Adding
muscle seems to be a mystery to most, yet if you pick up a copy of any
fitness or bodybuilding magazine and you’ll almost always see a headline like this:
"Gain 15 Pounds of Muscle in 6 Weeks."
If it were so easy you’d have millions of muscle-heads running
around. Even though building muscle tissue can be a challenge, I’m going to outline
some very specific principles that can pack on the muscle faster than you can throw away
that copy of "Muscle and Fiction"!
Before we get started though I want to clarify a few points.
- The ridiculous claims made by most fitness and bodybuilding magazines are only there to
get you to buy that issue – nothing more!
- If you are serious about strength training you need to be reading books and NOT cheesy
fitness magazines
Ok… here we go.
In order to add muscle tissue you must force the body to add it. Your
body won’t just add a pound of muscle just because you followed a 3-set workout that
you read about in Muscle + Fitness. You need to give the body a reason to make
improvements – in this case add muscle tissue.
You have to provide what I call a "stimulus". This can be
done in many ways and I’ll address a few in just a moment. Basically, you need to
force the body to add muscle by subjecting it to levels of stress it is not used to. Some
methods are more obvious than others but all can work. Here are a few examples of how this
can be done effectively.
First, the basic and common methods:
- Increase weight or resistance
- Perform more repetitions
- Perform more sets
- Move the resistance slower
- Rest less between sets and exercises
Now for the more advanced methods:
- Pre-exhaust (perform an isolation exercise first and immediately continue with no rest
on a compound movement. ex. chest flye and then chest press)
- Static holds (hold the resistance in the hardest position of the range of motion. ex.
the top position during a leg extension)
- Partial reps in weak range (perform a portion of the rep where you are weakest. ex. the
top half of a rep of leg extensions)
- Strip-set (after a warm-up set, perform 3 sets back to back with no rest while starting
with the heaviest weight possible and each time strip off some weight to allow you to
continue)
- 1 ½ reps (perform one full rep and then on the second rep only perform half the normal
range of motion and then return to starting position to begin the next rep. ex. one full
rep of lat pulldowns, pull second rep all the way down, resist weight back up but only
half way and then pull back down)
These are just a few examples of methods of increasing intensity to
ensure progress. The key point to remember is that whatever you do it must be progressive
in order for it to elicit a physical change. This is even more critical for those looking
to add muscle size.
Although this article is geared towards individuals who are interested
in gaining muscle size, the principles can also be used for individuals who want to build
strength, increase metabolism, or tighten and tone muscles.
Here are some general recommendations for different goals…
If your goal is to tighten and tone muscles:
- Focus on increasing reps, decreasing rest, and changing exercises frequently
- Train each muscle group twice per week
- Perform fewer sets of many different exercises (1-2 sets per exercise)
|
