Muscle growth takes time, persistence, and a long-term commitment to the process. However, with the right exercise programs and adequate protein consumption, most people can do it. When it comes to physical improvement, muscle growth is often a top priority.
Adding muscle mass will increase muscle definition, improve your lean muscle mass, and add volume and dimension to your figure in all the right places.
This article details everything you need to know about building muscle, including how to train, what to eat, and recovery protocols.
The Basics of Building Muscle
Anatomically, skeletal muscle is a series of parallel cylindrical fibers that contract to produce force. This muscle contraction allows all external human movements to occur.
Your body is in the process of continuously renewing and recycling amino acids, or the building blocks of protein in your muscles.
If your body eliminates more protein than it replenishes, you will lose muscle mass.
If net protein synthesis were uniform, there would be no measurable change in muscle size. Ultimately, if your body stores more protein than it eliminates, your muscles will grow.
The key to building muscle is to increase the rate of protein accumulation while minimizing the rate of protein breakdown. The process of increasing your muscle mass is called muscle hypertrophy and is one of the main goals of resistance training.
Muscle growth depends on a number of factors, including hormones such as testosterone and growth hormone, as well as the availability of amino acids and other nutrients.
To build new muscle tissue, the main tools to increase the body's rate of protein synthesis are to perform resistance training and get adequate amounts of protein and nutrients in general.
The right level of resistance training will stimulate your body's hormonal response in building muscle, but it requires adequate protein and energy to ensure that this process leads to gain muscle instead of losing muscle.
As researchers and experts continue to study the science of optimizing muscle gain, performing resistance training with moderate to heavy weights, combined with relatively high protein intake, remains is the only training method proven to increase muscle mass.
Tips for Gaining Muscle Although many types of exercise provide health benefits, the only way to reliably stimulate muscle growth is to use your muscles against resistance from moderate to severe.
Additionally, muscle growth depends on the muscles used.
1. Decide on your target number of repetitions Continuous repetition is a useful concept when designing exercise programs for muscle growth. Stimulating muscle growth requires performing strength training exercises with weights that only allow you to perform 1 to 20 repetitions.
In general, high repetitions say that weights you can lift for only a few repetitions tend to build strength, weights you can lift for 6 to 12 repetitions tend to build Build more muscle and more weight than you can lift for 12 to 20 repetitions.
tends to increase muscle endurance.
Understand that these ranges will have crossover, meaning sets of 3 reps with corresponding weights will lead to muscle growth, sets of 8 reps will build some strength, and sets of 20 repetitions will also build muscle.
Additionally, recent research shows that different individuals may respond better to lower or higher repetition intervals when it comes to building muscle.
Simply put, depending on who you are, your muscles may grow more with lower reps using heavy weights or with high reps using lighter weights .
2. Choose the right weight In any case, the weight should be heavy enough so that no more than 20 repetitions can be performed.
The weight you choose to use will cause you to reach or near failure the specified number of repetitions.
For example, if you do a set of 10 repetitions, by the tenth repetition it will be impossible or nearly impossible to do another repetition.
You should rarely do more than "two reps in the tank" at the end of a set if your goal is to build muscle. The general meaning of the rep continuum is that you should go through different training phases using different rep ranges to see what helps your body grow the most muscle.
3.Choose your exercises well As mentioned, muscle building is specific to the muscle being worked. For example, to build bigger biceps, you need to perform exercises that work the biceps.This could be an isolated bicep exercise, such as a bicep curl, or a compound movement that uses the biceps, such as a pullup.
In terms of the best exercise type for muscle building, compound and isolation movements can be equally effective at causing muscle hypertrophy. However, to achieve the best long-term training results, you should incorporate both compound exercises and isolation exercises into your training.
Compound movements like dumbbell back squats effectively stimulate multiple large muscle groups in one exercise and provide more functional movement for actual activities. This results in more effective workouts and more realistic muscle strength. Isolation movements are a great way to target specific muscles, and beginners may initially find them safer and easier to learn than compound movements.
