How To Put On More Muscle

How to Put on More Muscle

Do you want to see your body more chiseled with beautiful, lean muscle mass? It's frustrating when you work hard on changing your body, but you can't see any real changes. You hit the gym, watch your diet closely and yet when you look in the mirror, you see the same body you have for months, staring back at you. If enough time goes by, you slowly start losing motivation to keep working on your goals.

There are so many benefits of increasing your muscle mass. From gaining strength, to changing your entire body composition to increasing your metabolism, muscle mass is an essential role in losing weight and keeping it off. Many think of muscle mass as pure vanity. However, muscles are needed to keep the skeleton upright, warding off osteoporosis. You can't live without muscle mass, and you must continuously work your body to gain it and maintain it.

It's not easy to gain muscle mass, especially if you're a woman. Testosterone is a crucial factor in making significant muscle gains. Women can't grow massive amounts of muscles without enhancing their bodies with illegal or dangerous supplements, like steroids. If you're one of my chicks reading this who worry about getting all big and bulky, listen to me. You will not get big and muscular by merely lifting some weights. Your body is just not capable of it.

Ladies, remember that an increase in muscle mass will increase your metabolism health. Don't fear gaining massive amounts of muscle mass, but you do want to increase the amount of muscles you currently have. You'll burn calories while at rest. Your body will appear longer and leaner, and you'll be able to enjoy more rest time as your body is continually working to maintain those muscles.

Adding more muscle doesn't mean getting supermassive. It simply means adding more muscle mass to get a beautiful lean body. However, if you're training hard and not seeing your muscles grow, there could be a couple of things you're missing. Use these small tweaks with your fitness and nutrition plan, and you may find the missing puzzle piece that's been holding you back from adding more muscle. You don't need to do a complete overhaul to your daily regimen. If you change everything at once, you'll never know what was working and what wasn't.

LACKING IN CALORIES

We all know to change our body composition; we must be aware of our daily calorie intake. To lose weight, we must reduce our calorie intake. At the beginning of our fitness journey, the first thing we begin restricting is our calorie intake. It's exciting to take control of changing our bodies and our habits. We'll do whatever it takes to reduce body fat and to look and feel better.

As our journey continues, we are more adept at exercising more and keeping our diets on point. Our bodies begin to respond, and some will restrict their calories even more. When our body weight goes down, we do require fewer calories. However, if we want our bodies to progress continuously, we must adjust our workouts and diets as necessary.

Restricting too many calories will only result in losing muscle mass and reduce our energy levels. Our body needs calories to grow and build more muscle. If you restrict your calories rapidly, your muscles will rapidly decrease. Your body will use your current muscle mass for energy to keep you moving throughout the day and to get you through your workouts. If you want to gain muscle mass, that's the last thing you want to occur.

If you feel you've been under eating to lose weight, but now want to increase your muscle mass, slowly add calories. You don't want to increase your calorie intake up too fast as you'll quickly gain weight. By doing so, you'll return right back to restricting your calories again. This is a vicious cycle that some can never break and repeating this cycle, over and over again, will cause long-term damage to your metabolism and lowering your chances of maintaining a muscular physique.

BEING CONSISTENT

When you want to put on more muscle, exercising on and off, will not allow your muscles to grow. You must be consistent with your regimen so the muscles can be taxed regularly, forcing them to develop. When you lift weights, you cause the muscle tissues to have micro-tears. Healing these micro-tears is the magic in developing more muscle mass.

If you're consistently breaking the muscles down, allowing and helping them recover properly, your muscles will grow. Being inconsistent will slow or stall the muscles from growing. You don't have to lift weights every day of the week, but being on a regular routine will certainly aid in developing muscles. However, a day or two of rest will also allow the muscles to heal, adding to healthy muscle growth.

Find a workout routine that conforms to your lifestyle. Setting up unrealistic goals, including how many days you can actually work out, will prevent you from falling in and out of your regimen. Always keep your daily schedule in mind when deciding on how you're going to go about your workout regimen to add more muscle. You'll only frustrate yourself if you decide that you will work out more than your work or family life will allow. What does more muscle mass mean if you're always on edge trying to juggle all of it?

