How Do I Grow Bigger Muscles?
If you regularly surf the internet and have stumbled across this site by putting in the above search string I bet it’s been one hell of a journey. Big muscles are big business and hundreds of websites have been set up to entice you into buying an array of muscle building supplements.
Like many “slimming” websites, the promises which these sites and respective companies make, prey on your desire to achieve your goal and have you reaching for your wallet within minutes. In the same way that buying a slimming pill is not necessarily going to make you slim, buying muscle building products is not necessarily going to give you herculean muscles.
Muscular development is a far more complex physiological process than many people think involving genetics, hormonal interaction and highly specific resistance training and you are being conned if you think that scoffing 5 special protein shakes a day will help you in your quest for a larger musculature. Here’s why:
Stimulating growth – The Training.
Our genes have a hugely influential effect on individual muscle growth, which is why at your local gym you may see young guys far younger than you, putting in half the effort than you, yet boasting biceps you would happily pay for. You have to accept your genetic make-up and give yourself your own individual targets and goals, rather than attempting to beat a rival. Once you have accepted that you are who you are, you must then go about building muscle effectively and safely, by stimulating them to grow.
Muscle growth is stimulated by overload. Put simply, you have to overload and stress your muscles to point that they are not used to. By overloading your muscles, your body initiates a number of physiological changes to encourage your body to adapt to the stress you have just put it under.
However, many people wishing to bulk up, often make the same mistake when following this overload principle. By weight training, you can overload the muscles in a number of different ways and if your goal is to achieve a larger musculature you have to overload your muscles in a certain way to get maximum benefit from your workout.
So, how is this done? In principle it is easy and not as complex and some websites make out. In practice however, the training is difficult and your mental approach to each workout needs to be focused entirely on your goal. The training is painful and if your muscles aren’t burning like they’re on fire, you aren’t training hard enough.
Fatigue those fibres
On the web, there is so much literature on muscle building, invariably illustrated with ad’s for protein shakes and food supplements, and most of it is grossly over complicated. Unless you are a professional bodybuilder, going into microscopic detail about your training is largely unnecessary. The only principle (along with overload) that you have keep your mind on is fatiguing your muscle fibres – both the fast twitch and slow twitch.
By fatiguing you fast twitch (the fibres responsible for explosive movements) and your slow twitch (the fibres responsible for longer endurance activities) you are stimulating them to grow in size – a process known as hypertrophy. If you fail to fatigue these fibres by either by lifting to much or too little weight, you will fail to get maximum benefit from your workout and not achieve the results you desire anytime soon.
The question of “how do I know if I am fatiguing both fibres?” is an obvious one and the answer is pretty simple. Put simply, provided you follow these basic points, you will be fatiguing your fibres sufficiently to stimulate muscle growth:
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Perform 12-15 reps of each exercise for each muscle to absolute failure
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Perform at least 5 sets of each exercise for each muscle.
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Perform at least 3 different exercises for each muscle group.
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You muscles should feel exhausted at the end of the session
This page has helped to summarise the basics of muscle building. The fact that there are a plethora of books on the subject clearly demonstrates that the subject is huge and highly contentious amongst many professionals.
Whereas I would actively encourage you read more about the subject from different sources, I would also encourage you to always stick to the basic principles. You will undoubtedly learn about various training systems such as drop sets, polishing, pyramids etc but these systems still stay consistent with the principle of fatigue. Depending on the popularity of this page, I will in time upload a number of training system which I rate and will encourage you to incorporate into your training.
In the meantime, go fatigue those muscle fibres – burn baby burn.