Adding muscle mass isn’t really hard if you know what you are doing. If you exercise in the correct way and eat right you will obtain more muscle in a year than the vast majority of men and women do in five.
The majority of people exercise for years and years and make very little gains. If this is you, don’t get worried, you are not alone. This article will hopefully get you on track and make your hard work in the gym more rewarding.
If you have been getting your exercises from the muscle mags or the bodybuilding routines that you see on the web, you are not going to put on muscle proficiently. The workout sessions that you will find from these sources are not targeted towards the typical, drug free body builder or weight lifter. They are simply going to induce you to overtrain and very likely get discouraged from a lack of results.
The fundamental thing for you to remember is that you will need to have progressive resistance in order to add muscle mass, you need to give your body a reason to develop. If you go in to the gym and do the same exercise routine, same weights, and same reps, you just aren’t going to gain any real strength or size. This seems totally obvious, but I see people young and old in my gym all the time just going through the motions, and practically never making any growth.
You need to increase the work to force your body to react and then give your body enough sleep to properly grow, and the best diet for it to improve. It’s really that basic. There are a ton of various exercises that you can do, many different rep schemes, as well as quantity of sets. All of this is necessary to a point, but if you do not push your body more than its previous workload and give it the appropriate rest, it will not matter what you are doing.
People get stuck on the amount of repetitions to perform or how much rest in between sets, and they finish at whatever number rep they are meant to do. Do not do this, don’t stop short of what you can actually do. Do as many reps, sets, or amount of weight that will increase the amount of work that you did in your last training session. If you can do extra, then do it, keep going until failure. Once at failure, you can even push a little more to cause an even bigger workload. Don’t train to failure without a spotter though, or you might get in over your head. As a rule of thumb, somewhere between 5 to 12 reps will be efficient for adding muscle tissue. That being said though, I have used reps as low as 2 and as high as 20 under certain circumstances and have made awesome gains. Don’t get too worried about how many reps. Just train hard and push yourself further than what you did in the past while keeping proper form.
If you add to the amount of work and give your system the rest and correct nutrients that it needs, you are going to add muscle mass. If you are not gaining on your current routine, look at the three important things I touched on; progressive resistance, rest and recuperation, and a proper diet. At least one of these will be off, if you are not gaining muscle. Take a glance at each and make the modifications needed and soon you will be back on course and adding muscle mass and getting the body that you desire.