6 Fundamentals of Strength & Muscle Gain.
1. Lift Heavy Weights!
Heavy weights stimulate damage in your muscle fibres, thus forcing your body into responding with muscle growth. Essentially you need to teach your body that you are going to be lifting heavier and heavier weights on a regular basis, so it’ll have to respond with more muscle to handle the load. Simple.
2. Eat A Calorie Surplus
To fuel the growth of your new muscle mass you’ll need to be consuming a caloric surplus – ie enough calories to not only maintain your current bodyweight but also to power all that extra training and muscle growth.
3. Get Rest
You don’t get bigger in the gym; all working out does is create the damage your body needs to respond to. So, adequate rest is crucial in order to gain muscle mass. In that sense, gaining muscle is as much about what you do outside of the gym as inside.
4. Progressive Overload
Human bodies need a reason to gain muscle. At core, we're survival machines, so your training efforts must convince your body that getting bigger and stronger is going to present a survival advantage. This is achieved by way of progressive overload – using heavier and heavier stimulus as time goes on.
It’s really simple to do – and rewarding, because you can track your improvement. Here’s how it works...
5. Variance
Our bodies are brilliant at adapting to a training stimulus, so its imperative that you maintain an element of variance in your training programs. Variance might constitute anything from manipulating your rep ranges, rest time, exercise selection or training goal altogether. The important point is that you keep an element of diversity to your workout. Essentially, it's about keeping your body second guessing so it can't take shortcuts and stagnate.
6. Consistency
In the first stages of training for muscle gain you're likely to see some pretty impressive results in a short period of time. Enjoy it – progressions here are known fondly as ‘beginner gains’ and they wont last forever. As your body becomes more accustomed to training and you approach your genetic limit of muscle mass, your results will begin to slow down. I'm afraid it's only natural.