How to Gain Muscle
- Molly Kate
- Feb 16, 2023
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 27, 2023
My fitness journey started out with middle school sports, mainly soccer. I transitioned to volleyball in high school and fell in love with it. I wasn’t the tallest girl, I wasn’t the strongest server, and I certainly wasn’t the hardest hitter. But I loved it. That is really what attracted me to fitness. I became addicted to physical activity. I wanted to get faster, stronger, and leaner. I loved the feeling after an intense, sweaty workout session; leaving you exhausted and yet completely relaxed and at ease.
After we moved away from my high school friends, I fell out of sports. So, in order to chase that feeling again I began to workout in my bedroom every night. Just short circuits, completely bodyweight but high intensity so I could still get a good sweat. I began running, seeing how far I could push myself, how long I could go with my lungs burning and my side cramping (it wasn’t very far). Sometime in college, my dad started bringing me to the small gym that had just opened in our town. This was my introduction to weights. I still remember that first workout, I have never felt so weak in my entire life. I was barely squatting a few reps with just the bar, couldn’t do even one rep of chest press with the bar unassisted, and couldn’t move past the 10-15 lb dumbbells. The next couple days brought a lot of mixed feelings; first was embarrassment, second was excitement that I had a new challenge and third was wondering how I was going to walk this completely wrecked body up the long flight of stairs this morning and go about my day in pure agony. And so began my weightlifting journey.
I spent the next 5 years or so in the gym, getting stronger. Everywhere I moved to, I joined the gym in town. I became a regular at the gym, working out at least 5 days a week and for a short period of time I worked out twice a day. Safe to say I was obsessed with bodybuilding. My workouts consisted of splits and lasted over an hour usually. After several years of that, I was burnout. It became harder and harder to put the gym first. If anything came up in my personal life, I used it as an excuse to skip the boring and monotonous gym that day. I knew something had to change, because I had lost that feeling of enjoyment I always had from my workouts. I needed a new challenge.
And so, I began CrossFit. I found the CrossFit WOD (workout of the day) online and started working out in shorter, full body circuits. And once again, fell in love with fitness all over again. I found new ways to challenge my body and keep myself interested and engaged in workouts again. Although I do not strictly workout using CrossFit workouts, I have incorporated lots of this style and these exercises in my workout regimen nowadays. While my workouts currently are more about maintaining functionality and improving my quality of life, at one point in my life my one and only goal was gaining muscle. So, I do have lots of experience in that topic. I know lots of people in various stages of fitness have that goal of gaining muscle. It may be your only goal currently or it may be included in a long list of workout goals. But I wanted to compile a tip sheet on some the tried-and-true ways that you can accomplish that goal. Keep reading to see what you can do to gain more muscle.
Now if your one and only goal is to gain muscle right now, you should really steer clear of full body circuits and cardio. Long bodybuilding sessions are by far the best way to build muscle fast. I certainly had more muscle mass when I was strictly doing 1.5-hour long bodybuilding sessions in the gym. However, CrossFit did help me to lean out more than bodybuilding. This is because I never completed a serious cutting season. During my bodybuilding phase, I was obsessed with strength not aesthetics. So, I bulked and then maintained, and then bulked and then maintained. I never completed a serious cut. I was only concerned with hitting new PRs (personal records). So, when I began CrossFit training, I was burning more calories completing 3-5 full body sessions a week and not focusing on bulking and consuming an excess of calories. I was no longer obsessed with strength, I just wanted to feel good and functional. Because of this, I began to get lean. Fast.
One of the best ways to work out if you want to gain muscle is paying attention to your weight, sets and reps. As I was studying to become a certified personal trainer with the National Academy of Sports Medicine, I was taught there is a fine line you must walk in order to be in a muscular development phase without pushing too far into a strength or power building phase. Those phases are not optimal for gaining muscle. The optimal workout structure for hypertrophy (muscle growth) consists of 15-20 sets of challenging exercises per week. This translates to about 5-6 sets of a specific exercise, or 4-5 workouts per week. You should maintain a split workout in order to totally focus on a specific muscle group. You can do a Push day, Pull day, Leg day. Or Chest/Bicep day, Back/Triceps day, Leg/Shoulder day. Whichever way works best for you to split it up, but do not train full body 4-5 times a week. Working out the muscles at such a high intensity too often will negatively affect your recovery, slowing down the growth of the muscles. The weights should be challenging but you should be able to get 6-12 reps out of each set.
In choosing which specific exercises you should perform, prioritize exercises with an increased range of motion and more time under tension, this means holding the eccentric portion of the exercise longer, that is the point in the exercise where you are lengthening the muscle. So, in a bicep curl that is when you are dropping the weight back down. In a squatting exercise, that is when you are lowering into the squatting position. Slow the movement down during this point of the exercise. It is also important to periodically increase the complexity of workouts to avoid plateaus.
As far as nutrition goes, there are some key concepts to keep in mind when trying to grow muscle. The first is the most basic concept that muscle growth can only occur when muscle protein synthesis is greater than muscle breakdown, you can read more about that in this article. This means you must consume enough protein to rebuild the muscles that you are breaking down and to build them back bigger than before. So, following this logic, let’s first dive into fueling your muscles after completing a workout. There are several different schools of thought when it comes to post workout nutrition. I will stick with a method that is proven to work from NASM. According to NASM, the optimal post workout meal should contain a 2:3:1 ratio of carbs, protein, and fats respectively. Your body’s first goal after completing an intense workout that just drained you of all or most of your stored energy is to replenish those energy stores as quickly as possible. That means it wants carbs, the most quickly available macronutrient to turn into energy. If you only eat protein as a post workout meal, your body will take the time to break down that protein and use it to first refill your energy stores and then whatever is left will go to muscle recovery. So that is why it is important that you consume some simple carbohydrates shortly after a workout so all your protein intake can then go directly to muscle growth and recovery. The last nutritional tip is to investigate if creatine would be a good option for you. Creatine has been shown to increase muscle hypertrophy by speeding up recovery and boosting workout performance.
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