What’s the best muscle building exercise?
With all the contrary advice in magazines about how often you should train, how many sets you should do, and what the best muscle building exercise is, it’s no wonder that everybody is confused about what to do in the gym.
What makes your muscles grow? Scientists remain working hard trying to figure out exactly how muscle tissue grows. However, the stimulus, or cause, of muscular growth has been well known for a long time. In order to make your muscles bigger and stronger, then you need to apply the principle of progressive overload – or, more simply, adding weight to the bar.
Let’s say that you can bench press one hundred pounds for 5 reps. If, 12 months from today, you’re still doing the same five reps with the same one hundred pounds, chances are that your chest, shoulders and triceps won’t have developed much – if at all.
If, however, you’ve progressed to bench pressing one hundred ten, 120, or maybe even one hundred forty pounds for 5 reps, then your muscles should have grown bigger and stronger to deal with the additional resistance.
This assumes, of course, that you’re using correct technique to lift the weight. It’s possible to lift an additional few pounds in most exercises by simply “cheating” – shifting your body or shortening the range of motion to get the weight from point A to point B. The very fact you’re lifting more weight is really because you’re using a different technique rather then because you’re bigger or stronger.
Your body also gets better at performing a given exercise if you do it frequently enough, and a more efficient nervous system (the chain of command that sends signals from the brain to your muscles) instead of a bigger muscle helps to explain why you’ve gained strength. However, as a rule-of-thumb, a stronger muscle means a bigger muscle.
So, to build muscle size and strength, the best thing to do is concentrate on getting stronger in the basic, core exercises. Experts consider them the best way to gain muscle.
Deadlift
Squat
Bench Press
Overhead Press
Rows
Pull-ups (or pulldowns)
This sort of program also works well if you want to know how to lose fat without losing muscle.
Always do 1-3 warm-up sets for each exercise. Then, for your work sets, choose a load that will allow you to complete six repetitions on your first set, but not less than five repetitions on the last set of each exercise. Here’s an example:
Set 1: 6 reps
Set 2: 6 repetitions
Set 3: five repetitions
Set 4: four repetitions
As soon as you can do 6 reps in all 4 sets, then it’s time for you to increase the weight you use next workout by 5 pounds or five percent (whichever is smaller). Make use of a training diary to record each workout session so you know when you should raise the weight.
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 30th, 2011 at 5:07 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.