When it comes to physical improvement, muscle building is often a top priority. Increased muscle mass will enhance your muscle definition, improve your lean body mass, and add size in all the right places.
Building muscle requires time, persistence, and a long-term commitment to the process. While gaining significant muscle mass may seem challenging, with proper training programs and adequate consumption of certain foods, serious muscle building is possible for most people.
This article breaks down everything you need to know about muscle building, including how to work out, what to eat, and recovery protocols.
What Are the Basics of Muscle Building?
Physically, skeletal muscles are a series of parallel cylindrical fibers that contract to generate force. This muscle contraction allows all external human movements.
Your body is in a constant process of renewing and recycling the amino acids, or protein building blocks, in your muscles.
If your body removes more protein than it adds, you will lose muscle. If net protein synthesis is balanced, there will be no measurable change in muscle size. Finally, if your body deposits more protein than it removes, your muscles will grow.
The key to building muscle is to increase the rate of protein deposition while reducing the rate of protein breakdown.
This process of increasing your muscle mass is known as muscle hypertrophy, and it is the primary goal of resistance training.
What Are the Factors That Influence Muscle Growth?
The process of building muscle is driven by various factors, including hormones like testosterone and growth hormone, as well as the availability of amino acids and other nutrients.
Your primary tools for increasing the rate of protein synthesis in your body are resistance training and obtaining adequate amounts of protein and overall nutrients.
The right amount of resistance training triggers your body’s hormonal response for muscle building, but it requires the availability of sufficient protein and energy to ensure that the process results in muscle gain rather than muscle loss.
While researchers and experts continue to study the science of optimizing muscle gain, resistance training using moderate to heavy loads, combined with relatively high protein intake, is the tried-and-true method for building muscle.
What Tips Does Wellhealthorganic Offer for Building Muscle?
While various types of exercise provide health benefits, the only reliable way to drive muscle growth is to use your muscles against moderate to heavy resistance. Additionally, muscle growth is specific to the muscles being used.
1. Choose the Right Amount of Weight
In all cases, the weight should be heavy enough that performing more than 20 reps is impossible.
The weight you use should leave you at or near failure within the specified number of repetitions.
For example, if you are doing a set of 10 reps, by the tenth rep, you should be unable or almost unable to do another rep. If your goal is to build muscle, you should rarely have more than “two reps in the tank” at the end of a set.
The overall implication of the rep range continuum is that you should go through different phases of training using various rep ranges to see what works best for your body for muscle growth.
2. Choose Your Exercises Well
As mentioned, muscle building is specific to the muscles being worked.
For example, to build bigger biceps, you need to do exercises that work the biceps. This could be an isolation exercise like bicep curls or a compound movement that uses the biceps, such as pull-ups.
Regarding the best types of exercises for muscle building, both compound and isolation movements can be equally effective in inducing muscle hypertrophy.
However, for the best long-term fitness results, you should include both compound and isolation movements in your training.
Compound movements, like a barbell back squat, effectively stimulate multiple large muscle groups in one exercise and provide more functional movement for real-life activities. This leads to more efficient workouts and more practical muscle strength.
Isolation movements are a great way to target specific muscles, and beginners may find them safer and easier to learn initially compared to compound movements.
Additionally, isolation movements are easier to perform when you are tired, as you are not stabilizing your entire body. This allows you to do a few extra targeted sets at the end of your workout when you are too tired to do another compound exercise.
3. Structure Your Workouts to Avoid Overtraining
A good rule of thumb is to do 3 sets of 3-5 compound movements, followed by 3 sets of 1-2 isolation movements per workout.
Generally, you do your heaviest sets using compound movements and higher rep ranges on your isolation movements. Assuming you do three working sets per exercise, limit your total combined compound and isolation movement exercises to 5-7 movements per workout.
This allows you to benefit from each type of exercise while maximizing the overall muscle-building capacity of your training program and avoiding any symptoms of overtraining.
How to Eat to Gain Muscle?
To gain muscle, you need to provide your body with adequate calories and nutrients, especially protein. Doing so will aid in building new muscle protein from the dietary protein you consume, inspired by the work you do in the weight room.
Your body has a maximum rate of muscle-building, and beyond that limit, additional calories will be stored as fat. If your goal is defined muscles, you want to avoid gaining too much body fat.
Necessary Calories for Gaining Muscle
For sustainable muscle gains without excessive fat, you want to eat 300-500 calories per day above your baseline needs.
Necessary Protein for Gaining Muscle
When it comes to nutrients for muscle building, protein is the top priority. Recent research suggests that those training to gain muscle should eat about 0.72 grams of protein per pound (1.6 grams per kilogram) of body weight per day.
By incorporating these tips into your routine, you can enhance your Body Health. For more detailed information on Healthy Life at wellhealthorganic.com, visit our website.