When it comes to gaining muscle, there are many contributing factors. It is not just lifting weights and seeing results. There is more to this story to get to the maximum benefit you are trying to achieve.
Consider what weight training does to the body. Lifting weights causes micro-tears in the muscles. This is the soreness that is felt. The muscles then rebuild and grow stronger over time. You don’t gain muscle simply by lifting weights. You see gains only when you help your muscles recover from the work you do in the gym.
This is why recovery is just as important as the work. Inferior rest leads to Inferior growth. Recovery can come in many forms. Based on my experience, there are three main areas of recovery that everyone should be aiding—not only to gain muscle, but also to improve general health.
How you fuel your body before and after workouts will dictate how well you perform and whether or not you gain weight. The old phrase, you are what you eat comes into play here: If you eat poorly, you’ll feel poorly. If you eat foods that provide your body with adequate amounts of nutrients, your muscles will recover better from the stresses you’ve put it through and grow back stronger, allowing increased gains from your training.
Mobility isn’t just for those who practice yoga. Everyone can benefit from having better mobility. Exercising while paying attention to improving and maintaining your joint range of motion will help limit the likelihood of injury. Adding mobility work to your routine will help the body recover from training and lead to improvements in overall strength, health, and muscle gain.
You cannot be complacent when it comes to your sleep. Everyone has different schedules, but you should try to get at least seven hours of quality sleep every night. If you go to your training sessions already feeling tired and sleep deprived, you will not perform as well as you would will a full night’s sleep. Occasionally, you can get away with making poor food choices and still have a decent workout, but when you train on a bad night’s sleep, there’s no amount of caffeine that will help you. Lack of sleep will increase cortisol levels, which leads to more body fat and fewer muscle gains. So make sure you get the right amount for you!
Like most things in life we need to approach our training with a plan in mind. Many feel that they have to lift as much weight as they can. They want to test how strong they are today rather than building their strength. They put more weight on the bar than they can handle and end up missing a lot of reps and failing their set.
The best practice is to treat workouts like building blocks that work together to achieve a greater goal. This will add muscle and strength.. To do that, consider volume in your training plan. Volume is the total amount of weight you lift over the course of a workout. It is a key factor in your progress and an excellent illustration of why pushing max weights doesn’t always bring max gains.
For example:. It is training day! Here is what happened.
Summary: Completed one set but in doing so, only managed 19 reps for a total of 190kg over the sets. Instead, if the weight was dropped to 8kg and managed to complete all three sets of 10, 30 reps would have been completed, for a total of 240kg. A significant increase in just one exercise.
There is definitely a time and place for isolation exercises. Everyone loves doing the single muscle focused exercises like bicep curls; however, compound movements are better for overall strength. As wheelchair users, we may be limited to what multi-joint exercises we can do. Often, they involve muscles we cannot use or those that are needed for stability that we don’t possess. A usual session to add muscle is the warm-up, followed by compound lifts, and finishing with isolation exercises. We incorporate this as much as possible within our plans however, this can be quite difficult.
Compound lifts are multi-joint exercises that incorporate more than one muscle group at a time. They include squats, presses, deadlifts, and pull-ups, just to name a few. Compound exercises not only add muscle, but also increase strength. The stronger you are, the more muscle fibers you can engage. The more muscles you engage in a movement—whether it’s a compound lift or an isolation move—the more weight you can handle. The more weight you can handle, the more the muscles will grow.
Muscles cannot be added without a basic foundation of strength. You cannot get stronger by just doing curls. You get stronger by putting your body in a position where it has to engage a maximal amount of muscle fibers in order to produce force to move an external load. If you focus purely on isolation movements, you are simply pumping blood. If you focus on lifting with big, compound movements, you engage more motor units, which leads to more strength, more muscle, and more gains.
Variety is the spice of life and exercise variety is no different. It is also a key factor in building muscle. Remember when you first started working out and felt really sore the next day? Your muscles weren’t used to performing the new exercises and were adapting to them. Whether you are an experienced trainer or a beginner, your muscles respond to new movements.
If you put the strongest person in the world in a ballet class, I guarantee you they’d be feeling muscles they have never felt before for at least the next few days. That is because their muscles have become used to performing a certain way and when taken out of their comfort zone, they are challenged to work differently.
Even so, the muscles get bored fast, so if you have been following the same routine with the same exercises, lifting the same weight, at the same intensity and can’t remember the last time you’ve seen results, try adding some new exercises. That doesn’t mean doing something completely random every other day, it means sprinkling new exercises throughout your program to challenge your muscles so they don’t get bored.
When it comes to having limited mobility we may be restricted in how much variety we can implement. There are ways to work outside the box to find exercises to challenge ourselves and therefore reach our goals.
Another way to add variety to your workout is to use the same exercises but change the order in which you perform them. This will help trick the muscles that something different is happening.
Key Points For Adding Muscle
Here are your takeaways for how to shake up your workouts and stimulate gains: