Whether your goal is to get bigger and stronger or improve power and explosiveness for sports, you want to see progress — and pronto. Muscle Building
But building muscle efficiently requires more than just putting in time at the weight rack. Along with your strength-training regimen, diet, and lifestyle choices all play important roles.
For those seeking muscle building tips, here are some strategies to get you started.
1. Perform Multi-Joint Exercises
Resistance training is the most efficient way to build lean mass — especially if you pack your workouts with big, compound (multi-joint) moves like the squat, bench press, lunge, and pull-up.
“You can certainly build muscle with all types of moves, but a strong base in multi-joint efforts, at least some of the time, is a good idea,” says Michael Ormsbee, Ph.D., interim director of the Institute of Sports Science & Medicine at Florida State University.
Science agrees: Compound exercises cause the greatest increase in testosterone, a key muscle-building hormone, according to researchers at the University of Connecticut.
2. Don’t Just Lift Heavy
When you lift heavy weights or do explosive exercises like sprinting, you target the type II muscle fibers we discussed earlier. But studies show that type I fibers (a.k.a. slow twitch — the kind used in endurance activities) also have growth potential, so don’t ignore them.
Once every week or two, target those type I fibers with low-weight, high-rep work (e.g., 3-4 sets of 15 or more reps per exercise).
3. Get Plenty of Shut-Eye
Shoot for a minimum of seven hours a night. Getting less than that on a regular basis can cause you to rack up sleep debt, which can put the brakes on protein synthesis (aka muscle growth) and increase protein (read: muscle) degradation, according to a study by Brazilian researchers.
Also Read: How to get rid of the Turkey neck?