REP RANGES

If you're anything like me, you get used to your routine, and you stick with it, no matter what. You like heading into the gym, knowing precisely what you're going to do and how long it's going to take. Heck, my kids know the day of the week by what workout I'm doing. I'm definitely a creature of habit, especially when it comes to my workout routine.

However, your body is an intelligent machine and knows when it's being pushed and when it's not. It will only do what you make it, so becoming redundant with your daily exercises will leave the body stagnant. If you're not changing things up, even a little bit, your body will stay the same.

If you've decided you need to increase your muscle mass, increase your weight amount, and decrease your reps. You want to tax those muscles and force them to grow. Again, tearing those muscle fibers up (causing micro-tears) is the path to bigger muscles.

Slow your reps down and choose a higher weight amount, but only if you can maintain proper form. When selecting your weight amount, if you aren't doing it properly, you're merely risking injury and not going to make any gains. Proper form is everything when it comes to results.

When you want to add more muscle, keep your rep range between five and eight. Different rep range amounts are eight to twelve, twelve to fifteen or fifteen to twenty. All of these depend on your specific goals. Keep reps low, and rest period longer, you'll be sure to add more muscle.

Start by adding small increments of weight amounts. If you're starting point is twenty pounds, choose twenty-two and a half the next time. Keep doing your workouts consistently and strive to make small increases every week or every other week. Keep those reps down and maybe add a little bit more rest time in between sets to allow the muscle to rest.

COMPOUND MOVEMENTS

If you're currently training every muscle throughout the week, you may want to consider switching to compound movements instead. Compound movements are exercises like squats, deadlifts, presses, and rows.

These movements require several muscle groups and joints to be working simultaneously. You're recruiting multiple muscle groups to help you gain strength and muscle, all while burning more calories. These are great for building a strong, muscular physique.

Again, the more muscle you have, the more your metabolism will be working to burn fat. If you're short on time, compound movements could be the key to allowing you to make gains without having to commit to adding more workout time. It's a win-win.

As always, be sure to select the proper weight amounts and keep your abs engaged to prevent any lower back injuries. Track your weight amounts so you can see where you're increasing and not increasing. To add more muscle mass, you always need to be progressing in your weight amounts.

When it comes to your weight sets, play around with your rep ranges. Pay attention to how your strength is and how your body is reacting. Are you fatiguing too fast and falling out of proper form? Are you doing the last two reps with ease? These questions will help pinpoint where you should be with your weight amounts.

DOUBLE TRAIN

Many don't realize they can train the same muscle group a couple of times a week. They get used to a typical weekly routine of hitting all muscles throughout the week, once and then become frustrated that some body parts a lagging in growth.

Some muscle groups need more attention and training than others. Take me, for example; I tend to lose weight quickly in my legs. My quads lean out, and my hamstrings slowly shrink. I realized this early in my training years, so I've always trained my legs twice a week, sometimes three times. My lower body is also a lot weaker than my upper body. I can lift hard for two weeks with my upper body and get major results. My legs? Not so much!

If you feel "uneven" with your body, pay more attention to the weaker areas. If the back of your arms are still jiggling, start training those triceps twice a week. If you feel you look top-heavy, hit those legs often and hard. Transforming your body is amazing. It's like a sculpture that you can fine-tune, part by part. However, neglecting any body parts will leave those muscles weak and small.

Use the same tricks to the weak body parts as you do with any other muscle groups to add more muscle mass. Lower your reps, increase your weight amounts and use proper form. If you decide to train those triceps twice a week, be consistent with it, so you give them a chance to grow and become stronger. Patience and consistency are essential to removing any discrepancies in your body's physique.

PROTEIN

When you're attempting to add more muscle, lose weight, or feel full longer, protein is your answer. There are endless benefits to consuming the proper amount of protein daily. Protein is vital to becoming lean and fit, especially when it comes to muscle growth.

