BUILDING MUSCLE 101: PART 2- THE KEY FACTORS
Chances are outrageously high that if you saw two folks on the gym floor jacked to the gills and went up to them and asked “How did you build this much muscle” you are going to get two different answers.
Hell, ask 100 people and you’re likely to get 50 different methods to meathead madness. Maybe more.
So why in the world am I trying to narrow the variables down to an article?
Truthfully, I’m not. But I am going to tell you the major considerations that if you’re trying to build muscle you need to understand, maybe implement or at least be aware of because building muscle just isn’t that easy.
I will preface this with the following important announcement- if you hold great fear (particularly as a female) that upon entering the gym floor and merely touching the weights that you may accidentally turn into the hulk, then please, fear not.
Why?
Because building muscle is really, really hard. Like stupidly hard and I want to share why that is and how you can pursue it if you want.
Much the same as my genetics leaving me a big ole lanky 6”3 aren’t going to send me to the Olympics for gymnastics, they aren’t necessarily ideal for building the kind of figure you would find in action movies. But that alone didn’t stop me from trying.
This is the first consideration- genetics. Although we all have the capability to build muscle, for some of us it just comes easier. Chat to any string bean skinny dude and they will blow up about how hard it is. Difficult however isn’t a lifetime sentence to no gains- you just need to work harder than most.
The next thing that I stress to everyone who comes through the gym wanting to build muscle is that the process takes time. You can super charge fat loss and see huge changes in a matter of weeks through all sorts of drastic measures but the same doesn’t work for growing muscle.
Training needs to be dialled in, nutrition on point, sleep should be at the maximum. These need to be maintained as much as possible for months, a year, for biiiig gains even years. Our body isn’t designed to easily carry huge amounts of muscle, just because it’s capable doesn’t mean it likes it. You need to often force surplus calories, push the stimulus that forces muscles to adapt through growth as we discussed in part one.
Time and genetics are two major considerations but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Are you ready to deep dive into some of the must do’s of building muscle?
1. Maintaining A Calorie Surplus
It got a brief mention up above but a calorie surplus is an absolute must. Whether its calculated over a daily surplus or weekly to allow for variances in training.
When burning more calories than consuming you are in a calorie deficit and your body will look for alternate energy sources for fuel, such as muscle glycogen or fat. Now on the surface this seems like a good thing- if our goal was solely fat loss then it would be a great thing. Building muscle though we need that surplus to fuel growth. It doesn’t need to mean whack on huge amounts of body fat, but the vast majority of bulking phases will incur a little extra fat around the body but marginal amounts at worst.
Put away your party hats, this isn’t cause to celebrate the “dirty bulk” of pounding burgers and pizzas until the cows come home- better results are fuelled by better foods and as a result eating healthy is important, perhaps more so than normal as you’re putting your body under significant stress to grow tissue.
2. Contractions and Range of Motion
As far as exercise selection goes there are a million different ways to skin a cat, you can perform isolated movements targeting one key muscle or compound lifts that work multiple. The way you choose to train is going to come down to what works best for you. There are however two key considerations for any exercise when the goal is growing tissue.
Taking a muscle through it’s entire range of motion or at least having the capability to do so is important to get the most out of each repetition, particularly your big compound lifts. A half squat in athletic populations has it’s place, for someone looking to grow muscle will need a greater range so to work all intended muscles.
The other key consideration lends itself to contractions- the shortening and squeezing a muscle. The idea of “flexing” is no stranger a thing to do than breathing for most men, where as women it often takes a little bit of practice- to be clear, both are equally capable, there is just something about us boys flexing our biceps at every chance growing up.
Learning to flex and contract muscles in their shortened position builds that mind muscle connection and in the simplest of explanation is your guarantee that you’re working the right muscle.
3. Don’t Be Afraid to Load
No doubt you’re starting to identify a pattern of there being a very broad spectrum of what works when building muscle and this pattern continues on to loading which in this instance is just a reference to the weight lifted.
There is space for lighter weights and high, high repetitions when leaning towards sarcoplasmic hypertrophy (think “the pump”) but to return to one of our mechanisms of hypertrophy, mechanical tension, at times it is essential to lift towards the heavier end of the spectrum.
How heavy you go is up to you and I would recommend with many of the compound lifts have someone take a look at your technique to make sure it’s all being done well before loading too much to minimise risk of injury if the technique is off but also to make sure right muscles are working.
This style of lifting is known as myofibrillar hypertrophy and to really simplify that idea, when lifting heavy weights our body is forced to adapt to facilitate progression and that adaptation leads to denser, harder muscle tissue and more muscle tissue to allow the body to withstand high weight.
4. Recovery Matters
By now it should be almost painfully obvious that hard work is required to build muscle. One important thing to take note of is that your muscle isn’t actually growing as a direct result of the work done. The work done is the stimulus, but for adaptation to occur, please, stand and welcome to the room- recovery.
Recovery in this instance is quite a large umbrella with nutrition and sleep taking up the most room below, things like mobility, stretching and your feel good recovery like massage etc also finds itself under there too.
Hard work is great but only for so long as you’re able to recover from it- you will find if you skip solid sleep and eat like it’s your last ever meal (think consuming all sorts of junk in wild amounts) it won’t be long and the subjective nature of hard work stays the same, but the objective nature, ie weight lifted or work performed for the result of fatigue starts to decrease.
Recovery is very, very important- your goal each workout should be to make slight improvements and for beginners time between workouts may need to be longer to facilitate recovery. For more advanced lifters that timeline may shorten a little.
These are some of the big ticket items that will make or break your success in the gym when building muscle. So far we have covered the mechanisms of hypertrophy and this article- next up we will explore some of the most effective hypertrophy programs or styles of training. You will notice how different they are in terms of volume (reps and sets), intensity (weight lifted) and frequency (how often they are performed) which serves to highlight just how many roads lead to Jericho which in this case is the land of gains.
Until then!