After years of experience and educating myself, here are my lesson learns, and key points to achieve a bigger muscular look:
1. Stop going to failure on every set: One of the common mistakes that you see today with athletes is going to failure on every set and staying too long at the gym. First, if you are looking for bigger muscles, then you need to only go to failure in your last set of the exercises. If you hit failure with every set, then you are just tiring the muscle and destroying it. Your workout must be short...1 hour or 1.5 hours max!
2. Stop using light weight: A muscle must be subjected to a stimulus that compels it to adapt and grow. If there is no reason for a muscle to grow, no hypertrophy will occur. Turn up the intensity and stop using light weight if you want your muscles to grow.
3. Stimulus and Heavy lifting: A muscle must be subjected to a stimulus that compels it to adapt and grow. If there is no reason for a muscle to grow, no hypertrophy will occur. Muscles increase their strength and size when they are forced to contract at levels close to their maximum.
4. Stick with Compound exercises: Much more weight can be lifted with compound exercises than isolation movements. More weight, more overload, and in turn, more muscle. A compound exercise is a movement that involves more than one major muscle group. It involves a primary muscle and one or more secondary muscles.
[ An example of a compound exercise would be the barbell squat. The primary muscles are the quadriceps and the secondary muscles are the gluteus and hamstring muscles. ]
[ An isolation exercise targets just one muscle. Isolating a muscle during resistance training limits overload and muscle fiber stimulation. Therefore, it limits growth. Dumbbell flyes are an isolation movement for the chest, removing the shoulders and triceps out of the movement. ]
5. Nutrients, rest and sleep: As we have been talking before, you have to eat big to get big. There is no way around this (even if you follow all points above). Do not expect a big round muscle when you eat like a bird! I know many of you are going to say that you eat and you are not getting any bigger, but trust me, you don’t eat enough. If you hire a coach, you will be surprised how much you under-eat. Eat a lot and recover.
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