How to Grow Your Muscles - Part One

This article presents the basic theory behind how to develop your muscles through weight lifting. Knowing the theory is very important because it will help you develop a more effective training program that will meet your personal goals for developing your muscles. But it is also important to understand that there are other factors (such as diet, special training techniques, etc.) that affect muscle growth and are not covered in this article.

Introduction to muscle development

The development and maintenance of muscle mass is an important component of a comprehensive, integrated training program. However, many people tend to avoid this fitness sector either because they fear that extensive technical knowledge is required to understand how to develop their muscles or because they think they will over-exert their muscles and gain a massive physique . These fears are groundless and unnecessary.

It's easy to learn how to develop your muscles through weight lifting, as it is perfectly feasible to develop a weight lifting program that will allow you to significantly boost your muscles without getting over-sized. On the other hand, if your goal is to build muscle mass and add some volume to your body, and that is perfectly feasible. Simply, developing the strength, size and strength of your muscles depends on the type of weight lifting you follow. Just to be able to develop a training program that will allow you to achieve the ideal outcome you want, you need to understand the theory behind how and why your muscles grow. Regardless of what your ultimate goal is, developing your muscles will generally improve your health, increase your strength, improve your physical appearance, stimulate your metabolism, reduce your body fat, increase bone density, and improve your coordination, confidence and athletic ability.

Lifting weights

Weightlifting is a form of training that allows you to selectively develop your strength, size, and strength by performing exercises based on lifting (or pushing) weight. Weightlifting is the ideal workout for muscle development because it allows you to accurately control the size of the weight you use, the muscles you aim to exercise, the angle, the speed and the range of motion for each repeat, the number repetitions, and how much time you have for a break during and between exercises. Each of these factors, and many others, affect the way your muscles grow. Depending on how you want to develop your muscles, you can create a weight lifting program that will use all the necessary elements to achieve the results you want, be it muscle strength, muscle size, muscle strength, or any combination of them.

Terminology for Weightlifting

Before proceeding below, it is good to understand some of the terms used in weightlifting.
Repetition or Rep: it is the completion of a specific exercise through a full-range motion. At the end of the repeat, the weight you get should be in the same position as when you started repeating. For example, when push-ups (in this case the weight of the body is the weight you use), start with your arms outstretched, then bend your elbows by lowering your body to the floor, and then push your hands to stretch by bringing your body back to its original position. This is a repeat.
One Repetition Maximum or 1RM: is the maximum weight with which you are able to complete a complete repetition of a particular exercise.
Set: is a set of repetitions of the same exercise performed continuously without intermediate rest. For example, when doing push-ups, you may want to make a set of 20 reps. To complete this set, you need to do 20 push-ups without any break between repetitions.
Rest or Break: is the time when a given muscle group is idle, and therefore rests. Rest usually refers to the time between two successive sets (measured in minutes) or the interval between two consecutive workouts (measured in days).
Intensity: in terms of weight loss, it is a measure of the intensity to which a muscle is subjected. The best way to control the tension is through the size of the weight you choose.
Duration: Counts the time of weightlifting and rest periods. The number of sets you execute, the number of reps performed per and the duration of rest periods between sets is all the factors that affect the duration.
Frequency: counts how often your training sessions occur. Frequency is usually measured weekly. For example, you can train your whole body 3 times a week.
Muscular endurance: while muscular strength and muscle mass are self-evident concepts, muscle strength is a concept that is not known to many people. Muscular endurance is the ability of a muscle to withstand the lifting of a specific weight (or body weight) for prolonged duration.
Theory

The human body, through its evolution, has developed the amazing ability to adapt to the various challenges presented to it. To grow, your muscles will have to face difficult challenges so they need to adapt to respond. In fact, your muscles will only gain strength if there is a serious reason to do so. If you perform exercises that are easy for your muscles, they will have little or no growth.

The type of challenge you need to put your muscles to ensure their growth is called overload. This is just another way to say that you have to perform exercises that put your muscles in greater demands than they have been used to so far. Hypertrophy (muscle growth) will happen as a response to muscle adjustment. Overloading is the basic concept you need to have in mind when you exercise your muscles. A muscle must overcome a certain overload limit before recognizing that adaptation is required. This is a fundamental concept that is fully understood by those who really know how to develop their muscles.

At the Health & Fitness tip of next week we will talk about how theory is applied to the development of muscle strength, muscle mass and muscle strength.