Easy Muscle Building By Training Less Often
If you put the maximum work into something, you will get better results. This truth holds good for most areas of life.
When you study harder, your grades will improve. If you work to fine-tune your athletic skills, you will be better at athletic endeavors. If you put in more time in practicing an instrument, you will be a better musician.
So, it only makes sense to think that you will get massive muscles if you spend extra time at the gym, doesn’t it?
Actually, this is far from true! Conventional wisdom doesn’t apply to this area of bodybuilding.
I’m sure that right now you’re saying to yourself….
“Huh? How can spending less time at the gym let me get the muscles I want?
For sure! It’s easy to see why this really does allow you to get huge muscles if you look at the muscle-growth process from the beginning.
When you think about it, you can see that every process that occurs in your body is done to keep you healthy and alive. The human body is a fine-tuned organism designed to adapt to its external environment through millions of years of evolution.
The body signals its discomfort when it is hungry or thirsty, it tans when exposed to excessive sunlight, it builds calluses to protect the skin, etc.
Do you know how your body responds when you break down your muscle tissue at the gym?
Full points to you if you said, “You get muscles”! You’re so right.
If you can make your body feel like you have posed a threat to its musculature, your muscles will respond. Since the body thinks that something harmful is happening, the natural adaptive response is to make the muscles increase in size (hypertrophy) to protect you. If you continue to increase your workload from week to week, your body will get bigger muscles because it will continue to adapt and grow.
Isn’t that easy?
It is easy to understand, although you must keep in mind that this only works if you give your muscles sufficient recovery time. If you don’t allow enough time for recovery, your muscles won’t grow in strength or size.
In order to trigger your body’s adaptive response, you should stick to the minimum amount of volume required to stimulate it, so that you can continue to progress and eventually get massive muscles. If you can push your muscles beyond what they can handle and trigger that thousand-year-old evolutionary alarm, you’ve done your job. Putting your body under more stress will only increase the time your muscles take to recover.
Many people workout too frequently and perform more sets than they need, when trying to get massive muscles. High intensity weight training is a lot harder on the body than most people think. Unfortunately, the majority of bodybuilders create workout programs that do not help their gains and keep them from making the progress they’re working so hard for.
With these 3 basic guidelines, you can get the body you are after
1) Training more than 3 days per week is a no-no.
2) Workouts should never be longer than 1 hour.
3) Commit to 2-4 sets for smaller muscle groups (shoulders, biceps, triceps, calves, and abs) and 5-7 sets for large muscle groups (chest, back, and thighs).
You want to do all your sets to concentric muscular failure and be sure to add more weights or increase the reps every week. If you’re training consistently with full intensity, then further increasing the frequency or duration of your workout will be detrimental to your gains.
A great online resource to look at is this one on Muscle Building .It will guide you and possibly save years of wasted effort.
http://billjo-easymusclebuilding.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
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