if you want to make your girth a little bigger and your lines a little more pronounced, the workouts you do can't be buddhist, no one will dispute that. But do the same movements for countless workouts and your muscles will adapt.
Slow to no progress in muscle building? Here are 4 ways to make an immediate difference and build muscle again. There are many factors that affect muscle gain, see which behaviours are holding you back?
1. You may not be overtraining, but under-recovering
think about the effects of strength training on your body. Strength training breaks down muscle fibres and we cannot gain muscle through strength training alone; the only way to see the effects of training is to recover properly after strength training.
Recovery can come in many forms. There are 3 aspects of recovery that every little one should know about - they are not only beneficial for building muscle, but they can improve the overall health of the body.
nutrition.
The food you consume before and after training determines how you perform in the gym and whether you will build muscle afterwards. If you eat and drink indiscriminately, you will feel bad about training. If the food you consume provides your body with enough nutrients, your muscles will recover from strength training and grow fuller and stronger.
Flexibility.
It's not just people who do yoga that need flexibility. Good flexibility is good for every little one. Not taking care to improve and maintain joint flexibility when strength training can increase the risk of injury. Continually improving flexibility in your daily life will help your body recover from training and allow your body to improve in overall strength, health and muscle.
sleep.
Everyone has their own schedule and it is important to ensure that you get at least 7 hours of quality sleep every night. If you go to the gym feeling tired and sleep deprived, then training performance will not be good. The occasional unhealthy meal may not affect training performance the next day, but nothing can help if you don't sleep well at night.
Lack of sleep can increase cortisol levels, leading to increased body fat and decreased muscle mass. So, get to bed early!
2. Will you be more concerned about saving face than gaining muscle?
With fitness, it's important to put your pride aside because it can affect training. Many guys feel compelled to lift as much weight as possible to test how strong they are, rather than trying to build muscle. Setting more weight than they can handle on the barbell results in many wrong reps and inability to complete sets. If you think of every workout as a competition against someone else, you will enter a dead end.
If you look at each workout as a small goal to reach your ultimate goal, then you will build muscle and get stronger. To do this, you need to consider volume in your training programme. Volume refers to the total amount of weight lifted during a workout, which is a key factor in progress and why maximum weight does not always lead to maximum gains.
say it's bench press day and you start your training with a 60kg weight. For the first set, do 10 reps, for the second set, do 7 reps and for the third set, do 4 reps. So 21 reps have been successfully completed and the total is 1260kg completed (60kg x 21 = 1260kg). First of all, the body was not ready to do 3 sets with 60kg without warming up before using the official workout.
Also, it would have been better for the workout if the weight on the bar had been reduced. Assuming a few warm-up sets and reducing the weight to 55kg, do the first set for 10 reps, the second and third sets for another 10 reps, and finally successfully complete 30 reps at 55kg, excluding the warm-up, for a total of 1650kg.
by reducing the weight, 390kg was added to the overall workout (1650kg - 1260kg = 390kg), which is a very big difference in training volume.
3. Are you focusing on isolation and machine movements rather than compound movements?
There are definitely suitable patterns for isolation training. Most guys like to do push-ups, dumbbell curls and straight arm presses. A large percentage of guys over-focus on isolation movements at the expense of compound movements. If you want to build muscle, think of training as a three-course meal: The warm-up is the appetizer, the compound movements are the main course, and the isolation movements are the dessert.
compound movements are multi-joint movements that train more than one muscle group at a time. These movements include squats, push-ups, hard pulls and pull-ups. Compound movements not only build muscle, they also make the body stronger and increase the number of muscle fibres that can be trained.
The more muscles used in a movement - whether compound or isolation - the more weight it will bear and the more muscles will grow. You can't build muscle without a strength base, and you can't get stronger even by doing curls.
the body becomes stronger when it is in a state where it is generating strength by mobilising the maximum number of muscle fibres to move the external load. If you focus on isolation movements only, you are only pumping blood to the muscles. Focusing on compound movements mobilises more motor units, brings more strength and gains more muscle.
4. Lack of variety in your training?
Variety of movements is a key factor in building muscle. Remember when you first started training and the next day were your muscles sore? That's because the muscles are adapting to the new movements. Whether you are an experienced enthusiast or a novice, muscles will respond to new movements.
the muscles get used to a particular way of moving and once they escape their comfort zone, they have to do their work differently and receive new challenges.
Even so, the muscles will adapt quickly, so if they keep doing the same movements, using the same weights and intensity, or if they can't remember the last time they saw results, then it's time to do something new. It's not so much about scheduling new movements every other day, but rather about interspersing some new movements into the training programme to stimulate the muscles.
another way to add variety to your workouts is to use the same movements, but you can change the order in which you do them. If always starting a leg workout with a deep squat, then change to a hip dash or arrow squat to start. If always starting with a flat bench press for chest work, then change to an upward incline bench press to give the muscles a new stimulus.
key points to build muscle
suggestions to adapt your training and enhance its effectiveness by
1. Help your body recover from training by consuming adequate nutrition, doing flexibility activities and getting quality sleep.
2. Treat training like building blocks; when training, the choice is to do more sets and reps of weights.
3. Focus on doing compound movements; the use of isolation movements is an improvement in deficiencies.
4. Train muscles in new ways to increase the variety of training.
break down muscle adaptations and tackle the paper tiger that's holding you back. Master the 4 points and building muscle is so easy!