METHOD TO THE MASS(NESS)
Whats up?! So this is kind of a follow up post to my last post “Eat Your Way to Gains”, this blog will be more about the weight room aspect of adding mass and muscle size and strength. As mentioned in my last post there will be factors that control what you specifically should be doing that I cannot see but this will definitely be a good place to start on the subject, so without further adue here we go.
Pick Things Up, Hold It a Bit, Put It Down Slowly
Your goal when training to add mass should be time under tension, in layman's terms it is simply the amount of time during a lift that your target muscles are working or “under tension”. This is why bodybuilders don’t do a hard lockout on their lifts and instead do a softer lockout, this is going to keep the muscles under tension for a greater portion of the lift. Great ways to increase time under tension in just your everyday lifts is to add a pause in the bottom portion of the lift. In a bench it would be will the bar or dumbbells are on your chest, the one lift that this is not true in are deadlifts where you would want to hold it in the top position. Another way to add some time under tension would be to slowly lower the weight into the bottom position, for example you would slowly lower the bar onto your chest for a bench. With the pause you don’t want to let it simply rest there, this is not meant for you to rest in this position it is meant for you to hold the weight there and work to hold it up. You want to pick a weight that will be challenging for you to lift but not so heavy that you won’t be able to lift it after a pause, but also not so light that you can easily lift it afterwards. About 60% of your 1RM should be good for this work.
Sets to Failure
Sets to failure are definitely a fun way to add volume into your workout and always a good challenge to try and improve on them. The thing is it can easily get out of hand and you don’t want to be pushing to failure so often that you cannot recover in time for your next workout. Volume is your friend, but in moderation just like anything else too much of it can cause more harm than good. My suggestion for this would be to 1) Go to failure in isolation movements, like curls, leg curls, leg extensions, tricep pushdowns because these muscles can handle that extra volume better than your bigger muscles, 2) Rotate your “to failure” exercises, an example would be one week you go to failure in pushups, the next in leg press, and the third week in rows. This way you can give your body time to recover yet you still get to add extra volume with those exercises. And you want to recover, to be able to lift another day, which brings us to my next bullet.
RECOVER!
This I think is the most overlooked part of any person’s training, what separates your training from your favorite athletes even if you both do the same thing? Recovery! Any person not a professional athlete has stressors restricting their recovery making it harder for them to get back into the gym. A professional on the other hand trains, spends the day recovering, and then trains again. Their ability to spend time recovering allows them to train again, even within the same day. Therefore if you take your recovery days in-between training days serious and do mobility, self-massage, go and get a massage, eat properly and rest you will be ready to hit it hard in the gym again the next day allowing you to miss less days and train harder and with more volume. As an average joe unfortunately you have to work extra in order to rest and recover better in order to train hard.
Progressively Add Weight
This is one is kind of self-explanatory in that after some time you will need to start adding more weight to the bar. This is because over time your muscles will get used to the resistance and the weight will no longer give you the desired effect. Solution? Add more weight. Now obviously you can't indiscriminately add weight, the suggested amount you add is generally about 10%. So for example your bench is 100lbs, after maybe 3-4 weeks of training at 60lbs (60%) it starts to feel light, so you would add 10% of the 60lbs which would be 6lbs, making your training weight now 66lbs. In this situation where obviously your regular gym won’t have 66lb weights, I would suggest rounding DOWN to 65 because you are still increasing the weight but at the same time want to be able to hit your reps in training.
So there you go, make these slight adjustments to your training if you haven't already and along with my previous post you should be well on your way to adding on those extra pounds of muscle. If you don't need to add the extra muscle share with a skinny friend who does and until next time.
Jacob W.