Additionally, isolation movements are often easier to perform when you're tired because you're not stabilizing your entire body.
This can allow you to do a few more targeted sets at the end of your workout when you're too exhausted to do another compound exercise.
4. Structure your workouts to avoid overtraining A good rule of thumb is to do 3 sets of 3-5 compound movements, followed by 3 sets of 1-2 isolation movements for each training session. Typically, you perform your heaviest sets in compound movements and perform higher-rep sets in isolation movements. Assuming you're doing three sets of each exercise, limit the total number of compound and isolation movements to five to seven per workout.
This allows you to benefit from each type of exercise while maximizing the overall muscle-building potential of your training program and avoiding any symptoms of overtraining. How to eat to gain muscle Your diet is the second half of the muscle building equation.
All the weight training in the world will not yield results if you don't supply your body the nutrients it needs to grow new muscle tissue.
Bulking versus cutting Most athletes, bodybuilders, and serious muscle growing enthusiasts follow some variation of a bulking and cutting cycle.
Bulking periods refer to training phases during which you eat more food than you burn to support muscle growth. On the other hand, cutting refers to a period of restricting calories to reduce body fat, all while eating and training enough to avoid losing muscle. To gain muscle, you must provide your body with the right amount of calories and nutrients, especially protein.
This will promote the creation of new muscle proteins from the dietary protein you consume, which will be stimulated by the work you do in the weight room. The main goal of eating to gain muscle during the bulking phase is to provide your body with enough nutrients to grow, but not enough calories so that you gain more fat than muscle.
While some slight fat gain tends to occur during exercise, the sweet spot, where your body builds muscle but doesn't store large amounts of fat, tends to occur when you consuming more than 300 to 500 calories. Your body has a maximum muscle growth rate, beyond which excess calories will be stored as fat.
If your goal is to have lean muscle, you want to avoid gaining too much body fat. Calories needed to gain muscle To gain muscle long term without gaining too much fat, you should eat 300 to 500 calories per day above your basic needs. Many factors affect your basal calorie needs, also known as total daily energy expenditure, or TDEE.
These factors include age, gender, current lean body mass, physical activity, occupation, and underlying health conditions. Your best bet is to use an online calculator to estimate your calorie intake based on the data you enter. Once you have this baseline expenditure, add 300 calories to establish your daily calorie goal. Protein is essential for muscle gain When it comes to nutrients for building muscle, protein is the top priority. Recent research suggests that people training to gain muscle should eat about 0.72 grams of protein per pound (1.6 grams per kilogram) of body weight each day (5). Regarding choosing foods to eat, a nutritionist can give you specific advice. However, eating a variety of protein sources is probably your best bet.
How fast can you gain muscle?
While gaining muscle is surprisingly simple compared to many other goals in life, that doesn't mean it's easy — and it certainly doesn't happen quickly. Serious muscle gain requires months or years of strength training and a good diet. The rate of muscle gain varies between individuals, even when following the same program.
In general, with good nutrition and regular exercise, research has shown that muscle growth of 0.5 to 2 pounds (0.25 to 0.9 kg) per month is the norm Good for maximum potential muscle growth.
Although it may seem small, over time the results can be spectacular. With just a few years of regular training, you can gain 20 to 40 pounds (9 to 18 kg) of muscle, which would be a dramatic physical change for almost anyone starting the program.
resistance training program.
Summary:
Gaining muscle requires you to commit to resistance training and follow a proper diet. Training programs for muscle building should rely primarily on compound and isolation exercises with weights, but tailor specific exercises, sets, and repetitions to ensure size gains and muscle strength consistently and long-term.
Good nutrition includes enough protein, fat, and calorie intake to exceed your daily energy expenditure, enough to build muscle, but not so much that it causes excessive fat gain.
Significant gains in muscle mass take months or even years of regular training, but they can be done by almost anyone. Overall, to achieve your muscle building goals, you need to lift heavy weights, eat well, and maintain stability.
