Muscle Gaining Secrets

One thing that is very common among people who want to get slimmer is the fact that they’re all very impatient. They engage in a workout or training routine to lose weight or to achieve firmer body, but they don’t want to wait a long time to see significant changes.

When they fail to see results in a week or two, they easily give up. The truth is, there really isn’t any shortcut to achieving a slim and stable figure. It takes constant training and willpower to consistently follow your training schedule while making sure that you are eating the right foods.

While there aren’t shortcuts, there are some good-to-know things that will help your journey to a fitter and more buffed figure become easier.

Gradually increase the weight on your lifts.

Putting your muscles under increasing demand will slowly make it adapt to the stress. This is how you’ll achieve your goal to grow stronger week by week. Unless you increase the load on your weights, there won’t be progress with your strength. It’s basically founded on the idea of progressive overload.

Adjust rep ranges in a per week block

Increasing the load on the weights that you are lifting is mainly focused on strength training. Since your main goal is body building, you can’t just stop at routines that only impact your strength. If it’s the load that you need to adjust with strength training, when it comes to muscle build-up, it’s the reps that you need to adjust to see significant changes.

The rep ranges that you need to remember in order to get optimum results are:

8-12 reps per set

6-8 reps per set

You have to focus on 1 rep range for about 8-10 weeks before moving up to a higher rep range. Anything lower doesn’t really do anything in increasing muscle size and making it firmer.

Train to ‘almost’ muscular failure for every set

Now a lot of training guides will suggest that you create sufficient intensity with your training to trigger the stimuli to encourage your muscle to respond adaptively, thus allowing its growth. But here’s the trick; another thing that is necessary to achieve muscle gain is consistency and frequency in your training. If you train to failure, you’d be too sore and probably gain some injury that may cause you to miss a day or two of your training. That is totally counter-productive.

So what do you do? You have to train ‘almost’ to muscular failure. Stop your training just before you achieve muscular failure. That way, your body can develop a defense mechanism that is triggered by intense training which leads to increase in muscle mass. Additionally, you won’t miss a day of training trying to recover.

Fill up on protein

Protein is very important in muscle build-up. Amino acids are the building blocks of muscle fibers and that is what protein is basically made of. It is important that you supply your body with just the right amount of protein on a daily basis because it is required for optimum muscle growth.

The friendly approach to it is consuming a gram of protein for every pound of your total body weight. So if you weigh 220 pounds, you need 220 grams of protein every day. If you want a little challenge, you can always calculate your daily protein requirement by multiplying your lean mass weight (in Kilograms) by 2.75. For example, if your lean mass weight is 70 kilograms, your daily protein requirement will be 193 grams.

Determining your daily protein requirement is easy, what’s challenging is making a meal that will meet that requirement; and even more challenging is to make that meal delicious. You may have 4 to 5 recipes up your sleeve, but you don’t want to be eating the same food over and over.

Fortunately, recipes for delicious muscle building foods are available, with steps that are very easy to follow and ingredients that are readily available in your kitchen. The Anabolic Cooking cookbook has been specifically compiled for this purpose. Its goal is to provide you with options on tasty muscle building foods that are easy to prepare, affordable, and effective for muscle gain.

Get enough rest

Strenuous training is highlighted for muscle building, but getting enough rest and sleep is as important. Your body needs to recover completely from your intense training as your muscle tissues does self-repair and grow while you rest. Aside from that, growth hormones are released while you’re under deep slumber.