When it comes to how to gain mass muscle growth, your body needs two things: adequate and appropriate exercise, and adequate rest. Exercise can be provided either at home or at a gym, and rest can be provided during the day with naps or with a good night’s sleep.
Keep in mind that muscle doesn’t grow while you are exercising. It grows during the rest periods between exercises by repairing the damage incurred during exercise.
The Heavy Weights Principle
How much weight is required to build muscle?
Actually, the amount of weight needs to be only a little more than the muscles are used to.
Muscles adapt to the demands placed upon them. If you lift only then pounds, your muscles will develop until they can lift ten pounds efficiently and stop developing.
If you want to encourage more development, start lifting eleven pounds. If you understand this principle, it’s easy to understand how to gain huge muscle mass: the more weight that you lift, the more your muscles will be stressed to respond to the increased weight by becoming stronger. Muscles become stronger by growing new muscle mass.
The High Repetition Principle
How many repetitions are needed for a particular exercise to develop muscle?
As they do with weight, muscles develop to a point where they can efficiently handle the demands placed upon them. If you lift ten pounds once every fifteen seconds, your muscles will develop until they can handle this repetition rate efficiently.
If you wish to develop more muscle, increase the rate of lifting the ten pounds every ten seconds. It’s a fundamental of how to gain more muscle mass; as you increase the repetitions, you increase the stress or resistance on the muscles and they will respond to the need by developing new muscle mass to meet the new demands upon them.
The Progressive Weight Increase Principle
Lifting light weights is good for limbering up and burning calories, but not really effective as a way to gain body mass fast. Muscles need stimulation and challenge to grow.
Simply put, they need progressively increasing weight to force them to adapt and grow to meet the body’s demands upon them.
When you’re exercising, if you do not feel any discomfort at all in your muscles after you complete your sets, then you’re not using enough weight. Your muscles are not being challenged, and will not create new muscle mass.
Knowing how to gain huge muscle mass, requires that you understand that a successful exercise workout is a failure for the muscle capability. The muscle could not meet the demand placed upon it by the exercise.
To compensate and prepare itself for a repeat of this new demand, the muscle grows to meet the need so that it will not fail again.
When viewed in this way, it’s easy to understand that growing muscle requires you to put the muscle in a position to unable to meet the current demand placed upon it.
The Rest and Recovery Principle
Exercise is key to developing strong muscles, but constant exercise will not help at all. It will be detrimental. Your body needs time to recover from the demands that you place upon it through vigorous exercise.
The muscles need to relax and repair themselves. Let your body restore itself and grow some new muscle fiber and become stronger to meet the new challenges that you will place upon it during your next exercise session.
Remember, muscles don’t grow when they are being stressed. They grow during the periods of rest between exercises. Rest is as important as exercise.
Indications of Overtraining
Don’t overdo your training. You can end up causing more damage than good and can sustain permanent life-altering injuries.
If you cannot lift more weight than you did on your previous workout, you may be overtraining. If you cannot perform more repetitions with the same weights than your last workout, you could be overtraining.
If it takes you more time to complete a normal exercise routine, you could be overtraining.
Training with increasing weights, increased repetitions, and reduced time are all representative of how to gain mass muscle and are signs of progress in your bodybuilding efforts.
Failure in any of these areas is an indication that you are overtraining. If this happens, modify your approach. The idea is to improve your body and general health, not damage your body.