Adding muscle seems to be a mystery to
most, yet if you pick up a copy of any fitness or bodybuilding
magazine and you’ll almost always see a headline like this: “Gain 15
Pounds of Muscle in 6 Weeks.”
If it were so easy you’d have millions of muscle-heads running
around. Even though building muscle tissue can be a challenge, I’m
going to outline some very specific principles that can pack on the
muscle faster than you can throw away that copy of “Muscle and
Fiction”!
Before we get started though I want to clarify a few points.
The ridiculous claims made by most fitness and bodybuilding
magazines are only there to get you to buy that issue – nothing
more! If you are serious about strength training you need to
be reading books and NOT cheesy fitness magazines.
Ok… here we go.
In order to add muscle tissue you must
force the body to add it. Your body won’t just add a pound of muscle
just because you followed a 3-set workout that you read about in
Muscle + Fitness. You need to give the body a reason to make
improvements – in this case add muscle tissue.
You have to provide what I call a “stimulus”. This can be done in
many ways and I’ll address a few in just a moment. Basically, you
need to force the body to add muscle by subjecting it to levels of
stress it is not used to. Some methods are more obvious than others
but all can work. Here are a few examples of how this can be done
effectively.
First, the basic and common methods:
- Increase weight or resistance
- Perform more repetitions
- Perform more sets
- Move the resistance slower
- Rest less between sets and
exercises
Now for the more advanced methods:
- Pre-exhaust (perform an isolation
exercise first and immediately continue with no rest on a compound
movement. ex. chest flye and then chest press)
- Static holds (hold the resistance
in the hardest position of the range of motion. ex. the top
position during a leg extension)
- Partial reps in weak range
(perform a portion of the rep where you are weakest. ex. the top
half of a rep of leg extensions)
- Strip-set (after a warm-up set,
perform 3 sets back to back with no rest while starting with the
heaviest weight possible and each time strip off some weight to
allow you to continue)
1 ½ reps (perform one full rep and then on the second rep only
perform half the normal range of motion and then return to
starting position to begin the next rep. ex. one full rep of lat
pull downs, pull second rep all the way down, resist weight back up
but only half way and then pull back down)
These are just a few examples of
methods of increasing intensity to ensure progress. The key point to
remember is that whatever you do it must be progressive in order for
it to elicit a physical change. This is even more critical for those
looking to add muscle size.
Although this article is geared towards individuals who are
interested in gaining muscle size, the principles can also be used
for individuals who want to build strength, increase metabolism, or
tighten and tone muscles.
Here are some general recommendations for different goals…
If your goal is to tighten and tone muscles:
- Focus on increasing reps,
decreasing rest, and changing exercises frequently
- Train each muscle group twice per
week
- Perform fewer sets of many
different exercises (1-2 sets per exercise)
If your goal is to increase strength
and power:
- Focus on increasing weight
- Train each muscle group once every
7-10 days
- Perform multiple sets of each
exercise (2-5 sets per exercise)
If your goal is to increase muscle
size
- Focus on shocking muscles by
changing variables frequently (exercises, set and rep schemes,
rest time, etc)
- Train each muscle group on a
variable schedule (experiment by training a muscle group 3 times a
week and then once every ten days)
- Perform multiple sets for a while
and the perform single sets for a week or two
Some final reminders:
The recommendations above are general and of course would need to be
adapted and adjusted for your personal goals and experience. For
those of you who are advanced and may be thinking there’s no way you
can build strength by training once every 10 days I challenge you to
try it for at least 4 weeks, or those of you who think that you need
to stick to the same basic movements like bench to build size I
challenge you to try shocking the muscles by changing the exercises
you perform each week for 4 weeks, and those of you with little
experience I hope that you’ll throw away the fitness magazines and
learn what really works.
There are some great books on these subjects and for those of you
who are serious about strength training I personally recommend you
check out the books “APEX” and “No Turning Back” by Brian Johnston.
You can find them online at www.iart.com
If you have any questions about the techniques described in this
article please feel free to contact me. You can email me at jesse@achieve-fitness.com
I wish you the best! |
