If building more muscle mass is your latest project, learning the basics can help you complete it faster. While you need to lift something heavy, it takes more than that to get maximum results. Before you start any exercise, whether you’re lifting bodyweight or barbells, learn the proper form. If you don’t focus on your form so you lift correctly, it can diminish the results or even cause injury.
What’s your ultimate goal?
There are two ways to do strength training. One builds mass. The other builds strength. Bodybuilders opt for mass and big muscles, while power-lifters focus on how much weight they can lift. When you look at a bodybuilder, you think they’re stronger because of the rippling muscles. They’re not. When you build more mass, lift lighter weights and do more reps. To build more strength, lift as heavy as possible and do fewer. People often do both types, especially when first starting a program. You can do both. On days you’re working on strength, do three to five repetitions at a heavy load. If you’re working on bulging muscles, do six to thirty repetitions at a slightly lighter load.
Don’t overwork your muscles.
Having a goal is exciting, so you often want to do more. It seems like more is better! When you’re building muscles, that’s not necessarily so. You need to rest your muscles after a tough workout. When you do build muscles, you cause micro tears in the muscles. After the workout, particularly during sleep, those small tears heal. The scar tissue makes them larger. It takes 48 to 72 hours for that to occur. During that recovery time, the magic happens. If you don’t provide adequate rest for the muscles, you could lose muscle tissue.
Eat a healthy diet with extra protein.
Increase your protein intake slightly. If you’re not trying to lose weight, increase your calories. If you are trying to lose weight as you build, either use the calories necessary for your ideal weight or cut the calories by no more than 500 a day. Eat a snack of protein and carbohydrates a half hour before and one immediately following exercise. The pre-workout snack boosts recovery and allows you to maximize your efforts during exercise. The post-workout snack boosts recovery.
- Increase your intensity. Do HIIT—-high intensity interval training— strength-building workouts. Just don’t do more than two intense workouts a week.
- Compound exercises work several muscle groups at once. The larger muscles have the most growth. Always focus on your form when you’re doing these. Turning your hand wrong can pull a muscle and put you on the bench for a while.
- Include some food containing healthy fat. Food like salmon and avocados are healthy sources of fat. Your body must produce certain hormones to build muscle tissue. To do that, it needs fat.
- During recovery, the day after an intense workout, you need rest. That doesn’t mean you lay on the couch all day. You do recovery exercises like walking that increase circulation to heal the tissues faster.
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