:
-Try to eat 5 – 6 times a day, about 3 hours in between of the meals.
-Remember to drink enough of water!
-Immediately after your exercising, drink a recovery drink!
-Make sure that your every meal has some protein in it.
-Remember to exercise hard, it should never feel too easy! Remember to give your also the time to recover which it needs by keeping the days off from training.
Suggestion for 4 day exercise schedule:
Monday: Upper back, Shoulders, Calves
Tuesday: Glutes, Back, Abdominals
Wednesday: -
Thursday: Legs
Friday: Chest and arms
Saturday: -
Sunday: -