Building muscles takes time and requires hard work. It consists of training, protein/carbs intake and rest. The science behind muscle building is not difficult to understand. When you acknowledge that muscles are living organisms and do not just grow overnight, your body building efforts have a high chance of success. It begins with how you decode and interpret the ways to increase muscle growth at a safe pace.
The Science Behind Muscle Growth
Exercise has a deep effect on muscle growth. When you exercise, you need to ensure that muscle protein synthesis is greater than muscle protein breakdown. In short, muscle protein balance must be positive. According to Tipton et al, food intake is part of muscle growth building because even when you are into resistance training that promotes muscle protein balance, the effects are negative without something to fuel/sustain it. Foods rich in amino acids and carbohydrates increase muscle protein anabolism. Dietary supplements also assist in promoting lean muscle growth.
Weights to Encourage Muscle Growth
There are many types of exercises that you can take up to promote muscle growth, but one of the most effective is to lift weights (Laidler -Telegraph UK, 2017). When you take up weights all your muscle fibers are at hard work and they respond with muscle growth until a failure point. Therefore what is essential is to lift heavier weights gradually to failure. You should also repeat the movement of lifting at a slow cadence for optimum muscular tension from 10 seconds up and 10 seconds down. However, you can ask your trainer for guidance as to how to perform each exercise. In the event that you don’t have a personal trainer or if you exercise at home, you can search the internet for informative workout articles on topics such as the most effective tricep exercises or how to train your shoulders, and so on.
Another important aspect when building muscle is the rest interval. Scientific evidence shows that rest intervals have insignificant effect to strength gains. It does make a difference to your cardiovascular condition. If you want to enhance your cardiovascular conditioning, short rest intervals are the way to go. You should also consider the frequency and volume. There’s little scientific evidence to suggest that going overboard with training or performing more than a set increases your muscle growth (Thomas et al, 2016). For as long as that one set is done to failure, multiple sets do not make a difference to building muscles.
Planning Muscle Building
Before you embark on a training plan, it is important to get the green light from your doctor to identify if you have any pre-existing conditions that might affect your health when you train with weights. It is also essential to increase your calorie intake to help with the new muscle growth and for the extra training you are going to do. Finally, getting adequate rest is vital in accumulating muscle mass. When you reach failure, it is critical to rest and recover.
Building muscle growth not only promotes strength, power and endurance, it also benefits the health. Specifically, training for strength develops and maintains muscle mass. It reduces the risk of diseases such as colon cancer, promotes faster glucose metabolism, improves bone mineral density and decreases pain from backaches or arthritis.
