How to gain muscle?
When we talk about being strong or having power in your muscle, usually we mean that some specific muscle group is really strong or can endure resistance exercising for a long time. The needs and desires for muscle strength and appearance may vary greatly, some just wants a rounder better shaped butt when another couldn’t care less about the looks but wants just to get more strength. This is where the workout programs come along, different programs aim for different results. No matter, are you a pro athlete or just a Joe Average, the goals dictate what kind of program you need, how often, how intensive and quality of training. Here I try to go through the basics of gaining muscle.
Different types of strength
Strength training can be divided into three main part, explosive power, endurance and maximum power. There are many different ways to exercise muscles and / or to get more strength. Maximum power can be exercised without considerable muscle mass gain, then there is another way to exercise to get more power and to get more muscle mass. This muscle mass plus power training is called hypertrophic training. In jargon, this kind of exercising improves the muscles nervous system and also activates a protein synthesis, which in other words means efficient muscle growth.
ABC of Muscle gain
When you are starting out to get more muscle mass a recommendable load for single repetition is somewhere around 70 – 85% of your maximum repetition load. Basically this means that your muscles really need to work to get 8 – 12 repetition set done. It is recommended to do 1 – 3 that kind of sets for each muscle exercise. Keep 1 – 2 minutes of break in between sets. For more advanced exercisers a load is recommended to be 70 – 100 % from your maximum load, 1 – 12 repetition sets and 3 – 6 sets for one muscle exercise. When your aim is just to gain muscle, to get the best results you should focus on 6 – 12 repetition sets. Recommendable break between sets is about 2 minutes. Now you might be wondering is there a formula to calculate your maximum load for different exercises, the answer is unfortunately not. You need to go to gym and find out where your maximums are, preferably take a friend along to help you if you try to lift too big weights.
As for repetition, the speed of the exercise is calm and the repetitions should always be controlled. This means that when you do bench press the push from the chest to almost straight arms takes about 1 – 2 seconds and the part where you lower the barbell takes as long. So what ever you do, don’t do the lifting part in controlled manner and then just drop the weight.
How long does it take to see results? After 9 – 12 weeks of regular 3 times a week weight exercising you should start to see some gain to your muscle mass. Especially at the beginning don’t go overboard with your exercising, if you want you can go more often to gym than 3 times a week, but no more than 5 times a week! If you go too often, at some point you start to wear your muscles out and they don’t get the time to re-cooperate, but three times a week should be more than enough for most of us. Just make sure you workout HARD!! If you don’t sweat or you don’t feel anything in your muscles then you should take more weights.
You should warm up and cool down before and after the exercising. For warm up you can do some exercises with very light weights, just to get muscles warmed up and after the exercising stretch a bit to start the body’s recovery immediately after your exercising.
Keep your exercising smart and the results will come
Hypertrophy training is usually hard, so you need to ensure the right amount of food and rest for your body. As in all kinds of exercising, there will come a time when your exercise schedule says something else and your body is saying something completely different. It is only common sense to listen to your body! If your muscles are really sore from last exercise or you are otherwise tired a complete day off from training is definitely in place. There has been lot of evidence that versatile exercising will help you to get a better fitness level faster. The same thing goes for gaining muscle, from time to time change the exercises or change the number of repetitions in your sets, also completely different kinds of exercising like martial arts, walking etc. will stimulate your body and refreshen your thoughts.