Saturday, October 5, 2013

Four Key Ingredients To A Successful Muscle Building Routine

By Arnold Sylvester


If you were able to ask one fitness based question and get a straight answer, most men would ask for advice on how to build muscle as easily as possible. Sadly, getting a straight answer on any topic in fitness is something which most men deem to be impossible. Simple techniques such as high intensity interval training and power-based explosive training have been over complicated beyond the point where most people can hold their interest.

This may come as a little shock, but the foundations of building lean tissue are primarily the same as they were thirty or forty years ago. Things have got more advanced in certain areas, but the overall principles still stand tall.

They are:

1. Multi-joint exercises outperform isolation exercise every day.

These are your biggest exercises and they include moves such as the barbell squat, deadlift and bench press.

Any compound exercise will recruit more muscle fibers than an isolation move, therefore you'll gain more size over a shorter period of time.

2. Know your rep range.

Studies show that the greatest amount of lean muscle is gained when aiming for a weight which causes you to fail in the 8-12 rep range.

You'll be stronger on some exercises, naturally, but you can begin using your rep range as a guide to tell you if you are going too light or too heavy.

3. Change your program as you progress.

If there was one thing that held people back in the gym more than anything else, it's consistency.

That may sound strange, but consistently lifting the same weight over and over will not see you hit new results. As your body begins to adapt to an exercise, you will need to push it harder than before to see new results. Therefore, make increasing your lifts an absolute priority.

4. Don't forget to sleep.

Contrary to popular belief, you do not build new size in the gym. The process of building actually takes place during sleep...

If you try to get eight to twelve hours of sleep on a consistent basis, it is a guaranteed method to increase your size and strength. That's because the body releases growth hormone and testosterone at this point, so neglecting this phase of the day is not advised.

Imagine trying to build on a plot where the foundations were not yet set. Your construction would be constantly falling down again, that's exactly what you're doing to your body by not allowing rest.

These time tested, established techniques set the foundations for how to build muscle as far as relevant scientific research goes. While it's easy to over complicate things and turn any gym program into a science lesson, the basics of techniques such as hypertrophy, high intensity interval training and fat loss are primarily the same as they were a decade ago.




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