Protein aids in building and repairing tissues. They make enzymes, hormones, and other body chemicals. Protein is an essential building block of muscles, skin, blood, cartilage, and bones. When you're trying to increase your muscle mass, your body needs to make more actin and myosin by joining amino acids together, inside the muscle.

By eating more protein, our digestive system breaks it down into amino acids, which our bodies can use for a range of functions like building more muscles. Consuming more protein helps with muscle recovery, which is especially important when you're trying to put on more muscle.

My favorite benefit of protein is it keeps me feeling fuller, longer, which decreases my chances of consuming too many calories in a day.

Protein is easy to prepare and can be consumed on the go. Shakes, grilled chicken, lean hamburgers, fish, and eggs are just a few of my go-to's when it comes to protein sources. Be sure to keep different choices of protein, prepared and on hand throughout the week, to ensure you're eating protein at every meal. Your body needs protein throughout the day, every day.

REST AND RECOVER

I know you hear about the importance of getting enough sleep every night. But how can you do this with your busy life? Getting a solid nights sleep can be daunting in the age of competitive kids sports, social media accounts, emails, and longer working hours. It feels like we run twenty hours a day, nonstop, and now they say seven to eight hours of sleep is vital to your health.

You're not going to be able to shut out your daily life to get more sleep. It's just not possible. I advise my clients to take baby steps in increasing their sleeping patterns and times. Start by aiming to be in bed fifteen minutes earlier than usual. Shut your phone off, get the kids settled and in bed and get yourself straight to your bed.

Prepare at night for your morning routine. Layout your outfit, your breakfast, pack your lunch, and have your gym bag completely packed, all before heading to bed. By doing this, you should be able to grab an extra fifteen minutes in the morning. By doing these two small tweaks, that will help you gain an additional thirty minutes of sleep, a day. That's three and a half hours of sleep you're currently missing out on. Once you get this new routine down, start building from there.

Be sure to take rest days. Many avid fitness people fear taking a day off from the gym. They have themselves convinced that if they miss a day of working out, they're sure they will wake up in the morning having lost all of their muscle mass and gain fifty pounds of body fat. This couldn't be further from the truth. Your body needs rest, just like it needs sleep.

I advise taking "active" rest days. These rest days are days where you pick an activity, that challenges you, but is not overly taxing on the body. I highly recommend this to those that tend to fall off track when they miss one day at the gym. One day leads to two, which leads to a month. Active rest days keep you on a schedule and makes you feel content that you didn't lift weights, but you still did something good for the body.

When you want to put on muscle, you must learn to rest and recover just as much as you focus on the tips that will build the muscles. Your body knows exactly how to repair itself, but it needs you to allow it time and comfort to do so. For every hour you sleep, your body will thank you!

Building muscle can take time, and your patience is key to allowing the body to grow. Be sure to pick a plan that you can realistically stick with and one you enjoy. If you're super restrictive and rigid with your fitness and nutrition plan, you'll quickly burn out before ever reaping the benefits. I know you want to see the results come quickly, but building those muscles the healthiest way possible, will benefit you tremendously when you're trying to maintain the mass you've built.

Keep your proteins prepped and ready to take on the go. Drink more water, aim to increase your sleep time, and walk away from the gym from time to time. Go for a hike, ski, swim, or go for a stress-relieving walk. Not only do you need to give your body a break, but your mind needs some downtime too. The daily grind of life can take its toll on your mental and physical health. The body and brain go hand and hand, and for you to get the most significant benefits from the gym floor, you must nurture yourself when you're off the gym floor.

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Aimee Schwinabart is the founder of The Purely Fit—online workouts, nutrition, and fitness coaching that actually work! She specializes in short (super effective) daily workouts combined with customized nutrition plans to help real people shed excess fat to reveal toned, lean muscles. The Purely Fit approach to looking and feeling great prioritizes small, steady, super efficient workouts and nutrition upgrades to help you stay with it once and for all!