If you are like many people looking to maximize muscle growth there are three (3) strength training secrets that you really need to adopt today to make you workout smarter.
While building skeletal muscle mass quickly can be as straightforward as eating right, training hard, and resting well on a consistent basis, people get frustrated by a lack of progress because of their failure to maintain a balance between their diet, workout, and recovery.
The truth is, skipping your meals can affect your training as you would lack the calories and energy needed to perform your scheduled workouts. Also, if you train hard, but fail to rest or sleep well, you risk having a sluggish recovery that can adversely affect your strength and size training.
What you should know is that you can build muscle fast by incorporating muscle growth strategies that combine a proper dietary schedule, workout program, and recovery plan.
With that in mind, this article puts a spotlight on three (3) strength training secrets to help you achieve your hypertrophy goals.
Gain Muscle Efficiently with an Effective Workout Program
In your quest to build muscle mass, you need to develop a workout program that will help promote hypertrophy in the most efficient way possible. To this end, there are three (3) muscle-building keys that you need to understand, as they can be the difference between a successful weight training program and a failed one.
#1. Mechanical Tension
Whenever you engage in weight training, you put several muscle groups of your upper and lower body under a lot of mechanical tension which is basically the amount of stress and strain that you put your muscle through during your strength training sessions.
Mechanical tension can be classified into passive or active. The former refers to your skeletal muscles being stretched out without any form of contraction while the latter refers to your muscles being stretched out in isometric contraction.
However, when you create both passive and active mechanical tension during a full range of motion strength training session, you trigger what is known as a maximal hypertrophic response.
With passive tension you trigger a mind to muscle connection when you workout. This mind to muscle connection is a trigger for your skeletal muscles to begin to respond to the stress, strain and tension that comes with lifting weight during your workouts.
The best exercises for muscle growth are those exercises that promote a combination of passive and active tension to produce a maximal hypertrophic response rather than only passive tension.
It is important to know that when you lift weights, your skeletal muscles do not recognize the amount of weight you decide to lift, the only thing your skeletal muscles are aware of is the amount of tension that it is placed under by the weights.
As you achieve a full range of motion through the combination of passive and active tension during your strength training, you optimally work and activate your skeletal muscles by increasing the time under tension.
It is important to note that increasing your weights is not necessarily a good thing. In order to promote hypertrophy, you need to achieve a full range of motion when lifting weights.
If you are unable to achieve this full range of motions because the weight you lift is too heavy, you will not be able to efficiently promote hypertrophy.
So you need to keep a delicate balance between progressive overload and your ability to achieve a full range of motion during your weight training.
To this end, the best way to optimize workouts for growth is to trigger mechanical tension by gradually lifting heavy weights (but not too heavy) that allows you to complete a full range of motion using pre-activated skeletal muscles.
When engaging in an exercise or lifting weights, it is important that you perform three (3) second pauses during the eccentric phase or that period when your muscles are flexed out due to tension.
#2. Metabolic Stress
Before your skeletal muscles can grow in size and mass, they need to experience metabolic stress. As you spend time training hard by lifting weights for example, you tend to develop a situation where your skeletal muscles are filled with blood and experience hypoxia, a condition in which your muscles are deprived of oxygen.
In addition to this, your activated skeletal muscles will be filled with glucose, hydrogen, phosphate, and lactate metabolites which are responsible for the pump response that you get after a rigorous workout.
The buildup of metabolites on your skeletal muscles is indicative of your muscle tissues sustaining micro-tears as a result of your training sessions.
As your muscle tissues experience these micro-tears, they will need to be able to adapt to the stress, strain and tension placed on them, repair the micro-tears as soon as possible, and grow in mass and size in order to be ready for any micro-tears that may occur during your subsequent strength training sessions.
In summary, you will promote hypertrophy with a smart training for muscle gain approach involving progressive overloads that place sufficient metabolic stress on your skeletal muscles.
This then causes micro-tears leading to repair and followed by muscle growth to help your skeletal muscles adapt to any mechanical tension placed on it in the future. Also, to achieve pumps, you need to increase your repetitions (reps) to anywhere from 12 reps to 20 reps per set.
#3. Muscle Damage
Muscle damage is a consequence of both mechanical tension and metabolic stress on your skeletal muscles. As explained already, your skeletal muscles experience micro-tears during an intense workout session.
This damage to your muscles is countered by the response of your muscle fibers to repair itself during your recovery phase and as a result, the skeletal muscle groups affected will grow larger and stronger than before.
However, your period of recovery is important if you want to achieve hypertrophy. If you do not get enough rest and recovery time, your damaged muscles will not be properly repaired and therefore they will not be able to grow in size and mass in time for your next training routine. Overtraining is therefore dangerous and could lead to severe injuries.
Conclusion
If you want to achieve hypertrophy gains, you may want to spend between four (4) and five (5) days in a week engaged in a workout program. This workout program should also see you engaging in between four (4) and five (5) exercises on each day you train.
Also, whenever you workout, you need to make sure that you maintain a delicate balance between the three (3) mechanisms for hypertrophy revealed in the article, namely; mechanical tension, metabolic stress and muscle damage.
This way you will be able to activate a maximal hypertrophic response that will see you maintain skeletal muscle growth in the long-run.
If you need more strength training secrets, you can reach out to our in-house IFBB PRO for free coaching today.
