When it comes to growing muscles, you don’t need as much patience as you may think.
Truly, it should take time to see a noticeable change, but if you are doing it right, in a month, there should be changes. But, if you are not seeing any significant changes from month to month, then your approach is off.
Working out takes a lot of energy and time from you, so it’s too important to waste, and if you see progress, you can always see more.
To rev up your results, here are tips to follow.
To Grow Muscles, You Need To Eat More Protein
When you exercise, you break down your body muscles, and when you eat protein, you build them back again the harder weights you are lifting, the more protein intake you should have, to solidify and quicken your recovery time.
According to certain research, people who lift weights should eat 0.25-0.30 grams of protein per kilogram bodyweight for every meal. If you are weighing about 175 pounds, then your protein intake should be 20-24 for every meal. To get this exact proportion, you can eat three eggs, a scoop of protein powder, or even a cup of yogurt.
Lay Emphasis on Calorie Surpluses and Not Deficits
This may seem hard for you if you are working on your weight. But do you know that to gain muscle mass quickly, you need to increase your calorie intake? Because to build muscles effectively, you need to ensure that you take in more calories than you shed off every day.
If your body doesn’t get enough calories, and it feels there is a deficiency, it would reduce its tendency to build new muscles. After all, your body cannot efficiently grow your muscles if it believes that there is a shortage of food.
Try to eat at least 250 calories a day, and make sure that any weight you gain is from your body’s muscle research has also shown that the majority of these calories can be gotten from protein. When you eat a high-calorie diet that is rich in protein, your body gets to store about 45 percent as muscles.
Get More Sleep
For your muscles to recover, you need to do more than just eating the right meals. It requires about 8 hours of sleep every night to ensure a full recovery. That’s because when you are deep asleep, your body produces growth hormones, and this is necessary for muscle growth, and it also balances the stress hormone – cortisol – in the body.
Research has proven that cutting down on your sleeping hours to five hours every night instead of eight hours, can reduce the muscle-building testosterone levels in the body by 15 percent. So, you can understand why getting adequate rest is important when growing your muscles.
Decrease Between-Set Rest Intervals
You should always go with a timer or use your phone to set rest intervals for your workouts. Set your timer to 30 to 90 seconds of rest, because this would encourage a rapid secretion of muscle-building hormones while ensuring that you truly tire out your muscles.
Regardless of the rep, tiring out your muscles is a must for hypertrophy, so you shouldn’t be scared of feeling the burn.
Place Your Attention On The Eccentric Phase
When lifting weights, there is an easy and a hard phase. The easy phase is termed “eccentric,” while the hard phrase is termed “concentric.”
Let’s use squat exercise as an example, the moment you bend to do a squat, that’s an eccentric action, and when you are standing, that’s a concentric move. According to research, to eccentric movement is better at stimulating hypertrophy.
To increase the eccentric actions in your workouts, you can slow down when you are in an eccentric phase, or just incorporate eccentric-only variations into your exercise routines.
For instance, if you want to turn “squat” into an eccentric exercise, you would only lower yourself to the floor, and stop the exercise right there. It’s important to note that if you are focusing on eccentric-only variations, you would need to increase the weight you are using because your muscles are stronger when they move eccentrically.
Increase Your Training Volume
Your training volume is the number of sets multiplied by the number of reps, and it is a major determiner in how fast your muscles would grow. To increase your volume, you may need to reduce the weight, and to get the right volume, you need to do each of your lifts for five sets of 15 to 20 reps.
