The greater energy you put into something the better results you will achieve. For many years this has been a universally accepted truth that relates to many varied parts of life and from a historical perspective has always been seen as the standard in muscle building exercise. The more time you employ fine-tuning your body using muscle building exercise, the more athletic you will become. Hence it is reasonable to assume that the greater amount of time you spend in the gym with muscle building exercise, the stronger and more muscular your physique will become. In opposition to what you might think, the answer with regard to muscle building exercise is an unreserved no! It is in this area of bodybuilding that acknowledged understanding goes straight out the window.
Once we understand the muscle building exercise from its most basic roots, it is quite obvious why this is so.
Every single process that happens within the human body is centered around keeping you alive and in good condition and this applies even more so to muscle building exercise. Over millennia of evolution the human body has become a fine tuned organism that can adapt efficiently to the specific conditions that are placed upon it. Our body lets us know when we are hungry or thirsty, we get suntanned when large volumes of Ultra Violet rays attack us, we get callused to stop our skin from wearing and so forth. So what happens when we break down muscle tissue in the gym using muscle building exercise? The muscles get bigger and stronger, it's as simple as that. By battling against resistance over the muscle's existing capacity a threat has been posed to the musculature. The body recognizes this as possibly harmful and as a natural adaptive response the muscles will increase in size (hypertrophy) therefore protecting the body against this threat. As we regularly build up the resistance from week to week using muscle building exercise the body will persist in adapting and growing.
It appears to be simple and in the end it is. However, the crucial thing to conceive in relation to all of this is that the muscles can only grow if they are given proper time to recover between muscle building exercise. If not given proper time to recover, the process of muscle growth simply cannot take place.
Your intention in the gym must be to use muscle building exercise with the minimum amount of volume required to give an adaptive response. Once you get to the point when your muscles have been pushed over their existing capacity and have generated the ancient evolutionary alarm system, your task is complete. Any more stress to the body with muscle building exercise will simply build up your time to recover, weaken the immune system and send your body into catabolic shock.
The majority of people perform muscle building exercise way too often and with far more sets than they need to. High intensity muscle building exercise puts a great deal more stress on the body than the vast majority of people think. The vast majority of people structure their muscle building exercise programs in a fashion that actually thwarts their gains and prevents them from making the progress that they are looking for. There are some guidelines to help you to achieve maximum gains using muscle building exercise:
Do muscle building exercise a maximum of three days every week.
Do not let your muscle building exercise go over 60 minutes.
Perform between 5-8 sets of muscle building exercise for large muscle groups (chest, thighs, back) and between 2-4 sets of muscle building exercise for smaller muscle groups (biceps, shoulders, triceps, calves, abs).
Drive all sets to the point of muscular failure and focus on moving forward in either weight or reps each seven days. If you really train hard and are consistent, doing muscle building exercise more often or for a longer time than this will be counterproductive to your gains.
Muscle building exercise, like all good things in life, should be done in moderation! |
