The Survival Animal & Muscle - Your Bodies Perspective
While many of the basic principles discussed in the weightloss section(s) are still relevant and can be utilized while training for mass, many of the techniques are not the most efficient way to go about it. The types of training we talked about last lesson will definitely help you build lean muscle - in fact that was one of the key focuses for maximizing fat loss since increasing your lean muscle mass is the only true way to increase your metabolism. However, maintaining a caloric deficit and consistently performing high intensity workouts to maximize the amount of calories burned is not the best way to pack on larger amounts of muscle.
As mentioned in the weight loss sections - weight gain is simply taking in more calories than you burn, but the goal isn't just any kind of weight gain, we are looking to gain lean muscle mass - which doesn't happen by osmosis of whatever heavy calorie food you shove down your throat.
So, what needs to happen to make those muscles grow? In order to build muscle, you need two things; the appropriate supporting nutrition, which we will cover in the next section, and Supramaximal Stress - to justify the addition of new muscle to the bodies structure.
Once again, it comes down to accounting for the fact that we are a survival animal, and learning what that animal has developed muscle for in order to create the need for more. Your body doesn't do things for the fun of it, everything that happens with your biology is a result of your body working to adapt to current conditions. To change the body the way you want, you must create the environment that you want your ideal body to be able to handle, and your body will then adapt appropriately.
One of the reasons it is so difficult to make progress past a certain point is because muscle is expensive to maintain, so your body will only develop enough muscle to deal with the loads placed upon it. So, if you want to develop more muscle, you have to be willing to move some weight, and challenge your body and therefore yourself in ways it hasn't experienced, at intensities it hasn't handled before.
Also, being that muscle is an added expense, as soon as the body notices it is no longer needed, it begins to remove it - usually this process begins around 72 hours after non-use. If your body doesn't need it, it won't feed it - it will eat it. For example - if you curled 40’s on Monday, you will need to pick up that 40lb dumbbell within 72 hours to re-justify the adaptation of the addition of additional muscle tissue. Now, this is a simplistic overview of the process, and isn't to say that you wont make progress if you aren't hitting each muscle group within 72 hours of your last training session. Other factors come into play - such as recovery time - and the amount of muscle your body will catabolize will be negligible - assuming you didn't stop eating, or something to that effect.
As mentioned in the weight loss sections - weight gain is simply taking in more calories than you burn, but the goal isn't just any kind of weight gain, we are looking to gain lean muscle mass - which doesn't happen by osmosis of whatever heavy calorie food you shove down your throat.
So, what needs to happen to make those muscles grow? In order to build muscle, you need two things; the appropriate supporting nutrition, which we will cover in the next section, and Supramaximal Stress - to justify the addition of new muscle to the bodies structure.
Once again, it comes down to accounting for the fact that we are a survival animal, and learning what that animal has developed muscle for in order to create the need for more. Your body doesn't do things for the fun of it, everything that happens with your biology is a result of your body working to adapt to current conditions. To change the body the way you want, you must create the environment that you want your ideal body to be able to handle, and your body will then adapt appropriately.
One of the reasons it is so difficult to make progress past a certain point is because muscle is expensive to maintain, so your body will only develop enough muscle to deal with the loads placed upon it. So, if you want to develop more muscle, you have to be willing to move some weight, and challenge your body and therefore yourself in ways it hasn't experienced, at intensities it hasn't handled before.
Also, being that muscle is an added expense, as soon as the body notices it is no longer needed, it begins to remove it - usually this process begins around 72 hours after non-use. If your body doesn't need it, it won't feed it - it will eat it. For example - if you curled 40’s on Monday, you will need to pick up that 40lb dumbbell within 72 hours to re-justify the adaptation of the addition of additional muscle tissue. Now, this is a simplistic overview of the process, and isn't to say that you wont make progress if you aren't hitting each muscle group within 72 hours of your last training session. Other factors come into play - such as recovery time - and the amount of muscle your body will catabolize will be negligible - assuming you didn't stop eating, or something to that effect.