If you’re looking for shortcuts to build muscle I suggest you stop reading now. The truth is there’s no way to avoid the bulk of the work when it comes to getting your dream body, think about it, if it was that easy everyone will be walking around with ripped 6-pac abs.
What’s the point in that?
If you’re interested in adding a little more volume, a little more definition to your muscle groups and do a little extra hard work in the process, read on.
Muscle growth depends on many factors that can’t be listed out, but the major factors involved are genetics, nutrition, rest and hard heavy workouts. Tips, tricks and the works will help you add on a little volume where you may be lacking or get out of that dead end plateau you’ve suddenly found yourself in.
The problem with workouts is that we’ve designed them to build muscle, where the body is a natural work of God; our workouts are simply man made strategies. Granted they work well enough but sometimes these routines don’t quite live up to the expectations of the natural stressors our bodies are designed to react to, so don’t expect any easy ways out of this article.
Complexes
The thing about building muscle is that muscle growth in reality is a bodily response to better withstand the stress that it goes under, in simple it’s an adaptive mechanism. Like any adaptive mechanism, the body won’t be persuaded to put on sheets of hard to maintain muscle just to put up with an annoying set of deadlifts that lasts 10 seconds and doesn’t start again for weeks. The solution is simple, overload the muscle.
Well not that simple but you get the idea, overworking your muscle is not what is meant by this statement, instead add a low load, high speed set immediately after your usual high load, slow set. For example follow your set of sumo squats with a high velocity set of star jumps. The idea is to work both ST muscle fibres and FT muscle fibres thus giving you a complete workout.
Negatives
This one is a little complex, basically putting it, muscles are stronger on the positive concentric than the negative, this is why it’s harder to push the bar away from your body when you’re bench pressing but much easier to control it when returning it towards your body.
The motive of a negative is to increase the load of the negative concentric by one of two ways. The first way is to slow the negative concentric significantly when compared to the positive (Bring it down slower) and the second way is to switch exercises, for example by lifting your DB bench press rep and then returning it down as a skull crusher.
Hydrate
This one cannot be stressed enough. Water makes up the majority of your body and is needed in abundance for any type of recovery. Hydrate yourself adequately throughout the day and continue to do so with an added simple carb complex during your workout.
The Mixup
Unless you’re an athlete trained to recover at a rate faster than the average human being and unless you’re on banned steroids or insane amounts of supplements like Glutamine, mixing your cardio phases with your bulking phase is going to end up failing you.
It’s simple; you can’t be conditioning and bulking at the same time without superior genetics or supplements. The more you condition yourself during your bulking phase the more Cortisol you’re going to secrete, resulting in a catabolic state where there won’t be any significant muscle growth. If you’re serious about putting on some muscle, give the conditioning a rest.
Sleep
Once again this one is a given. Sleeping is your body’s way of getting some much needed rest to recover and recuperate, significant amounts of the muscle building process also happens while you’re asleep. In addition sleep is mandatory to perform a good workout.
Slow It Down
Studies suggest that heavy sets lasting from 30 to 70 seconds are perfect for stimulating muscle development. Customary exercise programmes call for a definite number of “reps” per set as a roundabout method to arrive at a specific TUT (time under tension). Realistically, most men perform sets of 10 to 12 reps in less than 15 seconds. Performing sets for time guarantees that your muscles are stimulated for the time periods necessary for stimulating hypertrophy.
Compound Exercise
This one is obvious, when it comes to building muscle, the more muscle groups the exercise stimulates the better it is. This is considering that you’re not an advanced builder looking to isolate muscle groups. When it comes to chest muscles for example always opt for a bench press over a fly simply because the bench press puts stress on triceps, shoulders and core muscles in addition to the pecs where the fly focuses only on the pecs.
By Dilshan Senaratne
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