Muscle Building for Men
Did you know that up to 95% of standard healthy adult males could potentially have a Brad Pitt body in just three months?
No? How about this…the average male can gain up to 20lbs of solid beef in the same 12 week period!
Yet we know that so many of you reading this will have been wasting months or even years with only minimal gains to show for your efforts.
So what is holding you back?
| 1. | Nutrition |
| 2. | Hormonal Imbalances |
| 3. | Inadequate rest and recovery |
| 4. | Poor workout design |
The aim of this article is to give you a brief insight into workout design. We will give you 3 great tips and we will give you a program to use straight away which if followed correctly will guarantee outstanding results.
Tip #1: Time Under Tension
In order to induce maximum hypertrophy (increased muscle mass) your set should last between 40 – 70 seconds. That means that if you are doing 10 reps of a bench press each rep should last between 4 and 7 seconds. Have a quick look around the gym floor at your club and see how quickly the weights are thrown around!
Tip #2: Superset Opposing Muscle Groups
If your first exercise is a bench press then couple this with a back exercise such as a pull up. This will allow you to double the amount of work done per session. There is also evidence that working an opposing muscle group e.g. the lats will allow you to recruit the higher threshold units of your opposing muscle – in this case your pecs when you return to your bench press.
Tip #3: Spend No More Than 60 Minutes in the Gym
Testosterone levels are highest between around 20 and 45 minutes into your workout. Training for longer than an hour will cause a drop in testosterone and a rise in cortisol (the stress hormone that breaks down muscle).
If you want to build muscle you need to increase your testosterone levels (90% of British men have low testosterone but this is another story) so don’t hand around the gym for hours – get in, work hard and get out!
Muscle Explosion Chest & Back Workout
This program is called German Volume Training and was popularized by the worlds leading strength coach, Charles Poliquin.
In Charles’s words - ‘the program works because it targets a specific group of motor units and exposes them to an extensive volume of repeated efforts; specifically, 10 sets of a single exercise.
The body adapts to that extraordinary stress by hypertrophying the targeted fibres. To say that this program adds muscle fast would be an understatement. Gains of 10 pounds or more in six weeks are the norm, not the exception.
The goal of the German Volume Training method is to complete 10 sets of 10 reps with the same weight for each exercise. You want to begin with a weight you could lift if you really pushed it for 20 reps to failure. For most people on most exercises that would represent 60% of their 1 rep max load.
Therefore, if you can bench press 200 pounds for one rep, you would use 120 pounds for this exercise. Now, it may sound easy, but you'll be pleasantly (or unpleasantly) surprised’.
Here's how to interpret the table above:
And Finally…
There is so much more to the science of building muscle, such as:
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How much protein should you take and when |
|
How to increase your testosterone levels naturally |
|
How you should eat for maximal gains |
|
How often to change your workout |
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How to measure your muscle fibre type |
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Why full range of motion is essential |
These are all extremely important considerations that allow us at Easyfit, to achieve such outstanding results with our clients and we will write more about these areas in future articles.
