Posts Tagged ‘Build Muscle’
This will be my final installment on how to build muscle. I first want to raise the question to see if you are training hard enough. You should realize that the mind gives in before the body physically does. Many of you may lack the physical toughness that is required to push through the discomfort of forcing your muscles to grow.
There are a couple reasons for this and one of them may be a fear of injury. Let me reassure you if you are performing an exercise properly, targeting the muscle you want to work, there should be no injury. Injuries happen when your form is incorrect and you twist your body in weird ways. Maintain body alignment when the exercise gets tough.
Learning how to build muscle is keeping your targeted goal, working the muscle hard enough to 
stimulate growth and increase size. Also remember to maintain the full range of motion with proper body alignment. Remember not to sacrifice form for more reps.
This would probably be a good time to hire a Personal Trainer to provide you the motivation required. They can assist with that final rep while ensuring correct form. They can help with the negatives and give you the ability to push yourself. Personal Fitness Trainers can help you maintain your commitment and keep you motivated to train hard. They can help teach you how to build muscles you seek!
The past few days I’ve been talking about changing up your workouts either by changing the exercise or completely using a different training style. These recommendations will assist you if you want to build lean muscle. Today, I have another suggestion for you, change the order of your exercises. That’s right, vary your exercises.
Generally, we suggest that you work your larger muscle groups first, legs, chest, back…etc. However, to build lean muscle, try working the smaller muscles first. For instance, triceps are the assisting muscle group when you are working on your chest. The idea here, would be to work the triceps and fatigue them. When you go ahead and work on the chest, the triceps will be fatigued and you will recruit more of the pectoral muscles to work harder when doing a bench press. Yeah, it will feel harder, but that is the point…build lean muscle!!
How about changing the exercise order by the progress made from your last workout session. Here’s an example, if you worked your back and got extra repetitions, or increased your weight, that would be a successful session. However, when working on the shoulders and there wasn’t any real progress made with an extra rep with the front or lateral raises, then work the shoulders ahead of back. Another words, work the least progressed muscle part first down and work down to the body part with the most progression.
I hope the suggestions made here today help with your goal to build lean muscle. Any time there is muscle confusion, that is a good thing for growth and results!
Some of my clients ask me what they need to do if they want to build muscle. Knowing their fitness goal of building muscle, there are a few answers to my response. First of all, I try to change their routine every 4-6 weeks. We still work the same body parts but with different exercises to cause the muscles to work in a different manner.
We’ll then increase the number of repetitions before we increase the weight, say from 10-12 repetitions. After they’ve successfully completed their increased reps, then we will increase the weight and drop the number of reps. We build muscle up as we gradually increase reps.
These are just a couple ways to build muscle! Remember ladies, you will not bulk up. Guys, get a spotter to help get those last few reps done. One other thing, be sure to allow for a full recovery between workout sessions.
Ok you have reached a plateau and you are not seeing the results of lean muscle. In order to build lean muscle, your body has to fully recuperate after an intense weight lifting workout. The body has limited capacity to build lean muscle and it will not happen until the muscle has had time to recover. So allow yourself to take time off for a week or 3 every now and then.
If you are looking to build that lean muscle, don’t sabotage yourself with other heavy workouts. You should have brief high intensity weight training workouts specifically for muscle growth. Then sprinkle in low intensity fat burning sessions. You don’t want the body to have to recover from the cardio, then there’s no time for the muscle growth. So space out your high intensity workouts with lower intensity calorie burning workouts to allow for proper rest and recovery to build lean muscle.
The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) has recently studied body composition and strength changes in women with milk and resistance exercise. Another words, does drinking fat free milk help build muscle mass in women? It has already been proven that consuming fat free milk after a strength training workout in men, helps to build muscle and a loss of fat.
There was a 12 week study with young healthy women that compared drinking fat free milk after strength training to drinking a carbohydrate energy drink. The study proved that drinking 500 ml of fat free milk immediately after a workout, increased muscle mass, increased a greater loss of body fat & increased strength gains in younger women than those who drank the carbohydrate energy drink.
Resistance training is really the only way for women to improve physical and muscular strength, metabolic and bone health. Most women don’t consume enough dairy products because of their fat content. However, the benefits specifically after your weight training workout helps younger women. Be sure to drink fat free milk after your workout to help you build muscle!
Ok folks, have you stepped back and taken a look at your workout routine lately? I mean, examined your workouts for each muscle group from every aspect? If you want to build muscle or just strengthen your muscles, have you achieved your results?? Be honest with yourself.
If your answer is no, allow me to help. Last week we talked about Drop Sets. On my website www.Fitnessfromthepro.com the main page goes into detail about Progressive Overload. Today, I’m going to refer you onto slowing down your repetitions. Which means as you push/pull the weight make the movement slowly and deliberately. Do this both ways, including the “negative”. Control the movement!
Now that you are slowing down the movement you may have to decrease the amount of weight you are using. I know we never like to drop weight, but lift like this for a couple of weeks, and I promise you will see muscle gains.
Build muscle or strengthen them this process will help. Try it!
Weight Training Workouts
There are so many different weight training workouts that you could do, I can see where it could be overwhelming and confusing. The first thing you have to do, when developing a weight training workout, is define your end goals. For some, their weight training goal might be to build muscle. Other goals could be to develop strength, endurance or just toning.
There are different weight training workouts to help achieve each goal. The workout used to build muscle is completely different than it would be for developing muscle endurance. Even the routine you would use for men and women would be augmented. For instance, men just like to work their chests and arms, whereas, women concentrate more on their legs…go figure. So, determine your goal, and come back here or www.Fitnessfromthepro.com for more info on how to get there!
When you are doing any kind of strength training and your goal is to build muscle, the length of rest between sets is a very important variable. A variable that is not often addressed. That’s why I’m here to help guide you to get the maximum results out of your workouts!
The length of your rest between sets influences your energy recovery and training adaptations. To achieve the result of maximum muscle strength and mass, you will want to lift heavier weights and have longer rests between sets, say 2-3 minutes. If your goal is for muscular endurance, you should be lifting lighter weights and have shorter rest periods between sets, less than a minute. Resting time for beginners is about 1-2 minutes.
So when your buddy wants to talk in between sets, keep one eye on the clock! Tomorrow we’ll go over the speed of the lift, frequency training and Periodization so you can build muscle.