Muscle Building Workout

What you consider to be a good muscle building workout?  These are some observations from my times in the gym.

You know when you go then to the gym, that there are two types of group shall we say, of people round the weighttraining area.

One group to seem to be having a social event and taking turns doing different  exercises to see who can pick up or do the most. The second group of people are more interesting. They come armed with one form or another summer workout plan. This is either contained in a small notebook or on their PDAs or phones.

 

The second group is really worth paying attention to. What they have done is planned their workouts and are constantly monitoring their progress. You also don’t see this group in the gym every single day, in fact possibly every other day.

 

Method in their madness.

 

This group of people absolutely know what they are doing. As you know in order to build good muscle you need to stress the muscle appropriately in order to force it to grow bigger. This happens due to the fact that stress in the muscle creates small micro-tears which the body heals during periods of rest.

The body attempts to make the muscles stronger in order to avoid having to heal those micro-tears again. And since we know that we simply pick up the intensity of our workout. We can do this in one of two ways,

1. firstly by increasing the weight or
2. by increasing the repetitions.

 

In order to figure out whether you should increase the weight or increase the repetitions you need to at least know what you did last time you were in the gym. If your memory is anything like mine there is no way you can remember what you did. So keeping track of what you did in a notebook or on your PDA is the only way to know.

 

So when you look at your progress can determine whether you should increase the weight or the repetition. The guideline is to keep your sets for:

• your large group to between five and seven
• your small muscle group to between two and four.

 

Now the idea is to pick up a sufficiently heavy weight to allow between five and seven repetitions in a set. So if on a particular exercise let’s say your bicep curls you’re able to pick up a 20 kg dumbbell a maximum of five times in your second set. Then in order to increase the intensity of this exercise all you need to do is increase repetitions to seven. If ever you can already do seven repetitions was this  wait then it’s time to increase the weight from 20 to let say 22 kg.

 

So now you can see that the second group of people are on to something. You’ll probably notice that they also have the bed of bills in general that the first group of people, genetics aside.

 

So how important to consider a muscle building work out to be now?

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 6:24 pm and is filed under muscle workout. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.